Lisa See, the author of the international best-seller, “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”(2005) and New York Times best-seller “Peony in Love” (2007), had time to sit down and answer a few questions while in San Diego, the last stop on her tour for her latest novel, Shanghai Girls (2009), now in bookstores. In this interview we discuss the variety of elements found in her novels, including the women whose voices narrate her works, and the exploration and revelation of forgotten parts of history. Her works explore pockets of history and time within Chinese culture before they disappear, as See puts it, “off the map of memory”. “Shanghai Girls” is the story of two sisters, Pearl and May, and their odyssey of immigration as they leave war-torn Shanghai for Los Angeles as new brides in arranged marriages. See chronicles the joy, the heartbreak, and the bond of sisterhood that connects Pearl and May over the next twenty years as they experience the making of a new life, and the formulation of a new identity. To learn more about Lisa See and her works, please visit: www.lisasee.com
By Christine V. Nguyen
CVN: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. What inspires you about the culture and time period of your novels?
LS: Well you know I have written about different time periods. For this particular one, I think there were three or four things that inspired me to do this particular book. One was to write about Shanghai at that time in 1937, that’s just this final moment before things really started to change there. It was the Paris of Asia and people had come from all over the world to be there and it was very glamorous in a lot of ways but also had extreme poverty.
Anyway, so this was this final, final moment and then the Japanese invaded in 1937 in August and then the Sino-Japanese war rolled right into WWII and then as soon as WWII was over, civil war, and then Mao took over the country. Mao took a pretty dim view of Shanghai, sort of looked at it like a woman with a very bad past and so kind of punished the city. So it went from being the Paris of Asia to being this very gray and drab place in a few short years. And I kind of wanted to write about that final moment before things changed because I think now when people look at Shanghai they think of it again as being this very glamorous world city.
I also wanted to write about what were called the Beautiful Girls, those models, and I’ve been collecting that advertising for a long time, and I love it. It’s really beautiful and really fun and there’s a lot of humor in those pieces too but I also always looked at those women and thought, I wonder what their life was like in real life, and I wanted to look at that.
Two other things: one would be China City, that tourist attraction in LA, and there’s nothing left of it anymore not even a single brick and people are getting old now, so to me it’s not only going to be gone off of the map of history but also off the map of memory and I wanted to capture it before that was gone too. And then finally I wanted to write about the Confession Program, which I don’t think most people know about. So for me there’s never one particular thing – I mean, I also wanted to write about sisters – you know there’s a lot of things that come together for me and I try to have the book to be very layered with history and emotions and relationships.
CVN: Forgotten parts of history, particularly the voices of Chinese women, strongly influence your work. What stood out to you about these women – is it how they function within the culture you explore, or work against it?
LS: Well I think what stood out about all of these women I’ve been writing about in the last three books is the extreme courage they have in really bad circumstances – things that if we had to live like that today, no way, we couldn’t do it. I think for me we tend to learn history in a certain kind of way it’s mostly about men’s deeds and the things they’ve done and wars and dates but I think that there’s a whole other history, a parallel history that’s been going on.
And there’s actually a woman I met who has a foundation. She goes into war torn countries and helps the women and she describes it as there’s the front line for the men and they’re out there fighting but in the back line there are all the women who have to keep things going; they have to feed their families, they have to provide for the children and the house, they have to keep everything that is real life continuing even in the face of war, even in the face of disaster. Well that doesn’t get written about very much so I’m really interested in that, in what happens while all of this stuff is going on, what’s happening at home, and how do women get by and how do the things they do in these really harsh and difficult circumstances.
CVN: How would you characterize the nature of the culture you write of – the personalities of these Chinese women who were intelligent, beautiful, articulate, and the society they lived in?
LS: I think that again, the women show a tremendous amount of courage in really difficult circumstances but they’re also victims of the culture. They don’t have a lot of choice – what their situation is is so difficult and often completely closed in. They’re not allowed out like the women in “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”, not allowed out of the house like in “Peony in Love” like that time – so how do you live like that, how do you get by like that.
And of course, this is about China, and these books take place usually in China or in this newest book, a Los Angeles Chinatown. I actually don’t necessarily see the books as being about women in the past – I mean, they are, they are about women in the past – but I think there are elements that people can relate to their own experiences even now today and how sometimes women can feel they don’t have choice or do the things they want or they have to be responsible over here when they’d rather be doing something else. Sometimes I don’t think about it as it’s in the past or another culture, I think about it as being about women.
