Changing China

photo: www.goodreads.com

Before there was bubble tea, there was regular old tea (archaic, I know) that originated deep in the Chinese mountains.

Li-yan, a member of the Akha minority group, lives in these mountains with her family and collects tea to earn a meager living. It's the 1980's but Li-yan and the Akha are far removed from the modernization of China. They follow special rituals for childbirth, marriage, and meals, pray for protection from spirits, and banish anyone who could bring more misfortune.

As a woman, Li-yan isn't especially significant or important to her village. But when she falls in love with a man her family disapproves of, and a stranger from Hong Kong visits looking for healing tea, she quickly finds her life changing as the modern world encroaches.

When Li-yan becomes pregnant out of wedlock, she gives her child up for adoption. Later, when Li-yan tries to find her daughter, she discovers that the child has been adopted by an American family. While Li-yan faces even more hardship and grief after losing her child for what feels like the second time, she also experiences love and trust, eventually becoming a voice of balance between old Akha tradition and the new China.

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"Show, don't tell" is probably the most repeated piece of writing advice across academic institutions, workshops, and critiques. Lisa See is most definitely more of a teller. This doesn't mean that she isn't descriptive, or that her writing is bad, because it's not. But it does mean that Li-yan's story felt flat - it wasn't as emotionally charged as it could have been.

Despite the first person perspective and immense range of experiences Li-yan has, both good and bad, Li-yan's telling was rarely emotional. Maybe this speaks to her resiliency as a character, but I wanted to see more of her grief rather than her just telling me that she felt it.

And of course, a significant portion of the novel discusses transracial adoption. No person or adoptee is going to have the same story. And expecting every book about adoption to personally fit your own adoption experience is frankly preposterous.

That being said, I didn't find See's depiction all that accurate. Maybe it's partially geography. The adoptees in The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane live in California where there are a lot of other Asians and maybe more pressure to do well in school and exist within a certain stereotype.

The adopted girls are afraid that their loving adoptive parents will "give them up" or return them to China, something that neither I nor other adoptees I know have ever once considered (being "returned" like a bag of potatoes). The adopted characters we get, excluding Li-yan's daughter, feel like placeholder stereotypes for how adopted girls should feel, rather than full characters, and the way things work out in the end of the story make a good narrative but fail to capture adoption's complexities and reality.

I appreciate See's effort, but I'm ready for books about adoption written by actual adoptees with authentic voices.

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This book was gifted to me by a dear friend :,) Because of this, my rating system is slightly upset (that's maybe a systematic flaw I need to change - for more on my rating system visit the Book Reviews tab), but from an outsider's standpoint, it probably warrants a 7/10. It accomplishes what it sets out to do.

Because of my personal knowledge about adoption, it didn't quite ring true for me, so I ultimately give it:

6/10 📕