The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

Li-yan is now 26 years old, and she works at the front desk of King World Hotel. It has been eight years since she left her village, and during this time, Li-yan has not only mastered her curricula but also acquired necessary skills for living in the city. She has learned to use an indoor toilet and electricity, and her roommates taught her how to apply makeup and behave in public. When she first arrived at the trade school, her peers and teachers saw her as “country bumpkin and the most tu person they ever met” (166). Yet with time, she has earned a reputation of a hardworking and talented young woman, and when it was announced that Yunnan Agricultural University is opening a Pu’er Tea College, the first such program in the world, her teachers recommended her as a perfect candidate. The Yunnan province is chosen as a place for the Pu’er Tea College because while modernization and urbanization have changed China’s landscape, Yunnan remained one of the few places where “the streets are quiet, the air is fresh, and the day-to-day life is peaceful” (169), and Pu’er symbolizes all those things.

Once Li-yan begins her interview, she can sense the bias of the panel’s five examiners, three men and two women.