Book World Live

A young woman in 17th-century China returns after death to fulfill her destiny.

Lisa See's love story takes as its narrator a girl dead at 16 and doomed to be a "hungry ghost" for decades until she can be "transformed into an ancestor." That narrator, young Peony, is a beguiling mix of innocence and experience; we watch her both as the pampered and studious daughter of a wealthy family and as a starveling wisp of air who cannot negotiate corners and must avoid mirrors and swords. There's a prodigious amount of information here digested and conveyed.-- Review: Ghosts in the Garden ( Book World, June 24, 2007)

Lisa See fields questions and comments about her latest work, "Peony in Love."

"Peony in Love" is the latest title for Lisa See that she has set in China, among them "Secret Flower and the Secret Fan" and " Dragons." She is also the author of a family history, "On Gold Mountain."

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Lisa See: Peony in Love is out today! I'm very excited (and nervous) about that and very pleased to be here. I bet not many of you have had a chance to read Peony in Love yet, but I'm sure we'll find plenty to talk about. To me, Peony in Love is about what women will go through to be heard and those emotions that are so strong that they transcend borders, time, and perhaps even death. Although it takes place in 17th-century China, I think -- hope -- that these are things that we still care about today.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: What are the goals of the Tan Ze? Do you feel the character was developed as much as you wanted it to be, or do you agree with some critics who thought the character required more depth?

Lisa See: I didn't know that there were critics who wanted Tan Ze to have more depth, so I don't quite know the context of that criticism. But I think the best way to answer your question is to talk about point of view in a novel. There were various ways I could have told the story of the three wives. I could have written a non-fiction book, I could have written a novel that followed the first, second, and the third wives in a chronological sequence, I could have written from all three wives' points of view and they could have been in a kind of dialog with each other. I wanted to stay with one character and tell the story from Peony's point of view, even though she'd have to be dead for two-thirds of the book. (That idea alone certainly posed some interesting writing challenges!) I was intrigued by the real life Chen Tong, who's given name has been lost to history. (Tong means "same," and she was given this name because she had the same name as her future mother-in-law.) I guess I wanted her to find and have her own voice, to be heard for who she really was, and for readers to see -- through the eyes of one person, who I hope people will connect to and care about -- what she went through to be heard, and finally for her to be truly honored for what she started when she began writing in the margins of the Peony Pavilion.

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Harrisburg, Pa.:17th century China is such an exotic time and place for American readers. What research did you do to capture that era?

Lisa See: First, I did a lot of reading about the time and place, and then about how women lived. I also read as much as I could that had been written by the women writers of that time. There were over a thousand women writers who were published in the Yangzi delta in the mid-17th century and a lot of their work is still available, even in English. Obviously, many of them wrote about their lives in the inner chambers and what they could see in their gardens -- flowers and butterflies. But many of them ventured farther afield not only physically but with their thoughts too. Their words, ideas, and emotions are all woven to create a 17th century world. Finally, I also went to Hangzhou. It's a very modern city today, but the area around the lake still has many old remnants for the 17th century and even earlier. I also explored some of the watertowns nearby, which really haven't changed at all. As I think about it, I do all kinds of things -- look at paintings on silk, tableaus that are painted on ceramics, listen to traditional Chinese opera from that region.

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Seattle, Wash.: Hi Lisa,

What did you think of the review that ran in this Sunday's Book World?

Lisa See: I loved that review! What's funny is that I even liked the criticisms. There is a bit of "romantic breathiness" at the begining, because Peony is a 16 year old girl who'd fallen in love for the first time. I think he was also said something about the writing feeling sometimes like a poor translation. I did that on purpose! I was trying to capture the texture and sound of 17th-century writing, which is bound to be quite different from what contemporary readers are accustomed to. But at the same time, it instatntly puts you in a different place and time.

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Sherman Oaks, Calif: What compelled you to write this book at this time?

Lisa See: When I was working on Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I kept coming across the women writers of the 17th century and in particular the three wives. To me, they were like a mirror image of the women in Snow Flower. Those women were poor, uneducated, with bound feet, they never leaft their rooms, and they longed to be heard. Two hundred years earlier, in a whole other part of China, there were women, of course, but these women were from wealthy families and highly educated. They also had bound feet, but they got out. And they also longed to be heard. This longing to be heard -- and what women will do to be heard -- is important to me. This story called to me and I was compelled to write about it -- obsessed really, just like the lovesick maidens.

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Munich, Germany: In your depictions of ghosts, were there any examples from older Chinese writings that contributed to your ideas? Are ghosts and spirits part of Chinese folklore?

