Li-yan was an Akha girl born to a poor family on Nannuo Mountain in southern Yunnan, born shortly after the Cultural Revolution. The Akha minority tribe still mostly lived their ancestral ways, and her mother, A-ma (her title, technically, not her name), was the midwife and medicine woman. The story opens with A-ma taking Li-yan to a birth to being learning how to midwife. Deh-ja, the woman, gaves birth to a boy which was very auspicious. They observed the birth ceremonies, such as waiting for three cries before naming it. Then disaster happened: Deh-ja gave birth to a second baby. Anything out of the ordinary is a human reject, and the babies were suffocated (prevent unhealthy children and idiots), the father must become angry and yell at the spirits that caused this, then the mother and father were exiled from the village. Li-yan was horrified that the babies are killed, and this began a small rupture with the Akha ways.
As she grew older, she was one of the few children to continue to middle school, since she was intelligent. Because she was the only girl from the village who progressed, she acted as translator when Mr. Huang from Hong Kong came with his son to the village. Mr. Huang wanted to restore the ancient art of making Pu’er tea, and was informed that the best tea was from this village. He bought their entire crop, but only from the ancient trees (which they had thought worthless; good thing for Third Brother that he was lazy did not cut down the ancient trees on his property). After several failures, Mr. Huang found that there was an old tea master nearby, and engaged his services.
Li-yan slowly fell in love with a boy named San-pa from another village on the mountain, who also went with her to school. He was widely seen as a boy of poor character. When she was officially old enough, she went with him into the woods to steal love (all Akha were encouraged to “do the intercourse” to get to know prospective mates). San-pa asked her father if he could marry her, and he flatly refused, since his reputation was poor. So San-pa went off to Thailand to earn money, promising Li-yan he would return to marry her.
It turned out she had gotten pregnant, which was a scandal and would have disgraced her family. So she and A-ma hid it, and she gave birth in A-ma’s ancestral tea-tree grove that no man was allowed to see, under the 800-year old tea trees, with a yellow fungus that gave A-ma’s medicines healing properties. The child was supposed to be killed, but Li-yan grabbed it before A-ma could kill it. But the only solution was for Li-yan to go to the nearest city and give it to the orphanage—secretly, because that was illegal. A-ma gave her an old cake of tea, given to her by her grandmother, to leave with the baby girl.
Unknown to Li-yan, the baby was adopted by a rich (white) American couple, in 1995 and was given to them very dirty and ill, but the baby, whom they named Haley, recovered. She initially struggled bonding to her parents, who obviously looked different from her, but eventually she grew to accept and love them.
Shortly after Li-yan returned, San-pa came back, and asked to marry her. Her father grudingly accepted. A-ma apparently did not think the marriage would last: as her three sister-in-laws hugged her goodbye, they each spoke a sentence in her ear. “You can divorce by leaving your husband, but you cannot come here.” “If you have any children you must leave them behind when you leave.” “A gopher who has not dug his escape route beforehand will find it difficult to leave when it becomes necessary.” They went to the city with the orphanage to retrieve their baby, but she had already been transferred to Kunming (Yunnan’s capital city) for adoption out. So they continued to Thailand. Li-yan briefly saw Deh-ja, who was hiding, and seemed to have been abandoned by her husband. She also discovered over the course of a year or so that her husband was an opium addict. Furthermore, San-pa revealed that he had married her because she was on track to go to university and he could ride on her coattails, but because of the baby she was unable to take the entrance exam, and all his plans came to naught. Eventually she realized that she had to leave, and she fled. Her husband tracked her down, finding her in the jungle just as a tiger did. He distracted the tiger and killed it, but not before the tiger eviscerated him.
