Lisa See

Lisa See, daughter of novelist Carolyn See, brings a novelist's skill to this sprawling ancestral history. Books tracing the roots of overseas Chinese writers are not uncommon these days, but See uncovered in her family tree a capsule history of the Sino-American diaspora: her great-grandfather, Fong See, founded a …

Dreams of Joy is a 2011 novel by Lisa See. It debuted as #1 in the New York Times list of best selling fiction. In this book See completes the circle she began in Shanghai Girls. The former novel ends with the suicide of Pearl’s husband Sam and the shattering discovery by Joy that May is really her mother, Pearl is …

Peony in Love is the fifth of Lisa See's novels. Her previous novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and Peony in Love emphasize the difficulty 19th- and 17th-century Chinese women had in achieving freedom and identity in a society that was both male dominated and rigid in its gender expectations.

Shanghai Girls is a 2009 novel by Lisa See. It centers on the complex relationship between two sisters, Pearl and May, as they go through great pain and suffering in leaving war-torn Shanghai, and try to adjust to the difficult roles of wives in arranged marriages and of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. This work marks …

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language …