With ‘Tea Girl,’ Lisa See brews a touching tale of loss and hope
“Rice is to nourish, tea is to heal,” says the matriarch in Lisa See’s sweeping new novel, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (Scribner, 384 pp., out of eeeE four). And yet over the course of an eventful life, her daughter Li-Yan, born into a teagrowing clan of the Chinese minority Akha, learns that tea can also bring strife, betrayal and unimaginable wealth.
As a girl on remote Nannuo Mountain, Li-Yan lives according to strict religious laws and the bone-breaking work of tea farming. Expected to follow in her mother’s path as a midwife, Li-Yan fights to be educated instead, but early promise as a scholar is derailed by an unwelcome pregnancy.
Unmarried and subject to Akha rule, Li-Yan is forced to hike more than 12 miles of difficult terrain immediately after birth and leave her daughter at an orphanage. Tense and vivid scenes conjure her brutal, heartbreaking journey as Li-Yan stumbles through the wilderness, using tea terraces as her only guide: “The farmers have triumphed over nature as I must now conquer my physical pain and weakness.”
This episode takes place in 1995, and one of the fascinating elements of See’s epic novel is the contrast between the isolated lives of the Akha and the global- ized world of China’s larger cities — a contrast bridged by tea.
When a strange businessman arrives searching for the secret to the mythic Pu-er tea, Li-Yan’s life is upended by startling changes: financial negotiations, new ways of farming and a journey to the United States.
The rest of the novel charts the dramatic — and, at times, improbable — rise of Li-Yan as a savvy purveyor of tea in America, as well as her grief over the child she longs to see again. The life of this “tea girl” as an adopted child in America is shown in brief interspersed flashes over the years. At times mother and daughter come tantalizingly close to each other without knowing it. Suspense builds as readers wonder whether the two will ever meet.
Fans of the best-selling Snow Flower and the Secret Fan will find much to admire in The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, as both books closely illuminate stories of women’s struggles and solidarity in minority-ethnic and rural Chinese cultures. At times the author’s research strains Tea Girl, weighing the story down with a fair amount of minutely detailed methods of tea production.
But in rendering the complex pain and joy of the motherdaughter bond, Lisa See makes this novel — dedicated to her own mother, author Carolyn See, who died last year — a deeply emotional and satisfying read.