Lisa See
Lisa See
Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her paternal great-grandfather was Chinese, which has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, a detailed account of See's family history, and the novels Flower Net, The Interior, Dragon Bones, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Loveand Shanghai Girls, which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list. Both Shanghai Girls and Snow...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth18 February 1955
CountryUnited States of America
I am an eighth Chinese, and I come from a large Chinese-American family in Los Angeles.
I love research. I'd go so far as to say I'm a research fanatic.
It used to happen in villages and towns in China that they would have - I guess you'd call them beauty contests - where all of the women of a particular village or town would be seated behind these screens or curtains with only their feet showing.
You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.
A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.
People write to me all the time, and I write back.
Don't ever feel that you have to hide who you are. Nothing good ever comes from keeping secrets like that.
Mama used to tell us a story about a cicada sitting high in a tree. It chirps and drinks in dew, oblivious to the praying mantis behind it. The mantis arches up its front leg to stab the cicada, but it doesn't know an oriole perches behind it. The bird stretches out its neck to snap up the mantis for a midday meal, but its unaware of the boy who's come into the garden with a net. Three creatures—the cicada, the mantis and the oriole—all coveted gains without being aware of the greater and inescapable danger that was coming.
While she is lovely, we need to remember that her face is not what distinguishes her. Her beauty is a reflection of the virtue and talent she keeps inside.
I think to really be literate in nu shu you only need about 600 characters because it is phonetic. So you're able to then create many words out of one character.
I don't really know anything about the movie business, even though I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life - somehow I've never bumped into it.
Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming -- weren't our dreams what gave us strength, hope, and desire?
My love for him had never gone away but only changed, growing deeper like wine fermenting or pickles curing. It bore into me with the pervasiveness of water working its way to the center of a mountain.
Our words had to be circumspect. We could not write anything too negative about our circumstances. This was tricky, since the very form of a married woman's letter needed to include the usual complaints -- that we were pathetic, powerless, worked to the bone, homesick, and sad. We were supposed to speak directly about our feelings without appearing ungrateful, no-account, or unfilial.