It's hard to imagine Lisa See -- this small, elegant, delicate-looking woman leading us through her beautifully-adorned Brentwood home -- in the trenches of China, traveling in obscure places where foreigners are rarely seen, catching rides across rivers, hopping on back of random pony-drawn carts, with only a driver-interpreter and village official to help her navigate.
But that's what she did in order to prepare for her new novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. To hear her talk about her experiences -- going into the houses, talking to the people, learning about their languages -- with such fixation and a wide-eyed fascination, you appreciate what makes the spirit of a writer like See. It's the sense of adventure, the never-ending curiosity, the borderline obsessive-compulsive research collected in order to best capture the essence of a time and place so that an author can transport readers to foreign lands. It's impressive; it's the reason writers are so interesting.
Lisa See's novels tend to be set in China, which is a reflection of her upbringing. Although she was born in Paris and doesn't look particularly Asian, she spent most of her childhood in her grandparents' antique stores in Los Angeles' Chinatown. In fact, her great-grandfather, Fong See, is regarded as the godfather of Chinatown, having played a crucial role in transforming it into the way it is today. She chronicles her family history in her first book, On Gold Mountain: The One Hundred Year Odyssey of my Chinese-American Family.
Since then, she's written a string of suspense-thrillers, most recently a successful novel called Dragon Bones, but Snow Flower and a Secret Fan is a departure from that genre. The inspiration for the story came when Lisa See discovered nu shu. Nu shu is a secret language that the women in the Jiangyong county of the Hunan province invented, developed, and used to communicate with each other. It is regarded by many as the only gender-based language in the world, one that been kept secret for a thousand years. This is particularly impressive, because it was during a time when women were not regarded as intellectuals. They spent most their time isolated in the "women's chambers" portion of the house.
During this time, because marriages were usually practical arrangements devoid of love or emotional attachment, female friendships (called lao-tong or "old sames") became especially intense and treasured. Therefore, this is a story about the deep and emotional friendship between two women, Snow Flower and Lily, who are soulmates through life as they survive foot-binding, abusive husbands, pains of motherhood, and inadvertent betrayals that almost tear them apart.
APA talks to author Lisa See.
Interview with Lisa See
August 23, 2005
Interviewed by Ada Tseng
Video Edit by Ada Tseng
APA: Your book is about a beautiful, complicated female friendship. But you've said that one of the main themes of your novel is regret. Can you elaborate on that?
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"Magical, haunting fiction. Beautiful." -Maxine Hong Kingston. Photo courtesy of lisasee.com. |
Lisa See: Well, there are really three main themes: friendship, love, and regret. I think it's an interesting thing, because we all have friends that we care so much about, but we have a hard time talking about that relationship and what that means to us. In literature, there are more books written about men about male friendships -- male bonding, male road trips, and their adventures -- than books written by women about female friendships. And you'd think it'd be just the opposite. But, women haven't been able to find the language within ourselves to talk about the emotions of that relationship. Why is that? Well, it brings me to love.
In English, we use one word to describe a whole host of feelings. I can say, I love my husband, and I love my children... but guess what? I also "love" hamburgers and the color purple, and I love to garden. But, I use the same word. But, love is a much deeper than that. It comes in a lot of forms. So, one of the things that was interesting to me is that in the Chinese language, in the characters, you can talk about something like "regretful love," "pity love," "gratitude love." "Mother love" has two components: one part means love, one part means pain. That's a mother's love. That really shows the depth in the language, so I really wanted to explore that theme of love in a way that maybe hasn't been done about female friendship.
And finally, I think whereever there's love, eventually there's going to be regret. You really can't get through life without regrets. One thing that I found when I was interviewing my family for On Gold Mountain, I was talking to people who were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, and they had these regrets. So I wanted to know, why hadn't they fixed it, why hadn't they done something about it. And, there were three reasons. You were sometimes are too proud to admit the one you were wrong. Or we're too embarassed, we dont' want to admit what we did. But often people will say to themselves, I'll deal with it next year. I'll deal with it later. But time runs out. And I really wanted to look at how love can be corrupted by regrets. Both in the novel, to explore if there was a way for Lily to fix her regretsm but also in a whole other way, for my own family, and for everybody.
APA: You went to China to do research for the book. Is the traveling and the process of immersing yourself in different cultures an aspect of writing that you enjoy?
LS: Yes, anything to go to China! The trip before Snow Flower was an intense trip. I was told that I was only the second foreigner ever to go to that area. It was down a lot of dirt roads, catching rides to get from this side of the river to that side of the river. There was this one day where this sweet kid picked us up, he had a pony-drawn cart and we hopped in the back. I dont' think you can write these types of books without spending a lot of time and being willing to go into people's houses and ask them embarassing questions. To really talk to them and take it all in -- all the senses, what you see, what you smell, what you feel and touch. That all becomes something you can use.
