Easterly by Panyan Yan
Stories from a Global Supply Chain
On a Colombian coffee hillside at dawn, two siblings—Lucía and her younger brother—learn how a harvest becomes a life. Half a world away, in a coastal Chinese city, a barista pins a small, traveled envelope to a café wall. Thread by thread, a valley and a city are pulled into the same story. Told in alternating chapters and braided with brief field‑note interludes, The Easterly is about work, family, and the hidden distances inside everyday things. As the siblings shoulder school, debt, and an uncertain crop, the book traces the coffee’s path—truck, port, container, counter—and the people who touch it. Clear‑eyed yet tender, it asks how we remain ourselves while crossing borders that are economic as much as geographic, and what it means to grow up inside a global supply chain.