Lisa See: Absolutely! I read a lot of old Chinese ghost stories. But ghost, fox spirits, demons, and the whole supernatural world is very much a part of Chinese life even today. In Taiwan and in rural parts of Mainland China, people still practice ghost marriages. The Chinese look at the afterworld in a very different way than we do. For the Chinese, the afterworld is almost like a parallel world. Ancestors still have all the needs, wants, and desires that they had as living family members. That's why they need offerings of food, clothes, furniture, etc. (in the form of burnt paper offerings) to live and be happy in their new home. But it's not so easy to become a cherished ancestor, which is why there are so many ghosts roaming the world.

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Los Angeles, Calif: Do you feel -closer- to any of the characters in this novel than the other characters? Why or why not?

Lisa See: What an interesting question. The character I feel closest to is Peony's grandmother. She's a very difficult person and flawed in many ways. She certainly has some very basic things wrong, which ends up confusing things a bit for Peony. But I love her anyway. She reminds me a lot of my own grandmother and some of my aunts and great-aunts on the Chinese side of my family. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a version of Peony's grandmother has appeared in every book I've written. In my mysteries, she was the Neighborhood Committee Director, a real busybody. In Snow Flower, she's the matchmaker, Madame Wang. And now here she is as Peony's grandmother. I've found that one of the wonderful things about writing is that I get to spend time with people that I've loved but who are now gone from this earth.

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Lisa See: I'm always comfortable talking about my family and my heritage. And thank you for asking. My great-great-grandfather came to this country to work on the building of the transcontinental railroad. My great-grandfather was the godfather of Los Angeles Chinatown. I'm only 1/8th Chinese and I have red hair and freckles. Today in Los Angeles, I have about 400 relatives, of which there are about a dozen who look like me. As children, the people we see around us are our mirror. When I looked around me, I saw Chinese faces. I thought that's who I was. The poeple in my family intermarried back when it was illegal. (It was against the law for Chinese -- down to 1/4 Chinese -- and Caucasions to marry in Californian until 1948; it was against the law in 28 states, some up until 1965!) So my family was really ahead of the curve. Today intermarriage is very common.

Anyway, my parents divorced when I was 3 and I moved around a lot. The one constant in my life was Chinatown. I guess that's why it was and is so important to me. And of course, they always tell writers to write what they know. This is what I know. But it's more than that.

As you may have noticed from one of my previous answers, I write about certain family members and the way they made me feel to this day. My heritage and my family are never far from my heart or my writing.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: It is hard to imagine today that women would accept the physical abuse, the binding of feet, in the past. Then again, there are some other analogies to the present in the today's abuse and treatment of women. Were there some messages being conveyed on this point?

Lisa See: I think you've made the point in your question. As far as we've come today and as free, mobile, and independent as we are, in some ways we have a long way to go. Let's look at footbinding and it's modern-day counterpart, breast enhancement. Did you know that the most popular age for breast enhancement is 17? It's a very popular high-school graduation gift. The reasons for it are very much the same as they were for footbinding: it makes a girl (or woman) prettier by societal standards, it's a great economic status symbol for men, it's givenusually by mothers, and it makes a girl more "marriageable."

We're so lucky in this country, but all you need to do is look at the Middle East, India, and Africa to know that women still suffer terribly. (Khaled Hosseini's new A Thousand Spendid Suns shows how women have been treated in Afghanistan over the last 30 years with beauty, brilliance, and despiar. Anyway, I think it's important for us -- as lucky as we are -- to think about where we are as women today in our own country and to be more aware of how things are for women in other parts of the world.

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Derwood, MD: What is for you the greatest challenge in bringing this time and culture alive for modern readers?

Lisa See: The greatest challenge is to not make it seem too "exotic." I want people to feel like they've entered the room in that time. I don't try to impose my beliefs on my characters. I certainly am glad we don't practice footbinding any more and I think it was a barbaric practice, but I don't have my characters say that. They have to live within the customs of their time. My hope is that readers will understand how things could have happened in that time and think about what they would have done if they'd lived there then.

After that, I think the greatest challange, but also the greatest joy, is to try and find those emotions that ranscend time and place. We all love, hate, feel eny, jealousy, disappointment, and desire. These are the things that make us human. Where and when we live is almost incidental to the importance of emotions.

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Sherman Oaks, CA: It is so wonderful that you, your family and heritage will live forever in your novels.

Lisa See: Thank you, but I don't know about forever. That's an awfully long time.

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Lisa See: Thank you all for joining in. I hope I see some of you out there on the road when I'm on my book tour.

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