I listened to this book for my neighborhood book club–I confess I would never have picked this title out on my own–but I found it gripping. The audio book on Audible is narrated by a host of talented folks, enabling me to get a strong sense of the characters’ personalities. The story is about an Akha girl named Li-yan who grows up in an Akha village in the high mountains of Yunnan province, where apparently the finest raw tea is harvested from very old trees. It’s initially set in the 1980s, when the Akha culture was relatively untouched by modern things like electricity and indoor plumbing. Li-yan and her family are subsistence farmers who survive by growing and picking tea. Her mother is the talented midwife and healer the village, and the community follows traditional Akha ways, some of which Li-yan objects to (e.g. killing newborns who are deemed “human rejects”). The plot follows her as she rebels against her culture, is more or less exiled to the city, gets an education, and returns to find her village totally changed by the intrusion of the new market-based economy and high demand for Yunnan teas.
Readers learn A LOT about tea in this book. I was definitely drinking more green tea by the time I was halfway through due to the health benefits praised throughout the story. The Akha village is home to some really old tea trees, the leaves of which can be harvested, fermented, and then ripened using different methods. The tea, called pu’er, can be quite valuable.
The plot is driven by mother-daughter relationship issues: Li-yan rebels against her mother, has a baby girl out of wedlock, and spends the rest of the novel attempting to reunite with her. Her first husband is a whole bundle of problems. Her second husband is a dream come true (well, to me anyway). This is to say, I guess, that there are a lot of romance elements to the plot. I wondered if the author was over-exoticizing or over-romanticizing the ethnic Chinese culture in any way, but ultimately I quieted my inner literary critic/skeptic and just let myself get swept away in the storytelling. Highly recommend.