What makes being a writer different from being a scholar is... I have talked to a bunch of nu shu scholars, and I'd ask them "Oh, did you notice this?" and they hadn't, because they were focused on the linguistics, or just on a particular village, or collecting personal stories of two particular women. But, they weren't looking at the whole environment like the writer would.
One of the main things I noticed was that the architecture was different. In these houses, there was a women's chambers upstairs with one window. And these women, from the time that they were seven until they died, that's basicallly where they lived, in this one room with one window. Some of the windows had beautfiul wood carvings, but some of them just had 3 wooden bars coming down, like a jail. So that was their experience of the world, lookng out through these bars. When i talked to the scholars, none of them mentioned that. To me, it was so clear how the architecture had informed how people lived. As a writer, as a artist, you're trying to look at a lot of different things and see what you can use and what you can incorporate into a story that becomes meaningful.
APA: What was it like meeting the oldest living nu shu writer?
LS: She was 96 when I met her. She was the oldest nushu writer at the time, but she has now died. She was extraordinary. This tiny tiny person, very frail, bird-like and crumpled. Her skin was like tissue paper, so thin. She had lost most of her hair. She had bound feet, and she could no longer make bound-foot shoes because her hands were so arthritic, so she wore child size kung-fu slippers with tissues stuffed in the toes. She talked about the time before her footbinding, what the footbinding was like, how it was married sight unseen into her husband's home and left her family behind. She had a sworn sisterhood, so she talked about what it meant to her, and what the language meant to her. She sang songs for me, told me special dishes she used to make, showed me how they used to make wedding quilts. It was just one of the most remarkable experiences in my life to have gotten to meet her and spend time with her and hear her story.
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An example of nu shu writing from the inside cover of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. |
APA: Can you describe what nu shu is like, in comparison to Chinese?
LS: In standard Chinese, the characters are square and blocky. [In calligraphy,] with a brush, there's some heaviness of the strokes. Nu shu is very long and thin, described as looking like mosquito legs. It only uses six strokes, and there are only 600 characters, the phonetic verson of the dialect. But because it's phonetic, it's easier to learn than Chines. You would be able to sound them out. Some of the characters are italicized versions of traditional Chinese. Some are completely unique to nu shu, and they don't exist anywhere else. But because there are phonetic versions of local dialect, you have to understand the context of what people are writng, otherwise there can be mistakes and it can be misinterpreted.
APA: Are there any speculations about why nu shu was only found in that one county?
LS: I haven't read any speculations.. but I have a theory. It's a remote area. It's traditionally been remote. It's the Yao ethnic minority. Although there are Yao ethnic minorities in many provinces, they stayed in this one area. It's geographically difficult to get to. But again, this was a women's language, and they were in that one room wiht the one window, they weren't getting out. They were marrying from village to village, but not out of their own county, it was so geographically isolated.
APA: How do you respond to the speculations that there were men using nu shu, and therefore it cannot technically be considered a womens-only language?
LS: The only thing like that I've heard is that in Shanghai, in the museum, they have a coin from the era of the Taiping Rebellion that has nu shu on it. They don't have an explanation for that, that's the only thing they've found. So, were they using it as a secret code during the Taiping Rebellion? The leader of the Taiping Rebellion thought that men and women should be equal. In fact, the women who did not have bound feet fought side by side with the men, so equal rights was a very prominent idea. So, did the women bring nu shu with them and allow them to use it in the Taiping Rebellon? I don't know. I do know that men knew that it existed. It was supposed to be this big secret. They knew it existed, but they didn't care. To them it was like embroidery or cooking or taking care of the baby, it was beneath them. In this area, most of the men were illiterate because they were farmers. So, they were illiterate, but their wives were literate in nu shu.
APA: Why do you think it's important to imagine and know that women had this secret language in 19th century China?
LS: So often you hear that in the past, there were no women writers, no women artists, no women historians, no women architects, no women chefs.. everything. There were women, but we didn't do anything. But they had to have been doing something. History has made it so that these stories have been lost or forgotten or sometimes deliberately covered up. So, to me, what's extraordinary about nu shu was that here was a language they they had invented, used, and they themselves were the ones who kept it secret from the men, and i think it's remarkable.
I felt this especially after I went there, saw the architecture and learned how these women lived. It's just incredible that here were women that... no one expected them to have intellectual thought, to be creative in any way, no one expected or wanted them ot show any type of emotion, and yet through this language, through this writing, they were in a sense able to fly out of that one window and reach across the fields and find other women that they could tell their stories to that would listen to them, that they could be emotional with. A language that they could hide in embroidery and in fans and in weaving, and in very creative and beautiful ways. They could tell histories and do things, when in their daily life they had been told they couldn't do these things. So for me, it was amazing on two different levels.
