The Tea Lady of Hummingbird Lane: A Novel

Of their distant mountain village, Li-yan and her household align their lives across the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha individuals, ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on because it has for generations—till a stranger seems on the village gate in a jeep, the primary vehicle any of the villagers has ever seen.

The stranger’s arrival marks the primary entrance of the trendy world within the lives of the Akha individuals. Slowly, Li-yan, one of many few educated ladies on her mountain, begins to reject the customs that formed her adolescence. When she has a child out of wedlock—conceived with a person her mother and father take into account a poor alternative—she rejects the custom that may compel her to offer the kid over to be killed, and as a substitute leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, close to an orphanage in a close-by metropolis.

As Li-yan comes into herself, leaving her insular village for an training, a enterprise, and metropolis life, her daughter, Haley, is raised in California by loving adoptive mother and father. Regardless of her privileged childhood, Haley wonders about her origins. Throughout the ocean Li-yan longs for her misplaced daughter. Over the course of years, every searches for which means within the examine of Pu’er, the tea that has formed their household’s future for hundreds of years.

A strong story about circumstances, tradition, and distance, The Tea Lady of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little bit identified area and its individuals and celebrates the bond of household.