Li-yan performed the burial ceremonies as well as she could, which was mostly limited to informing San-pa’s spirit that he was dead now, and needed to stay with him and not go bothering the living. She returned to her parents-in-law briefly to inform them that he had died violently (which meant his spirit would not be worshipped). Then she went to the tea tree grove and met A-ma. A-ma had expected her return (although sooner), and had arranged with Teacher Zhang of her school to get her a place in a trade school in Kunming. Li-yan’s experience of A-ma growing up had mostly been feeling like A-ma was dissatisfied with her, but during the conversation she learned that A-ma had thought of her everyday, and although she was willing to bear the family the disgrace of her return, she realized that Li-yan needed to go out to have a good life; she would not function well in the village. So Li-yan knew that A-ma loved her, and sacrificed for her to send her to school in Kunming.
In Kunming she was seen as a bumpkin. No one there worried about spirits and rituals, and her classmates suggested she not do it in public. They taught her makeup and how to look more Han majority. In class she learned English and basic computer skills, which enabled her to get a job in a nice hotel. She was well-liked: she worked hard, and since she could not go home to her village, she took other worker’s shifts during the two weeks of Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), when everyone went back to their families.
She had continued her girlhood practice of giving her teachers tea as a sign of respect, and she continued to drink tea with them after she graduated. One day one of them told her that a new Pu’er school was opening up, and would she like to be a candidate? She interviewed, the only minority to do so, and the interviewers clearly did not like her. But it was the tea master who’s opinion turned out to matter, and he was impressed with her reactions to the teas he poured for her. She was accepted.
After she graduated, an unknown investor offered to fund a tea store in Guangzhou if she would run it, and she gratefully accepted the offer. Guangzhou was a huge city and she felt pretty adrift, but the tea store did well. She met an older lady in the park one evening and they became friends. She asked if she would be interested in her son; she grudgingly accepted, and it turned out that they enjoyed each other. His family had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and so he valued someone who worked hard and was a little tu (lit. earthy; uncultured). On his own, he went to her village to ask her father to marry her, and then proposed. She accepted, and they were married at the government building, she in her traditional Akha outfit, because she would always be Akha. Her husband valued her traditions, and she felt loved.
It turned out that her husband was quite wealthy, running a company that bought cardboard collected for recycling in the US and sold it to the lady who made a huge fortune in making cardboard boxes in China. He took her to San Francisco for their honeymoon, and while there, they bought a house together. (He already had one in the SF area, as well as a fancy place he had bought on an old island area of Guangzhou that she really liked. He said it was wise to plan an exit, just in case.)
Her business had done really well and developed a good reputation. She sold tea from her family, and had regular buyers. When she left for the honeymoon, she asked her childhood friend Ci-teh to mind the store for her. However, they saw on television that her store had been busted for selling fake Pu’er, and she realized that Ci-teh had betrayed her. On their return, she and her husband went back to her village and confronted Ci-teh. (Who also had bribed the leaders of the village to let Dah-ja’s husband, her brother, back.) In a brief moment alone, Ci-teh mocked Li-yan for trusting her. Some of the village sided with Ci-teh, who said she was going to develop a rubber tree business, but most of them supported Li-yan, who insisted on doing everything properly and verifiably authentically.
After this, she and her husband mostly lived in the US, where they raised their son, Paul. They returned to the village every year for tea-picking season, just before Christmas. The pain of giving up her daughter had never gone away, and she began hoping to find her some day. Mr. Huang had also moved to the US. Every time he saw her he asked to see the trees in A-ma’s grove, which he knew had been allocated to her. As a child in the village, she had twice sold him a basket of leaves (for a very good price), which he had made into cakes which he sold to no one. Now she got angry at him, and he finally explained why he pestered her. When his son was little, his wife died of bone cancer. A little while later his son got the same cancer. He was desperate, and had eventually located Li-yan’s A-ma as the most well-regarded healer on Nannuo Mountain (since Pu’er from ancient trees was reputed to have medicinal properties). Unknown to others, A-ma’s tea had healed his son, Xian-rong. However, he knew it was the yellow fungus on the trees that was the cure, and he worried that his son might have a relapse. The tree were safely hidden now, but with GPS, that might not last long, and perhaps his son might not have access to the trees if he needed it.