APA: With the lao tongs and sworn sisterhoods of that period, how would you compare that to how women relate to each other in contemporary society?
LS: One of the interestng things that happened in the editing process was: there's the letter of vituperation. Snow Flower writes it to Lily. This was one of the standard nu shu forms: one woman gets really mad at another woman, writes this letter, and reads it publicly in front of all the other women. And my editor said, "That is so mean. No one's going to forgive either Lily or Snow Flower. They're going to lose all sympathy, especially for Lily." And I tried to explain to him -- women are mean. Women are really mean!
So I said, "Do me a favor, just have some women at Random House read it. Don't tell them anything or give them any hints, just give it to them." And, people came back and told him they liked it or whatever... and he said, "Don't you think they're going to lose all sympathy for Lily?" And, all the women were like, "No, women are mean." [laughs] It's another one of those ancestral emotions and desires, that transcends time and place. I think those things are universal, that it doesn't matter when or where you were born. It would be great if women could transcend that. Even here, women are really competitve. And, as girls, women are taught to never to cause trouble, and to be calm and ignore it, don't make a fuss, don't be disagreeable, don't get mad. So I think the way women have learned to deal with that, is going through these circuitous ways instead of being direct.
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Photo courtesy of lisasee.com. |
APA: How did you come up with the title?
LS: My agent chose this title. We all liked Snowflower and we all liked that name. And my agent called me one day early in the morning and said "What do you think?" And what we liked was: Snow Flower, S F, and Secret Fan, S F. I liked the rhythm of it and the alliteration. But I also had a favorite book as a little girl called Amelia Ran and the Magic Ring, so when I heard this title, I just thought it was so much like Amelia Ran and the Magic Ring. A lot of people ask if it's a children's book or a fairy tale or a mystery because of the word "secret." Because of all these reasons, even though it probably muddied the waters a little bit for people, I really liked it. And it made me very happy to think of that book that meant so much to me.
APA: What about the names of the characters?
LS: I was just thinking of flower names. This is my fifth book that has to do with China or Chinese-Americans, and I know from the past that readers have trouble with Chinese names. They're not used to Qs and Js and they get confused about that, so they don't realy know how to pronounce them when they're reading. But then, on the other side, I really hate it when the names are things that are really beautiful in Chinese, but when they're translated they almost sound like an odd American Indian name -- She Who Walks By the Pond on a Moonlit Night. And, well that's too goofy. So in my family, one side of the family all had names that had love, and on the other side, they all had names that had flowers. So I knew that flower names were part of Chinese culture and tradition, but if I was careful, I could choose it in the way that they wouldn't have that other part that made it sound quaint and exotic and cutesy and "oriental." My Chinese teacher, her name is a variation -- it's not Snow Flower, but it had to do with her grandfather going out on the day she was born and seeing a flower that bloomed. And there's no such thing as a Snow Flower, but sometimes flowers come up in the snow, so I thought that was perfect for Snow Flower because she was able to endure and survive and blossom under very sad and harsh circumstances.
APA: Have there been interesting reactions to your novel as you've been on your book tour?
LS: There are a couple thngs that have surprised me. One is that I had thought people would be most interested in was the secret language. But the thng they've been most captivated and curious about is the foot-binding. And I'm really surprised by that. The other thing that surprised me but really pleased me, is that all over the country, people that adopted girls from China brought them to the book readings. And I've gone to places that are pretty white, and then there's all these little [Chinese] girls running around. And they don't have a Chinese community there, apart from the university. So that's how these familes are trying to make these connections. What I'm happy about is that these families are really trying to make sure their daughters have a real connection to their heritage, because it would be really easy for them to just have them be American, period. I think that's a real change from when girls were adopted before. But they're making an effort to help them learn their culture.
APA: Lastly, can we talk about the new book you're working on?
LS: The new book is a reverse mirror image of Snow Flower. In the Yangtze Delta in the 17th century, 200 years before when Snow Flower takes place, there were women also had bound feet, but from the elite class, very very educated. But there were more women writers in that area who were being published than altogether in the rest of the world at that time. And even today, a lot of the poetry is still in print. But the story I'm telling has to do with these girls, they're called The Lovesick Maidens, and they were these 16 year old girls who loved the opera, The Peony Pavillion the they weren't allowed to see it, they could only read it. But in that opera, the girl catches a case of lovesickness and dies, becomes a ghost, a young guy comes and falls in love with her, brings her back to life. And, so these girls would read this and catch a case of lovesickness themselves, and as they died, they would write this poetry. So it's a ghost story within a ghost story. But to me, this was another example of something where we've been told that women didn't do anything, and yet, look, they did this incredible stuff...