When The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane begins in 1988, Li-Yan and her family work as tea pickers in Spring Well, a village in the Yunnan province of China populated by the Akha people. Spring Well has no running water, no electricity, and has only ever seen one car. Over the next 25 years, with the skyrocketing popularity of Pu'er tea, everything changed.Pu'er is a rare tea made from the leaves of tea trees in the Yunnan province, some of which are thought to be thousands of years old. As the most educated girl in the village, Li-Yan finds herself at the center of her village's new relationship with tea exporters, a path that will take her far away from the village she never thought she'd leave, all while hiding her own painful secrets.Author Lisa See , who lives in her home state of California, is known for the extensive research and rich detail she puts into her bestselling novels set in China, including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love . She spoke to Janet Potter about the lure of Pu'er tea and the joy and challenge of presenting little-known Chinese customs to Western audiences.: I was giving a talk, and they had brought in somebody to do a Chinese tea demonstration. It's very different from a Japanese tea ceremony, which is so neat and elegant and very stylized. With Chinese tea they're pouring it all over the place, even on a table where it just overflows, goes through the table, and into a bucket. It's all about abundance and messiness. He was pouring Pu'er, and since I was the speaker, I got to sit at the table and taste everything. He talked a little bit about the history of the tea. He told me about one cake of tea that had recently sold at auction for $150,000. After that, I knew what the next book would be.: Well, yes! I think sometimes when people think about China, they think, "Oh, it's just a bunch of Chinese people." You don't really think about it having ethnic minorities who are so different that they have their own language, clothes, and traditions. If you're going to write about that, especially because the Akha have some old traditions that are gone now that are pretty harsh, you have to be as accurate and as fair as you can and try to put it in context of how they're living and why it made sense to them.I remember with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan , one of the very early readers asked why I wasn't more critical of foot binding. I don't think that's my job to be critical of foot binding; I just want it to be in the room so people could understand it within the context of the culture and the time period.: If there's something I really want to write about, I can find a way. In the 17th century there was an opera called. Women weren't allowed to see it; they could only read it. When young women read it, they would catch cases of lovesickness, like the main character in Peony in Love , and waste away and die. And as they were dying, they wrote poems and stories that were published after their death, and much of that is still in print today.