By this time Haley had grown up. She was grateful to her parents for adopting her, but also angry, and hurt that her mother had not loved her enough to keep her. Her parents were successful and driven, and raised her that way. Her father was an arborist, and she absorbed care of trees from him. Her mother was a scientist, and in college she went in this direction. She wondered if she could find her mother somehow by means of the tea cake she had been given as a baby. The wrapper had strange lines on it, which were not characters. On a visit to Nannuo Mountain, she felt like the lines represented a scene on the mountain, but realized it would be impossible to locate it.
She developed an interest in tea, and was accepted to do research on the effects of climate change on tea trees in Yunnan. This was partly out of personal interest, and partly out of hope that perhaps she could find her mother. At a tea conference she met a young Chinese man, Sean, who was a Pu’er dealer. She told him about her research and search for parents, and he said that he was going to Nannuo mountain to buy tea at the same time, so perhaps she would like to accompany him? Her parents doubted his intentions, but she went, and he kept his distance. Nonetheless, she gradually fell in love with him. He confessed that he had loved her from the start. But no one they met could tell her where her tea cake had come from.
They came to a village with an old-fashioned spirit gate (wooden, rebuilt every year, with a man and woman with extra large sex organs to scare away the spirits). The people here knew Sean, whom they greeted as Xian-rong. When she showed them her tea cake, an old woman, who spoke neither Mandarin nor English, looked like she had seen a ghost. Failing to communicate, the old woman grabbed Haley’s tea cake and ran away with it. Without thinking, Haley bounded after her. The woman ran up the mountain—she was a lot stronger than she looked, and in better shape, too, but Haley knew she had to follow if she ever hoped to get her tea cake back. Then the woman stopped, and held up the tea cake, tracing the lines on the cake with the lines of the mountains in the distance, and Haley knew that the woman was showing her where her tea cake came from. Then she sidled around a boulder on the edge of the cliff, into the grove.
Haley saw that the grove was well-tended, saw the ancient trees and the yellow fungus. She felt love radiating out of the canopy of the trees, because Akha are connected, and in the canopy she saw a woman picking tea, who she immediately recognized as her mother, because every day in the mirror she had seen a little bit of that woman’s face in her own.
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is a well-researched and compelling story, deftly weaving together the three threads of developing China, a rags-to-riches minority girl store, and the loss and uniting of mother and daughter. The author is one-eighth Chinese, and clearly identifies with that side of her, which has informed a beautiful piece of historical fiction.
I fit this novel under the category of “Chinese parent history fiction”, a la Amy Tan. These tend to illuminate Chinese culture, especially traditional, pre-Communist culture, and generally provide a well-researched and tangible window into a world inaccessible to us (and largely to the authors). Because of China’s history, this category tends to be rather emotionally painful, too: the struggles of the characters are actually representative, not just there as a plot device. Lisa See did a fantastic job here, which I can best summarize as the realization that, apart from the Akha villagers, I have met everyone in this book during my times in China. (Not literally of course.) My first trip to China was actually to Yunnan province, in the time period Mr. Huang (and others) were beginning to revive Pu’er, although we visited sites in the north and I did not find out about Pu’er until much later. I’ve seen the minorities while in Yunnan (they were very proud of them). I’ve purchased tea from young women fresh from the countryside running a tea store in the big city. I’ve seen the women from the countryside seeking a better life in the big city. I’ve had women try to set me up with someone to marry. I didn’t spend much time in the park, but I’ve seen it. (Mostly the men, though. The old people in the park can be some really interesting characters.) Everything feels so on point that nothing gets in the way of me seeing the pictures of these people. (In fact, the book was difficult to read, because somehow I identified personally with the story, despite the fact that I am definitely not Chinese, and have enjoyed, but never identified with other Chinese-American stories. The pain in the story is real; I know people who have experienced similar hardships.) The only thing that did not feel Chinese was that the story wrapped up neatly with a happy ending; that never happens in Chinese stories. But, this is Chinese-American, after all, and hardly a detraction.
Lisa See has embodied the Chinese minority experience as well as aspects of the Chinese-American experience excellently. Similarly, this is as close to embodying the experience of living in China as I have read, coming from the standpoint of having lived in a major city in China for several years. Fiction, yes, but also very real.