2018 Audie Award Finalist for Fiction and Multi-Voiced Performance The thrilling new novel from number-one New York Times best-selling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been abandoned and adopted by an American couple. Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming
2018 Audie Award Finalist for Fiction and Multi-Voiced Performance
The thrilling new novel from number-one New York Times best-selling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been abandoned and adopted by an American couple.
Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate – the first automobile any of them have seen – and a stranger arrives.
In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her audience. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change.
Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city.
After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley’s happy home life, she wonders about her origins, and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations.
A powerful story about a family separated by circumstances, culture, and distance, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond that connects mothers and daughters.
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The Best Lisa See Book Yet The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane follows the life of Li-yan, a member of the Akha hill tribe whose way of life is still tied to the land. Growing up picking tea leaves each season with her family and living without electricity or running water in a hut made on bamboo stilts, Li-yanâs life is a far cry from the modern world of the late 1980âs. Set to follow in her motherâs path as a midwife, Li-yan struggles to accept her path and works hard in school hoping to be the first in her village to…
Lisa See is an Amazing story teller Lisa See is an Amazing story teller. This book is well researched and extremely enjoyable. I have a daughter adopted from the Kunming Welfare Institute, Yunnan Province, China. She was born in October 1994 and we adopted her in May of 1995 about the same time and setting as this book. Our daughter is thought to be of one of the minority groups so I found the book extremely interesting.The book shed light on the lives of the Akha people, a minority group living in Yunnan Province…
Poignant Tale Lisa See’s novel was a fast read because I was rooting for the happiness of the main character, Li-Yan, raised in a ritualistic, indigenous culture that becomes both a hindrance and a blessing. A compelling story of a mother and her infant daughter separated by cultural necessity, “The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane” spans the polar worlds of the Akha, one of China’s ethnic minorities who work the tea plantations in the Yunnan Province of China, and the newly rich, jet-setting Chinese…