"In a remote Chinese mountain village, Liyan and her family align their lives around the farming of tea. Life goes on as it has for generations--until a stranger appears, bringing the modern world to the lives of the Akha people. Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, begins to reject customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlock, she leaves her near an orphanage. While Li-yan leaves her village for an education,...

A young Indian woman joins her new husband on a tea plantation in the jungles of Assam where she struggles to manage a staff of servants and socialize with British wives in a colonial society at the dawn of World War II.