A Chinese Tea Tale

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane     Lisa See     (2017)

“’No coincidence, no story.’” With this quote from her mother, the first-person narrator of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Li-Yan, begins. Remember that line as you read Lisa See’s moving tale of the collision of a traditional culture with the modern world.

In the mountainous Yunnan province in the far southwest of China live the Akha people, one of China’s tiny ethnic minorities. The Akha speak a distinctive language and practice a kind of animistic religion, involving many taboos and ritual sacrifices, guided by patriarchal village shamans. When this novel opens, in 1988, the province was even more isolated than it is today, and because of its inaccessibility the Akha people were not touched very much by such Chinese political movements as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. They were also exempt from China’s One Child policy because of their minority status.

Li-Yan is the daughter of a tea-growing Akha family, but she yearns for an education and an escape from her isolated village. When she has a baby out of wedlock, she refuses to allow the baby to be killed, as is the Akha tradition. Instead she makes a grueling journey on foot to an orphanage in the closest town to relinquish her daughter, who is wrapped up with a tea cake (a block of compressed tea leaves). Without revealing spoilers, I can tell you that Li-Yan’s adventures over the next twenty years bring her considerable success, mostly because her mountain’s rare tea leaves, called Pu’er, become international best sellers. But Li-Yan constantly misses the daughter she gave up and wishes she could find her.

Interspersed with the story that Li-Yan narrates are varied documents, such as letters and transcripts, relating to this daughter of Li-Yan, who is adopted as an infant by a Caucasian American couple from California and named Haley. Haley has a privileged upbringing, but she never feels fully part of American culture and longs to find her Chinese birth mother. Coincidence comes in here, as Li-Yan and Haley almost meet more than once.

Some reviewers of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane found the lengthy disquisitions on the cultivation of tea trees and the processing of tea leaves onerous to read. I liked these sections, which build the background for the role of tea trading in the novel. Besides, I’m a great fan of tea. And tea is, as you might guess, part of the final coincidence that ties this novel up.

Some reviewers also criticized the author’s extensive descriptions of Akha culture. I liked these sections, too, especially the accounts of religious rituals and of the distinctive clothing of the Akha, which is rich with indigo-dyed fabrics, embroidery, and elaborate women’s headdresses. Late in the book, a character describes the Akha: “’In the West, you think the individual is supreme, but the Akha see themselves as one link in the long chain of life, adjacent to all the other links and cultures.’” (352) The contrast of the tribal Akha ways with the lifestyles in large Chinese cities and in California, where some of the action takes place, appealed to me, as did watching Li-Yan’s adaptation to totally different cultural norms. Here is Li-Yan in a large Chinese city: “I take a deep breath to fortify myself, mortar into place another brick to hide my secrets, and settle my face into what I hope is a pleasant expression.” (222)

Lisa See is a talented writer with nine published novels about Chinese and Chinese American characters. If you like The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, try her 2009 novel, Shanghai Girls, next.

Family Sagas: Three Reviews

Review #1

Commonwealth     Ann Patchett (2016)

I can accord all the usual accolades to Patchett, who deftly spins a saga covering fifty years of a family that she admits is somewhat like her own—it doesn’t matter exactly how much. Commonwealth is a set of interconnected novelettes about the affairs, divorces, and remarriages of the older generation and the resultant dysfunctions visited upon them and their children in California and Virginia. The characters are wonderfully crafted, the scene-setting is vivid, and the pacing is energetic. But there’s a serious flaw in this book that I simply cannot get past (spoiler coming). One character, who has a clearly known allergy, dies from anaphylaxis. Patchett repeatedly presents Benedryl tablets as the antidote that the character should have ingested, possibly because these tablets have other roles in her story. In fact, the death could have been prevented only if epinephrine (in an EpiPen) had been administered quickly. This is not a footnote in the novel but rather a defining event. Is Commonwealth still worth reading? Yup. But I’ve warned you.