CVN: A lot of your novels are largely historical – how do you do your research? What catches your attention that provokes the start of each work, or do you begin with conception?
LS: How do I get ideas – they come all kinds of ways. Really, with “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” I was reviewing a book on the history of foot binding and there was a mention of the secret language and I just thought, how could I not know about this? How could that be that I don’t know about it? And how could it be that we all don’t know about it? Here it is, the only writing system to have been used exclusively by women anywhere in the world and it’s not common knowledge? That just really blew me away. It took me a while to get around to writing the book, because it first started as a personal obsession that I just wanted to know more about it, but over time, as I learned more and more, I finally had to write a book.
With “Peony in Love”, I was asked by Vogue magazine to write an article about the Lincoln Center production of the Peony Pavilion that they did in 2000. When I was doing the research for that I came across the lovesick maidens and the three wives commentary and I again had the same sort of “how could this have happened and I didn’t know”?
There were so women writing back then when we tend to think there were no women writing anywhere in the world in fact there were more women writing in the Yangtze Delta in the mid-17th century than all together in the rest of world at that time – thousands of them, not just a couple. That’s an amazing thing, but we don’t know about it. But it still took – oh, five years before I figured out how to tell the story. So sometimes it’s something I hear about or come across but I have to just think about it for a long time before I can really figure out how to tell the story or if I want to tell the story.
And then for research, I do all the kinds of research that anybody does – I go to China, I go to every place I write about. I interview scholars and academics. I live near UCLA and I go to the research library there and read peoples published and unpublished dissertations. I spend a lot of time in regular people’s houses and attics and basements and garages and closets and sometimes even in the trunks of their cars, just trying to get ephemera – photographs and diaries and letters and things that have been kept that can help tell a story in a human way, not just in a purely historical way. Sometimes I even just look on the internet. I just do research in every way you can think of to try and get information; that’s how I do it.
CVN: In reading some of your research, I’m sure you came across some of the actual written documents by these women. Did you ever come across anything in their writing that surprised you?
LS: With “Peony in Love”, these were three women all married to the same man, one right after the other, and they used to write in the margins of one copy of [the play] “The Peony Pavilion”. What really struck me was any time you see in that book their writing in the margins, those are their actual words – and they were sixteen years old, these girls! They were really young. And yet, I think what they had to say about love, in particular about love, is as true today as it was then. Of course the first one was never married, but the second and third were, and their views about marriage, and if they had a daughter – that really surprised me. I think of how somebody who on the face of it could not have a more different experience of life than I have had could have so many of the same thoughts about love and marriage and children and art that I did. That was a real surprise.
With the secret language I did find – there aren’t very many pieces of the original nu shu [gender-based language, “women’s writing” in Chinese] left, and some have been translated over and over again by different people, so you can read the same letter but it’s been translated by five different people so it has a different interpretation. But two things – they had standard things they complained about and it was okay - like you could complain about your mother in law. Everyone complains about their mother in law. But you couldn’t complain about foot-binding, you couldn’t complain about the injustices of the emperor. You could complain about your husband, you could complain about your daughters, you could complain about your mother-in-law, but certain things you couldn’t complain about. So even though it was a secret language, they still had some restrictions and some things that were still socially unacceptable.
The other piece that really surprised me and I end up using so much of it was – remember the part when they go into the mountains, and the women are falling off the cliff when they’re walking up? That’s based on a piece of nu shu written by a woman who survived that winter. When I read that, that’s when I knew when I wanted to set the book. I could have set it a thousand years ago, I could have set it today – there were a lot of different times I could have set it. But when I read that, I thought okay, I don’t care, somewhere that has to be in there. Everything worked before or after it, but I knew I had to have that. The reason was, for me, first, that always they say there were no women writers, no women artists, no women historians, no women chefs – there were women, but supposedly, they didn’t do anything. Well here’s the only historical account of what happened in that area during the Taiping Rebellion – the only one. You can’t say there were no women historians – there were, she was one of them.
