Revisiting Lisa See By Terri Elders
In April, Lisa See concluded her 2015 promotion tour for the paperback edition of China Dolls with an appearance at a Friends of the San Pedro Library fundraiser. The organizers of the event at the Grand Annex emailed me that mine had been the first check received. I’d made the top of the list. Moving to the top of lists, including those of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestselling novels, isn’t out of the ordinary for Lisa See. For me, however, seeing her once again in person would be extraordinary. Though she and her mother, novelist and book reviewer Carolyn See, have sent invitations to her talks over the years when I’d lived hundreds or thousands of miles from the locales, this time Lisa would be close. Aside from a Skype interview with a book club in Colville, WA, I’d last laid eyes on her at Loyola Marymount University. I’d met her there initially in 1979, at a literary event her mother, a professor at the university, had organized: A Symposium of California Writers. At the first of what turned out to be three successive summer gatherings, Carolyn engaged Lisa, a humanities student there, as her co-hostess. Together the two made certain everybody got to meet one another. Literary lions at such events often are kept safely caged from the people who buy and read their books. Not at this one. I’d planned an article for Uncle Jam, so armed with business cards, water-colored by publisher Phil Yeh, I’d mingled with as many writers as I could: Herbert Gold, A. Scott Berg, Alex Haley and other luminaries. The authors sat down for lunch on a firstcome, first-served basis. Anybody could join them for a glass of wine. The second summer, the university rented its campus dorm rooms, so Carolyn and Lisa arranged a square dance for evening diversion. Rub shoulders with writers? That we did, as we dosi-doed. Swept to my feet by an eager partner, I’d forgotten where I’d stowed my handbag. Lisa joined me in an eventuallysuccessful hunt, peering under tables surrounding the dance floor. I still remember how radiant she looked promenading in her full skirt that evening. Three years later she published her first book, Lotus Land, sharing the penname of Monica Highland with her mother and their friend, John Espey. The trio, noticing the success of popular soap opera novels of the day, decided to try their hand. Together they had crafted what turned out to be the first of three books with a nom de plume derived from the Hollywood intersection of Santa Monica and Highland Boulevards. Lisa still looks radiant, and still affords her fans a chance to engage in chitchat. When she’s not up against a deadline, as she is now for her upcoming The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, she even Skypes in to talk with book clubs. My book group two years ago expected we’d be allocated a half an hour at best. Instead, Lisa stayed online with us for an hour and a half, relating hilarious stories about family history, as well as describing her current writing projects. In San Pedro she allowed as much time to answering her audience’s questions as she did to her talk on how she went about researching China Dolls. I took notes: What’s her writing routine? “I learned this from my mother. When I’m writing a novel, I write a thousand words a day. I do
Lisa See it in the morning before I get distracted. I write straight through from an outline, and go back and edit later.” What does she like to read? “I don’t read novels while I’m writing. I don’t want other voices to seep in. I won’t read The Goldfinch…too long. I purposefully keep my novels to a readable length, around 400 pages.” What about covers? “I didn’t have too much say about covers at first. About half my books aren’t my own titles. I’m terrible at titles. The photographer who does my photos for the books is Patty Williams, wife of Los Angeles Times movie critic, Kenneth Turan.” What’s the new book about? The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane will incorporate three main elements: a mother/daughter relationship, the history of tea, and the Akha ethnic minority of China. It’s about a woman who gives up her baby for adoption in China, a woman in Pasadena, California, who adopts her, and the girl herself. The historical backdrop centers on tea, the second most popular drink in the world after water. It’s set in the tea terraces of the province of Yunnan. What inspires her to write? Lisa claims her paternal grandmother and her mother have been major inspirations. She cites a passage by Wallace Stegner, from Angle of Repose, that she used as an epigraph in her family history, On Gold Uncle Jam Quarterly, Volume 42, #105 Summer 2015
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