Review #2

The Turner House     Angela Flournoy (2015)

For a comprehensive examination of the decline of the great city of Detroit, read the classic nonfiction text, The Origins of the Urban Crisis:  Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue. For an intimate portrayal of the effects of that crisis, read The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. I’m pretty familiar with Detroit. Flournoy has captured the city in its gritty bleakness of the early 2000s as well as, through flashbacks, in its manufacturing glory of the mid-twentieth century. Her angle in is the varying fortunes of the African American Turner family, with thirteen children who were born in the better days and are aging in the dying urban landscape. Although the cast of characters is huge, Flournoy keeps the plot manageable by developing primarily the stories of the oldest and youngest of this clan. The house that the Turners grew up in is depicted lovingly, as an organism in decline. The Turners are African Americans, but The Turner House is about working class Detroiters of any race or ethnicity who are trying to maintain family bonds through tough times.

Review #3

The House at the Edge of Night     Catherine Banner (2016)

Like Shakespeare’s island in The Tempest, Catherine Banner’s island of Castellamare is a tiny Mediterranean refuge for shipwrecked souls, a place of implausible coincidences and occasional magic. Banner follows a family on Castellamare throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, starting each section with a local legend that sets the tone for her archetypal, folkloric characters. The titular House at the Edge of Night is a bar and gathering place for the island community. Readers watch as the succeeding generations of Amadeo Esposito’s family take on the management of the bar, through periods of prosperity and depression, war in the surrounding world, and conflict in the village. Although the novel has a dreamlike, wistful quality, Banner treats serious issues such as clan loyalty, sibling discord, political clashes, and the rival demands of career and family. 

Proulx and the Forest

Barkskins     Annie Proulx     (2016)

In the year 1693, we meet the original “barkskins” of Annie Proulx’s gigantic novel.  René Sel and Charles Duquet are poor young Frenchmen who take their chances in agreeing to cross the Atlantic and serve for three years as loggers in return for a promise of land of their own. Arriving in the maritime regions of New France (now Canada), René and Charles are stunned by the brutal weather, the vicious mosquitoes, and the virgin forests of unimaginable magnitude.

The two axe-wielders take divergent paths in the wilderness. René Sel sticks with his backbreaking job, reluctantly marries a native Mi’kmaq woman, and dooms his descendants to lives of hard labor in the forests to which they are constantly drawn. The Sel family gets stuck in a racial borderland between European and indigenous cultures and never thrives.

Charles Duquet, however, quickly abandons the tree felling and makes his fortune, first in furs and then in lumber, changing his name to Duke along the way. Charles is the consummate shark, founding a dynasty and a business empire.

Over the three hundred years that Proulx follows these two fictional families, both the Dukes and the Sels exploit the forests—the Dukes through land deals and the Sels by actually chopping down tree after tree after tree. The branches of their families occasionally brush against each other. (The characters are so numerous that I needed to flip frequently to the genealogical charts at the back of the book.) Sometimes Proulx pauses and develops a character in depth. At other times she tosses out names and moves on with her plot.

In the end, the main character of Barkskins is the forest—that vast forest that stretches across much of the North American continent at the beginning of the book. Although the species vary as the barkskins and lumber barons move westward, clearing the land, I think Proulx sees all the trees of North America as part of one mystical body. She’s at her most eloquent in describing this character.

When the surveyors in her story get to what will become the state of Michigan, they find sugar maple, beech, yellow birch, oak, hickory, pine, hemlock, spruce, and fir in forests so dense that the paths of the Native Americans are almost impossible to follow. The huge diameters of the trees are a challenge to the technology of the period. I pored over the descriptions of my home state’s trees, in awe of Proulx’s rich language.

She is, in effect, writing a eulogy for the North American forest, which has become a victim of human depredation, part of a global destruction of the environment. As Proulx takes us through the centuries, we see the respect that native hunter-gatherer societies had for the natural world give way to the Europeans’ demands for tillable land and space for cities. Feeding and housing hordes of immigrants increasingly take priority. The forest sighs, weeps, groans, and dies.

The human toll exacted by the felling of those hundreds of millions of trees is not ignored by Proulx. Gruesome deaths, either directly or indirectly related to the timber industry, abound. I found these deaths difficult to stomach; picture the possibilities with axes, lumber mill saws, huge jams of logs rolling through river rapids, and the menacing branches of toppling trees.

This is a glorious but tragic novel, a moral statement about the failure of humans to be stewards of our planet’s abundance. Yes, Proulx’s ending is weak, her narrative seeming to dwindle like the forest itself. In 1693 no one could imagine that the North American forest would ever end. The tragedy that Proulx documents is not one cataclysmic event that's easily recognized. Rather, it’s the loss of one tree after another, until the forest is gone.