But also, what those women went through, what everybody went through during that time – I guess the thing that really struck me at the end was here they’d gone through so much, they’d gone up the mountain, they lived outside for three months, they came back down, they survived – they knew that they could walk really far on their bound feet. But once they came back down they went back inside and shut the door, and didn’t go back out again. And that just really surprised me, and really stayed with me. I found that piece she had written, and it not only became a whole chapter, but it really said a lot to me about the culture and about how women thought at the time. So to me that really changed the book.
CVN: Was that ever hard for you, to contend with a perspective that’s obviously based on living in a different time period and culture and reading these writings and being immersed in this type of history that’s in some ways so different from our own?
LS: No, I think once you decide you’re going to be in the room with them – and that’s how I feel about all my books, if you can just be in the room, and it’s not my job to make a value judgment about it. There were a couple of early readers who said why aren’t you being more critical about how women are treated, and you should say more about how bad this is for them – why isn’t one of them a rebel? I really don’t think that’s my job as the writer - I think my job is to put it out there and people who are reading it can interpret it themselves, and to be as true as possible to the time and the culture and the place.
CVN: I’ve read in your previous interviews about your travels to China, doing research for your novels – what was that experience like? Can you tell of one specific time/place where you witnessed or experienced something that directly affected the writing of your novels?
LS: Well the thing is that there are so many things – everything from what it smells like, to what the weather’s like, to what people are eating in a particular place. When I was going to Jian-yong county to do the research for “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” we stopped in this little town – I mean really tiny town – to call it a café is calling it more than it was. It was one room with one table – like a kid’s table, way low – and we had this really simple meal but the dessert was this candied taro, and that was so good! I had to have that, and on the way back out we stopped there again, just to get the candied taro because it was so good. So I had to have that in the book, I had to have the candied taro! I don’t know if that’s a deep thing, but it’s the kind of thing you couldn’t find in a book – you have to go and experience it yourself.
I did mention the weather – but how important weather is to a place, and to a culture. I mean, I’ve just been on this tour, in Des Moines this last week, and I went out to dinner after the event. It was ten at night, it was still completely light because it’s way far north, and really warm – it was like 90 degrees! Everybody was out, everybody was walking around, it was the middle of the week but they’re out in these outdoor cafes in downtown Des Moines. If somebody had said, “What’s the nightlife like in Des Moines?” I would have said there can’t possibly be one – and probably in winter it’s the exact opposite. So, clearly, the weather and where they are in the country has a real effect on that culture which is completely different from here, where as soon as the sun goes down, it’s going to be cold, even in the middle of summer – and how different that is. The heat and humidity of China in the summer is always pretty palpable in my books, mainly because I’m not used to that kind of heat or humidity coming from California, we just don’t have that.
CVN: We talked about China City a little, which doesn’t exist anymore - what differences do you note between Chinese culture as you wrote it in your novels, visiting the locale, and Chinese culture here, within the states? What changes have you observed from the Chinatown you knew and the ones you experience that exist today?
LS: One of the things is in China, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, things continued to evolve and change. But in Chinatowns, up to a certain point, they really didn’t.
The people who came - like my family – when they came, you couldn’t live outside of Chinatown, you couldn’t marry outside of Chinatown, you couldn’t work outside of Chinatown, you couldn’t go to school outside of Chinatown. It was a ghetto! It was a wonderful ghetto, but still a ghetto. And that meant that people really held onto the traditions and the culture in the way that it was when they left – when they left China, or Hong Kong, or Taiwan, and came here – they hung on to how it had been. But in China, it was evolving and changing.
This really hit me a few years ago, we were having a family dinner – for our family, a small dinner, about a hundred people – not all the family, but one part of our family, a banquet. The next room over, they were having a wedding, and their traditions were so completely different from what we did in weddings. And so we were like, “Okay, where are they from?” And finally, we sent somebody over and they were from Taiwan but they hadn’t been over here very long – and it was completely, completely different. So I think that’s one of the main things, is that people held onto the culture and traditions because they had nothing else. You didn’t have a way. Later, of course, when the laws changed and you could move out and have a different kind of life, and you could live where you wanted and work where you wanted, all of that changed pretty rapidly.
So today, people who come over, wherever they’re coming from, they can live pretty much where they want – if they have money, they can live wherever they want – they are already familiar in a lot of ways with American culture because they’ve seen it TV. So, I think that’s one of the big differences.
