Hidden world
Lisa See’s latest novel, “The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane,” takes place in the fascinating world of pu’er tea, from the picking of tea leaves to the distribution of aged, fermented tea cakes in Southern California. It is 1988 when “Tea Girl” opens on Li-yan, an Akha girl whose family spends its days picking tea in the mountains of the Yunnan Province in China for the equivalent of $25 a month.
The Akha are a distinct ethnic group and hill tribe that live in several Asian countries. Their culture is significantly different from that of the Han majority in China. Their beliefs are animistic — they believe everything has a spirit — and emphasize their profound connection to the natural world.
The Akha followed a number of traditional superstitions related to childbirth. Babies born into the wrong circumstances, including twins, were considered “human rejects.” In an early chilling scene, Li-yan’s mother, who is a midwife, orders a father to kill his twin boy and girl within minutes of their birth. Li-yan tries to stop the father from killing the baby, and from that moment on is irrevocably altered. When Li-yan becomes pregnant prior to marriage, her baby is also considered a human reject, and she is supposed to kill her. Instead, Li-yan gives up the baby for adoption. The baby is adopted by a white couple in Southern California, and given the name Haley.
The rest of the novel is strong, but sometimes feels off balance due to the different narrative techniques used to tell the mother and daughter’s diverging stories. See doesn’t always trust the reader’s ability to make the leap into an Akha girl’s mind, and pushes too hard to generate understanding. For example, Li-yan’s repeated use of the term “ethnic minority” to refer to herself feels forced, a shortcut to make sure the reader understands Li-yan’s outsider position among the Han majority, but one that doesn’t allow us to actually feel what are presumably feelings of alienation.
Meanwhile, Haley’s story of mixed emotions is told with almost no framing via quotidian documents: doctor’s notes when she’s a sick baby, curated emails by her adoptive mother, a clearly autobiographical short story written by Haley in preparation for drafting a college essay. There’s a sharp little exchange about the phrase “grateful-but-angry,” in a transcript of a meeting of Chinese American adoptees, that is meant to elucidate how Haley feels. However, the underlying assumption seems off — that the life of a cross-cultural adoptee in white America is so privileged and familiar, it barely needs its own voice.
In the novel’s opening line, Li-yan’s mother says “No coincidence, no story” after First Brother finishes telling the family about his dream. Li-yan notes, “The coincidence could have been anything,” and this claim holds true for the novel. A boy who steals a scallion pancake in what seems to be a minor anecdote early in the novel plays a larger role in Li-yan’s life later on. A tea connoisseur and his son visit the Akha village, and play a surprising part in the novel’s wrap-up.
These coincidences are deeply pleasurable, combining with the character agency of traditional realism to create an unusual hybrid tale. The rebellious way Li-yan thinks about various contradictions within the culture, and her bold defiance of traditions, make her story feel quintessentially American. However, she often advances through an intervention of fate, or another character’s sacrifice, rather than her own drive. The world itself, with its many fortuitous occurrences, becomes a kind of character in a novel. Nothing is coincidental, the novel seems to say, or else everything is.
The central appeal of “Tea Girl” is women’s relationships to their mothers and friends. See breathes life into a hidden world to which many of her readers don’t have access, just as she’s done in “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” “Shanghai Girls” and her many other Chinese historical novels. “Snow Flower,” for example, revealed 19th century Hunan Province, a world in which a secret script, nu shu, was developed for women, and where some young girls were paired with emotional matches that stayed with them through their lives. The hidden world there served as a resonant backdrop for a heartbreaking tale about the shifting fortunes of two friends.
In “Tea Girl,” however, the unfamiliar world of the Akha tea pickers and pu’er tea is foregrounded. It is evocatively conjured through tremendous research, so much so that it steals the spotlight from the inherent drama of a girl who loses her daughter and leaves her traditional world behind. Still, the novel is an alluring escape, a satisfying and vivid fable that uses an Akha belief to tap into our own longings for coincidence.