The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is Lisa See’s 2017 novel, focused on a corner of China that most Western readers have never encountered in fiction. The Akha are an ethnic minority living in the remote mountains of Yunnan province, near the border with Laos and Myanmar, and their traditional way of life centers on the cultivation of pu’er tea, the ancient fermented tea that has been grown in their region for thousands of years.

The novel follows Li Yan, a young Akha woman whose life is shaped by the strict customs of her village and by the unusual arrival of strangers from outside who come looking for the rare pu’er tea her family knows how to find. Li Yan has a daughter outside of marriage, against the rules of her people, and is forced to give the baby up. The girl is adopted by an American family in California and grows up as Haley, knowing little of where she came from. The novel alternates between Li Yan’s life in the changing China of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries and Haley’s growing up in California, with the two stories slowly converging across the years.

Lisa See has built her career on this kind of carefully researched historical and contemporary Chinese fiction, and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane shows her at the height of her powers. The Akha cultural material is presented with the kind of specificity that makes the world feel real rather than exoticized. The pu’er tea industry, with its growing global reach and the way it has reshaped the lives of the mountain villages that supply it, gives the novel a rich economic and historical context. And the mother daughter story at the heart of the book has the emotional resonance that Lisa See’s readers come to her for.

For readers who liked Snow Flower and the Secret Fan or The Island of Sea Women, this novel continues See’s project of bringing forgotten or unknown corners of Chinese women’s experience into the mainstream of historical fiction.