I’d say the other thing – and I think that this is something most people aren’t aware of…I mean Chinese people are aware of it – but there’s a kind of division between the people who came before 1965 and the people who came after 1965, the people who are Cantonese speakers and the people who are Mandarin speakers. Pre-1965 typically Cantonese, more of less uneducated, didn’t have a lot of money – a lot of them came from peasant families, like my family. After 1965, people were Mandarin speaking – more educated, have money, didn’t have to live in Chinatown, could live where they wanted. And the differences in their experiences were really vast. So you can’t just say “Chinese-American” – that’s like saying “English” and “German”, because it’s really more like that, almost like separate countries.
CVN: Was it almost like writing about a home that doesn’t exist anymore when you wrote back on China City?
LS: That’s really true, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write it. You know when you’re growing up and you hear the stories of your parents and your grandparents – they aren’t your stories, but you have a kind of nostalgia about them. Well, you’re still young, you might not yet – but later those will be the stories your grandmother told you. These aren’t my memories, but they are stories, so much of it, are stories that people told me who are dead or gone or dying already. I really wanted to capture those stories and capture that time and that place, China City, before it was gone off the map of memory.
CVN: I don’t know if this is connected but would you say this most recent book is the most personal to you?
LS: They all are in different ways, and of course “On Gold Mountain” which is about my own family, that would have to be the most personal – but this one, I have been saying it’s the closest to my heart, because it is this sense of trying to capture this time and place that I didn’t live through but it meant so much to my grandparents, especially my grandparents and my great-aunts and uncles. These were things when the family would get together and they’d say, “Oh remember when…” And you hear those stories and so it’s a kind of, on my part, nostalgia, but also missing them too, and missing the way the family would get together and tell things like that for Christmas or Thanksgiving. At the end of the evening, they would start in on these stories, and there’s a lot of that in there for me.
CVN: Just for fun, we were mentioning the candied taro earlier, but food and culture have always been closely intertwined – what foods remind you most of Chinese culture, or of your childhood home?
LS: One of them and it’s on my website and in the book is “curried tomato beef” and my grandfather had a restaurant in Los Angeles Chinatown that opened in 1936 – so not in China City, but it was in old Chinatown. And that was one of the dishes he served and when I was a little girl, the restaurant had long been closed but he used to make that and I used to watch him and he’d let me cut things up - I could be the “second chef”. And he called me that, because I guess he had a restaurant, and he said, “Oh, here’s my second chef.”
My dad makes it, but my dad also tinkered with it and changed it around and added his things and I make it too, but I hadn’t made it in a long time. So I called my dad and I said, send me how to make it, because I wanted to put it on the website because I had it in the book. Because a lot of times, when people have book clubs, they like to make something in the book, and so many people have written to me about how to make that candied taro. And finally somebody else found a recipe on the internet, and now I have a link to that recipe. It must be really hard because people then write to me saying, “It didn’t work!” And I say don’t blame me, I don’t know, I think it would be really hard to make! [CVN: I just eat it!] I just eat it! Only two times, coming and going out of this one little place!
Anyway, I made the tomato beef and sort of remembered what my grandfather did and my dad’s recipe on yellow lined paper and then I was tinkering around with it myself, but here’s the thing, when I ate it…First of all, you don’t really see it in restaurants anymore, it’s like aspic, it’s fallen off of menus. It was like I was eight years old, the taste – I don’t know, taste is one of the strongest senses you have, and can put you right back in that time.
So I’ve only made it a couple times now that I’ve perfected the recipe, but that’s certainly one. For other things, we used to eat when I was little and you don’t see too often in very many restaurants, is steamed pork with duck egg and pickled turnips on top. Another thing, I don’t know what it’s called – it comes in an earthenware jar, and it looks almost like wood-bark. I don’t know what it is, but pork with that on top, steamed. I don’t know what it is, though. [CVN: Is it slightly sweet tasting?] Salty, really salty. I don’t know what it is, though. What are some other ones? That almond custard jello and anything with lop-chiang [Chinese sausage]. Anything with lop-chiang!
CVN: I was reading an interview where you talked about all the “scary” places you’ve traveled – where were these places, and what made them dangerous, intimidating, etc?
