Divining love from leaves: a review of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

There are some stories that don’t just unfold — they steep. Slowly, carefully, letting the message and themes embed themselves richly into the page, and into your soul. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See is one such novel. With a delicate hand and a deep reverence for heritage, See offers not only a narrative of a mother and daughter separated by culture, distance, and time, but a meditation on identity, belonging, and the enduring power of love passed down in silence.

The novel opens in the lush, mountainous tea-growing region of Yunnan, China, where the Akha people live closely with the land and by the dictates of centuries-old traditions. It is here that we meet Li-yan, a young girl raised within this insular, animist society. The Akha world is rendered in vivid, respectful detail: rituals for births, harvests, and deaths are not mere background—they are breathing parts of the story and treated as such. Lisa See immerses us so thoroughly in this world that I could almost taste the earthy tang of freshly picked pu’er tea, feel the weight of tribal expectation pressing against the girl’s growing desire for more.

But change begins as a quiet shiver beneath the surface—subtle at first, like the wind shifting through the trees, until it grows into something that cannot be ignored. Li-yan, still young but already restless, begins to feel the weight of rules she once accepted without question. After assisting her mother, the village midwife, in the birth of another woman’s child, she is forced to witness a tradition that unsettles her to the core. The newborns are twins—an omen in Akha belief, a sign of spiritual imbalance. In keeping with tribal law, the infants are deemed “human rejects,” and their lives are extinguished without ceremony, without mourning. Li-yan’s hands do not carry out the act, but her silence and presence make her complicit. For the first time, she sees the difference between what is sacred and what is cruel—between obedience and conscience. It is here that the seed of her rebellion is planted.

As time goes on, this seed grows. She refuses an arranged marriage. She seeks education in the city. And, most heartbreakingly, when she gives birth to a child out of wedlock—a daughter—she makes a choice that defies both her people and her heart: she leaves the infant at the doorstep of an orphanage, with a tea cake wrapped alongside her as a clue to her origin. It is an act of grief and hope, one rooted in her stubborn belief in the possibility of reunion.

From here, the novel splits its narrative, following Li-yan’s path toward modernity and independence, even as she never stops listening for echoes of her child. Meanwhile, across the world, we witness Haley’s life as an adopted Chinese-American girl, raised in California by loving parents, yet haunted by questions she cannot articulate. Her identity becomes a mosaic of fragments: a face that doesn’t match her family, a language she doesn’t speak, a culture she doesn’t know, hidden messages in the tea cake her mother gave her, and a yearning for something unnamed and unreachable.

What I found made the novel’s exploration of adoption so moving is its refusal to simplify it. See doesn’t reduce Haley’s experience to trauma, nor does she portray adoption as a perfect rescue. Instead, she gives us the nuance: the gratitude and the ache, the belonging and the dislocation. The novel understands that love—however deep—doesn’t erase the need to understand where you come from. Haley’s longing thus isn’t just about meeting her birth mother, it is also about reconnecting with the person you could’ve been, a perspective that (from people I’ve spoken with) seems to be quite accurate with those in the adoption community.

What makes The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane further stand apart is its insistence on quiet truths. There is drama here, yes—secrets kept, identities hidden, fortunes made and lost—but See never lets spectacle overwhelm the soul of the story. Instead, she leans into the emotional spaces between characters: the things they cannot say, the letters never sent, the silences between phone calls, the histories written in the margins of adoption papers.

In this book, we also learn about the cultivation and mystique of pu’er tea (quite niche, I know)—not just as an agricultural product, but as a cultural artifact, a symbol of prestige, and even as a spiritual metaphor. The tea becomes a character in its own right: patient, aged, and full of memory. As Li-yan steps beyond the bounds of her village, tea remains the thread that ties her past to her future. What begins as a birthright—a skill inherited through generations—evolves into her lifeline. She struggles, learns, survives, and yet ultimately returns to what she knows best: tea. But this time, she approaches it not as a humble villager bound by tradition, but as a woman reshaped by the loss she’s experienced, and the ambition she’s cultivated. With determination and care, she builds a tea business that honors the ancient methods of her people while embracing modern innovation.

The prose throughout the book is graceful—simple when it needs to be, lyrical when the moment calls for it. One of the novel’s great strengths is its refusal to offer tidy answers. While there is a reunion of sorts, it is not miraculous or perfect—it is tentative, complicated, and feels real. I will say though that the plot occasionally leans toward the convenient, especially in the later chapters when success comes swiftly, and threads begin to weave together a bit too neatly. But by that point, the emotional truth of the story has done its work. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is a novel that asks us to consider what we inherit, and what we leave behind. It is a story about mothers and daughters, about finding home in the most unexpected places, and about how love, like a fine tea, can endure even after years of separation and silence.

It’s a novel best read slowly, with intention. Let it linger on your tongue. Let it warm your chest. Let it remind you that even when the world pulls us apart, there are threads—rooted deep in earth, in memory, in the heart—that hold us together still.