The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane Ny Times Review

Lisa See'southward new novel draws readers along a fantastic tea-infused trail

"No coincidence, no story."

Li-yan's female parent repeats this simple aphorism equally she interprets her children's dreams over a breakfast of thin broth in their bamboo house on a remote Chinese mount. But this opening line of Lisa Run into's new novel, "The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane," is also a provocative claiming to the reader. Come across wagers she volition carry our attending through every coincidence and twist of fate on a fantastic tea-infused trail, from the villages of Chinese hill tribes to the drug-infested Golden Triangle and the glamour and wealth of Los Angeles.

(Scribner)

The story begins small, plunging u.s. into the immersive detail of a single grueling day picking tea with young Li-yan, her mother, A-ma, and the rest of their ethnic-minority Akha family. After work they must trek two hours to the tea collection center simply to be told that they are too late to sell their leaves for the official quota. "The sound that comes from A-ma is not and so much a groan as a whimper. All that work at half price."

What makes life bearable for the Akha is their conventionalities system, which suffuses every attribute of their daily lives. The full sweep of their practices is flawlessly embedded in See's prose. When a bite of a stolen pancake leads to an entire village's humiliation, the purification ceremony that follows feels completely natural.

Li-yan has been taught blind obedience to tradition, but her faith is shortly tested. A-ma is a midwife, and as Li-yan assists at a nascency, she must spotter her female parent enforce the Akha's harshest rules when a serious taboo is broken. Her outrage at this incident leads Li-yan to question tradition, and the story is propelled forward when she falls pregnant out of matrimony, breaking another taboo.

This novel is largely Li-yan's story, merely as she leaves her village to commence on a quest through many hardships, we also get to run into, through a selection of official documents, doctor'southward notes, family emails and childhood writings, the life of Haley, a Chinese orphan adopted by a well-off California family. Tea volition become the theme that holds these two stories in orbit around each other as Li-yan finds her vocation equally a tea dealer while Haley grows up obsessed with 1 souvenir from her unknown nativity family: an one-time cake of dried tea with an unusual label.

The hardships that face up Li-yan in her life are every bit compelling every bit the fog-shrouded secret groves where she and her mother cultivate a special healing tea. I could have hung out here in remote People's republic of china forever, but Run into has wider ground to encompass, including Chinese adoption, the international fine-tea market and modernistic Chinese migration to the United states.

Author Lisa See (Patricia Williams)

It is harder to write with empathy about rich people, and as the story takes its biggest bound — from rural People's republic of china to wealthy Los Angeles — I did chortle at the line "Three days afterward I'1000 in Beverly Hills having dinner in a eating house called Spago." Merely it is a testament to See's power as a author and to her impeccable research that she commands our attention once more immediately. "I'm notwithstanding struggling with how to use a knife and fork," says Li-yan, who eschews eating in fancy restaurants for shopping in Chinese markets and cooking for her husband like a proper Chinese wife.

As Li-yan struggles to fit in with the newly arrived Han-majority Chinese millionaires in Pasadena, her story circles closer to Haley's. Li-yan hangs Han New Twelvemonth decorations and accepts an American proper noun. Meanwhile, Haley, now in high schoolhouse, must deal with being Chinese amid white friends and yet "not Chinese enough" for the Han Chinese. She struggles with the pressures of being both an abased orphan and an adopted child treated equally precious past her white parents. "Lucky just aroused" is the phrase her therapist uses, and through transcripts of a group-therapy session with several adoptees, Encounter provides a blistering peek into their complicated emotions.

Merely equally properly aged tea from aboriginal trees has both flavor and a "returning taste," and so this story balances moving on with returning home. Both Li-yan and Haley must ultimately reconcile where they come from with who they are now, and they must compromise with the flaws of family and tradition if they wish to reclaim their roots. A lush tale infused with articulate-eyed compassion, this novel volition inspire reflection, discussion and an overwhelming desire to drink rare Chinese tea.

Helen Simonson is the author of "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand" and "The Summer Before the War."

The Tea Daughter of Hummingbird Lane

By Lisa See

Scribner. 371 pp. $27

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/lisa-sees-new-novel-draws-readers-along-a-fantastic-tea-infused-trail/2017/03/20/11c0b9be-08fb-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html