Hey, See! There is lot of details and knowledge about China included in your books. Is every little piece of historical knowledge in your books thanks to your own researching and how much time and effort you make to find information? Thank you for pleasant reading moments! I really like your novels. How much in percents you think your own heart is Chinese?

Lisa See Thank you! I'm so glad you like my novels! I love research. I’d go so far as to say I’m a research fanatic. I also over research. In my first draft, I put in everything I know up to that point. That means that the first draft has all kinds of facts and other information that I found that I have to write about. But I’m writing a novel, and a novel can’t be about interesting facts I’ve found or how smart I am to have found those facts. So the real challenge and goal is to cut out all that research to make the characters, story, and emotions shine. That’s what a novel is after all. What I hope comes through, after all these cuts, is that the research is still there – like underpinnings or a solid basement – but relatively invisible and unobtrusive. What I don’t want is for readers to come to a dead stop in the story to read a few paragraphs or pages of history.
Your second question is hard for me to answer. What makes you Chinese? Is it how you look, how you feel inside, how you raise your children? My cultural identity is much more Chinese than American. I don’t look Chinese, but I grew up in a very large Chinese American family. In Los Angeles I have about 400 relatives. The majority are still full Chinese, about a dozen look like me, and then there’s a spectrum in between. So how do we – as human beings -- identify ourselves? We identify ourselves by the people who are around us. They are our mirror. So when I was a little girl and I looked around, what I saw were Chinese faces and what I experienced was Chinese culture.

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