Lisa See And Her New Book "Dreams of Joy"

After publishing three Red Princess series (Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones), and then two in-depth studies of the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love), the Chinese American writer Lisa See wrote a novel Shanghai Girls. In the book, Pearl and May escaped the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the nineteen thirties. The sisters fled to California. Lisa See's new book Dreams of Joy continues the story of the two Chinese sisters : Pearl is forced to return to Shanghai on a search for her daughter.

Dreams of Joy takes place in the nineteen fifties. Pearl’s nineteen- year-old daughter, Joy, is angry at her mother and her Aunt May. So she runs away to China to find the father she has never met. She not only finds him but becomes involved with the changes taking place in the country. Lisa See says this situation was not uncommon at the time. She says many young Chinese were sympathetic to the country’s new government.

LISA SEE: “Actually, there were a lot of Chinese going back to the People’s Republic of China at that time, ninety thousand in one year from Fukien province alone. But also a lot of other people who weren’t Chinese, who were going to China kind of inspired by what was going on there, or even hoping to start a business.”*

Lisa See has written several best-selling novels about Chinese-related subjects. She says those themes have special appeal for her.

LISA SEE: “I’m part Chinese. But I have red hair and freckles so I don’t look very Chinese, but I did grow up in a very traditional Chinese American family. I live in Los Angeles and today, in Los Angeles, I have about four hundred relatives, of which the majority of them are still full Chinese and there there’s this spectrum with me on one end – there are about a dozen that look like me – but then, sort of, this spectrum all the way up to the majority being full Chinese.”

She says she is also part Irish. Like most Americans, she celebrates her ethnicities.

LISA SEE: “I think all of us here in the United States, we all had someone in our families who was brave enough, scared enough, dumb enough, crazy enough to leave their home country to come here. But there is still a part of us that is tied to our original homeland and we all share in that feeling no matter where you came from.”

Lisa See is already at work on her next book. It deals with Chinese American culture from the first half of the twentieth century. Both Shanghai Girls and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan received honorable mentions from the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature. And one of her books has already made it to Hollywood. “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” will be released in movie theaters across America on July fifteenth.

* All quotes from VOA
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