The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

Both main characters, Li-yan and Haley, struggle with finding a sense of belonging. The search for identity unites them, mother and daughter, despite their separation and lack of knowledge about each other’s fate. Li-yan, the novel’s protagonist, grows up in a close-knit, traditional community, but she begins to feel her lack of belonging when she is still a little girl. While everyone else around her seems to accept the Akha traditions and way of life, Li-yan asks many questions and looks at the Akha culture critically. Her sense of not belonging in the village where she was born and raised becomes especially acute after she witnesses the birth of twins. Superstitious, the villagers kill the twins and exile the parents. This has such a strong and lasting effect on Li-yan that she begins to explore the possibility of a life outside her village.

When she starts studying at trade school, her background makes her different from everyone else, and Li-yan has to try very hard not to stand out. At first, she feels like a complete outsider, but with time she makes friends and adjusts to life beyond her village. Yet when she moves to a big city, she struggles to find her place there: It is too big, too crowded, and too noisy for her. She finds solace in her daily walks in the park, where she can reconnect with nature. When after many years Li-yan wants to come back to her village and embrace her heritage, she is treated as an outsider. She has to gradually restore the people’s trust in her so that they will begin to treat her as a true Akha. Although at the beginning of the novel Li-yan tends to reject her Akha identity, as she grows older, she becomes more rooted in Akha traditions. Her decision to wear traditional Akha clothes on her wedding day testifies how much she values her heritage and how proud she is to be able to call herself an Akha.

Haley, like many adopted children, also struggles with belonging. Despite growing up in a loving family, Haley knows that because of her looks, she is different from both her adoptive parents and from other Chinese children. Her school peers bully her for not being “Chinese enough” (282), exacerbating her feelings of isolation. Apart from this, she doesn’t know anything about her origins, and this makes her continuously question her identity. Haley feels a sense of belonging only when she arrives at Yunnan province, where she realizes that she is “[o]ne hundred percent American and one hundred percent Chinese” (352).