The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

      The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is set initially in Yunnan province of southern China among the Akha tribe.  We began with some discussion of the Akha people and their unusual beliefs and customs, such as the women wearing ornate 11 pound headdresses and the villagers building a spirit gate each year to keep people and animals inside and spirits and demons outside of the village.

      The Akha people in this book are tea farmers or harvesters.  We talked about how the tea plant is a tree and not naturally a bush.  The low growing tea plants are the result of pruning and convenience for harvesting.  Puerh tea, the specialty of this village, is a fermented tea which comes from that area of China and is produced from a wild species of tea plant which has broad leaves.  During our discussion we sipped two types of raw puerh, one just aged one year and another that had aged 12 years.  So called ripened puerh has undergone accelerated fermentation and is thought to be inferior to the raw, naturally aged, variety.  As we were sipping, Annie mentioned her being more aware of the flavor of the tea by taking small slow sips than by our typical practice of drinking a big mug of tea.  The tea master in the book pointed out that sipping tea is one of four ways to concentrate the mind, along with sitting quietly, walking, and feeding fish.  Annie also pointed out that the author began her story with detailed descriptions of life in the village and then moved into a much faster timetable as the novel progressed.

      There was discussion about whether it was realistic that Li Yan as a young girl began questioning her Akha traditions.  Most agreed that her assisting with the birth of twins and then witnessing their being killed according to tradition was enough to stimulate such questioning.

      There were many coincidences in the book that seemed to add to the interest of the story, such as Haley or Yan Yeh, who was born in the Akha village, meeting Sean or Xia Rong in America and then falling in love with him while visiting her native village.  The author included some fun tips about Haley's growing up in California such as that she "inherited" her dad's love of trees and that she wrote a school report about the Boston Tea Party and the history of tea.  It was moving for many in the group that Haley finally encounters her mother as she is climbing down from picking tea leaves in her ancient tea tree.

      The group agreed that the author effectively portrayed Haley's anguish about how her birth mother must have felt to have relinquished her baby.  The interactions among the adolescent adoptees in the therapy group, expressing both gratitude and anger, seemed quite realistic.  Paige, Maddy, and Sheri shared stories from their families about how family members from China and Korea have adapted to living in the USA.  Annie mentioned appreciating when books take people down their personal paths and their stories get shared with the group.

(Written by Sheri)

     Members of the book group engage in a tea ceremony of Puerh tea at Ku Cha House of Tea