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 wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate.
Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.
Sisters, as you know, also have a unique relationship. This is the person who has known you your entire life, who should love you and stand by you no matter what, and yet it's your sister who knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt you the most.
All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as the women in my county know, are sources of sadness, rupture, and brutality.
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.
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.
The classics tell us that, in relationships, the one between teacher and student comes second only to the one between parent and child.
Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest.
I write a thousand words a day.
People write to me all the time, and I write back.
A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.
You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.
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.