LS: “Scary”. I’m trying to think of what made them “scary”. [CVN: Dangerous, maybe?] I don’t know, because I don’t get too scared. Actually, I’ll go pretty much anywhere, except last night, I was at the downtown San Diego Public Library, there were so many homeless out there that I said, you know what, I’m going to let someone walk me to my car.
But that’s so rare that I ever feel uncomfortable – maybe what I meant was what seems scary to other people, isn’t really scary to me. A lot of people will say to me, "How can you go to China, in the middle of nowhere? How can you do that?" They’ll say it especially to my husband – "How can you let Lisa go off like that, all by herself? Where is she, what’s she doing?" And he says, “I don’t know, she’s okay though.” I think maybe it’s because he’s been to China a lot, but I can’t really think of a safer place to travel by yourself.
CVN: One of the focuses of our press is to take away this negative attitude that Americans have been fostering in the past 40-50 years, towards travel and seeing other parts of the world – as in everything is a loss outside of here, and it’s safest here and best to stay here [LS: Or that it’s dirty or scary…] Definitely. How do you feel about that?
LS: I can’t think of anywhere that I’ve traveled where I felt unsafe – except for outside the library! I think that’s changing though, because so many people now have gone to China.
All over the country now, I’ll do these big events, and people will say, in the Q&A, “I went to China!” and other people will say “Me too, me too!” and they’ll say this was the best place I’ve ever went, the food was so great and they’re still kind of surprised, I think, because maybe they did have some of those old stereotypes in mind but the reality is just not that at all.
CVN: You’ve traveled to so many places – where do you want to go that you’ve never gone before?
LS: I would love to go to Bhutan – I was supposed to go this fall but I can’t go now. I have an idea – I don’t know if I’ll ever write it – but I’d like to follow the steps of Kuan Yin, the goddess Kuan Yin. She was born on an island off of – now I can’t remember where, but somewhere off of China, and ended up in Tibet. So I think it would be really interesting to follow her trail, that’s a trip I’d love to do.
These are very specific things – I would like to go to New Zealand. There are fjords, you can walk and it takes several days to walk it, and I just thought that would be really beautiful and I love to walk, so I’d like to do that. I’d like to go back to Thailand – I love Thailand, so I’d like to spend more time there, in the mountains in the north. There are a lot of places in Southeast Asia that I’d like to go that I haven’t gone to yet or haven’t spent enough time in. I’m not very interested in Europe – I’m sure it’s nice, and I’ve been there, but it doesn’t have a lot of interest for me.
Christine Nguyen and Lisa See
CVN: Where have you been that you’d like to visit again?
LS: Well, Thailand. Actually one place in Europe I’d like to go back, I was on a book tour to Poland a couple of years ago, but I only went to Warsaw. You know when you go someplace, like all those people who’ve been going to China who were surprised – I was so surprised and so interested. There were two things – one thing that was a surprise was – you know what the number one minority is? Vietnamese. So somebody came, and then they brought over their family – so it’s Poland, but there are all these places you can get Vietnamese food, and it’s really interesting.
But that’s not necessarily why I want to go back – what really struck me there was how people, even really young people, are very connected to the history of the country and know all kinds of things about the country and they’ve been invaded so many times and the history is so layered and so tragic. So why I want to go back to a tragic place I don’t know, but I just found it incredibly fascinating. So I would like to go back there and spend more time seeing it.
For any time when you want to get away, going down to Mexico is nice because it’s so close. I’m always ready to go back there because it’s easy and it’s not too expensive or too far. I just think travel is the best thing anybody can do and experiencing other countries and other places.
I’ve been involved with these various women’s groups and I mentioned that one earlier, where she deals with the back line of women - she’s a member of this group I’m a member of called “The Trusteeship” and there’s another woman who’s a member of that group, and she’s the woman in Africa who has led the whole protest to end female genital cutting. And she has this whole program that she does there that’s based on what the woman in China did who ended foot binding. So she’s based her program on this woman from 100 years ago. And it’s really working. I’ve never really had an interest in going to Africa but I’d like to go there and follow Molly around and see what she does and see how she does it and how she’s modeled it on this woman from China.
CVN: Well, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to tell us a little more about where you’re coming from; I’m sure our readers will enjoy seeing the way your perspective and background has made your writing so unique.
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