The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Lisa See
Here is another lovely story by one of my favorite authors. This is the story between mothers and daughters, starting out in a remote Akha village in China in the 80's. It is about a young woman who falls in love and gets pregnant outside of marriage, and in her village, that means that her child must be killed at birth. However, instead of killing her daughter, her mother takes her to a sacred part of the forest where the women of her family cultivate the ancient tea trees in order to secretly give birth, then she treks across the mountain to the nearest city to take her daughter to an orphanage.
Later, the man she loves returns and they marry, and she tells him of their daughter, and so they go to retrieve her, but find that she has been adopted by Americans. Her heart is with her daughter, always longing for her, but she must move on with her live, through tragedies and major changes.
Meanwhile, her daughter, adoped to a loving family, with only an antique tea cake on her person to give any clue to her identity, goes through her own struggles in America, and becomes obsessed with learning about the tea cake and her identity. She ends up learning much about the Pu'er tea made in China, and being intellectually gifted, pursues learning about the chemical and medicinal properties.
This tea cake ties them together, will it bring them together as well?
I really enjoyed this book. It was different from her other stories, in that we learned about the Akha villages and how different they are from mainstream China. I also learned about the tea trade and how lucrative it has been historically. Not being a tea drinker, I have known nothing about tea, so I felt this gave me a bit of education on that as well.
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