Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See, "one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot" (The New York Times Book Review), a moving novel about tradition, tea farming, and the bonds between mothers and daughters. /> In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha people, ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generationsâ??until a stranger appears at the village gate in a jeep, the first automobile any of the villagers has ever seen.
The stranger's arrival marks the first entrance of the modern world in the lives of the Akha people. Slowly, Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlockâ??conceived with a man her parents consider a poor choiceâ??she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, near an orphanage in a nearby city.
As Li-yan comes into herself, leaving her insular village for an education, a business, and city life, her daughter, Haley, is raised in California by loving adoptive parents. Despite her privileged childhood, Haley wonders about her origins. Across the ocean Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. Over the course of years, each searches for meaning in the study of Pu'er, the tea that has shaped their family's destiny for centuries.
A powerful story about circumstances, culture, and distance, TheTea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond o… (más)
This is primarily a fascinating story of Pu'er, a valuable and possibly medicinally useful tea, and a family in the Chinese province of Yunan whose fortune is determined by the world's discovery and appreciation of it. Li-yan is the only daughter of an Akha family in Springwell Village, in the mountains of southwest China in the1980s - 1990s, where all live at poverty level, ignoring the older growth trees in favor of terrace-grown tea, until the arrival of a tea connoisseur from Han-majority China that changes the trajectory of the village. The stories of the political climate and the customs and superstitions of the Akha people, considered part of the "hill tribes", ethnic minorities, are fascinating, and the first part of the book, from Li-yan's viewpoint, touchingly tells of her love for a ne'er-do-well boy from a neighboring village, her pregnancy, the abandonment of her daughter, the downfall of their eventual marriage, and her brilliant success in the Pu'er business and in America. The story is greatly weakened when Li-yan's daughter Haley, adopted by affluent American academics, is introduced. The inevitability of Haley's scientific interest in tea to force a reunion is a weak plot point, and Haley's privileged American life a distraction from the much more riveting tea universe. The audio was nicely done, except for Haley's voice, which was annoyingly babyish and stayed that way even as she turned 21. ( )
Read for my book club. I don't have particularly deep feelings on this book. Most of it was very well written. Good language, pacing, and character development. Despite lacking the obsession with tea that the author obviously has, I enjoyed the book and was amused/impressed that anyone could write a book constructed around tea, culture, and tea culture. ( )
When a son is born, Let him sleep on the bed, Clothe him with fine clothes, And give him jade to play . . . When a daughter is born, Let her sleep on the ground, Wrap her in common wrappings, And give her broken tiles to play . . . Book of Songs (1000-700 B.C.)
"No coincidence, no story," my a-ma recites, and that seems to settle everything, as it usually does, after First Brother finishes telling us about the dream he had last night.
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See, "one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot" (The New York Times Book Review), a moving novel about tradition, tea farming, and the bonds between mothers and daughters. In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha people, ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generationsâ??until a stranger appears at the village gate in a jeep, the first automobile any of the villagers has ever seen.
The stranger's arrival marks the first entrance of the modern world in the lives of the Akha people. Slowly, Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlockâ??conceived with a man her parents consider a poor choiceâ??she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, near an orphanage in a nearby city.
As Li-yan comes into herself, leaving her insular village for an education, a business, and city life, her daughter, Haley, is raised in California by loving adoptive parents. Despite her privileged childhood, Haley wonders about her origins. Across the ocean Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. Over the course of years, each searches for meaning in the study of Pu'er, the tea that has shaped their family's destiny for centuries.
A powerful story about circumstances, culture, and distance, TheTea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond o
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