The Roots of Success !

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Lisa See and the roots of her success

By AKSHITA NANDA 

An author’s search for her Chinese roots has led her to write critically acclaimed novels set in her ancestral land.

CHINESE-AMERICAN author Lisa See watches about 100 movies a year, but the one film she is too afraid to catch is based on her own best-selling novel of 19th-century China, Snow Flower And The Secret Fan (the movie opened in Singapore last month but there is no Malaysian release date yet).

The story of foot-binding and female friendship is brought to the screen by Chinese-American director Wayne Wang of Joy Luck Club fame. Chinese actress Li Bingbing and South Korea’s Gianna Jun play the main roles of two devoted friends.

In a recent telephone interview, See, 56, confesses that during the July screening of the movie in New York, she posed for photographs with the director and actors, then sat outside the theatre for the duration of the film.

Chinese at heart: Author Lisa See is enamoured by her Chinese heritage.

“It made me too nervous to sit in with other people,” the California native, whose father is Chinese, says over the telephone from Colorado, where she is on vacation. “Now I understand why actors, during interviews, say they have not seen their movies!”

Snow Flower And The Secret Fan, published in 2005, is the first of See’s works to be adapted for the big screen and is among the most popular of her four evocative literary novels of China.

She declined to write the script – “I’m a novelist, not a scriptwriter” – but was insistent that the period details in the movie be accurate, down to cooking rice in a pot, without stirring.

See’s latest book, Dreams Of Joy, tackles the Cultural Revolution in China and topped the New York Times’ bestseller list when it was released in June.

She has also written three thrillers about Beijing detective Liu Hulan, and a biography of her Chinese-American grandfather, On Gold Mountain (1995, Vintage).

That family history inspired a five-month exhibition at Los Angeles’ Autry Museum of Western Heritage (now the Autry National Centre) in 2000 and an opera from the Los Angeles Opera company that same year.

Right now, See is working on a book about the “chop suey circuit” of night clubs in 1930s America. These clubs were known for their Asian dancers and performers, often touted as “the Chinese Fred Astaire” or the “Chinese Ginger Rogers”.



The daughter of Washington Post book critic Carolyn See and anthropologist Richard See, Lisa says her desire to learn more about her roots inspires most of her writing.

“I’m Chinese in my heart,” she says, even as her red hair and freckles, legacies of her mother’s Irish ancestry, give some pause.

Her parents divorced when she was three but much of her childhood was spent with her father’s family, at the antique stores her grandfather Fong See established in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.

“My mum and I moved a lot because of her work and the Chinese side of the family stayed where they were. To me, that was a part of my life that was most secure,” she recalls.

To this day, rice is comfort food for her two grown sons and she translates family conversations in Cantonese for her husband, lawyer Richard Kendall, though she insists that she is not fluent. “I think something happens in families, where you can understand one another,” she says.

Influenced by her mother’s choice of career, See, a graduate of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, turned her bachelor’s degree in humanities towards writing.

She was industry magazine Publishers Weekly’s West Coast correspondent for 13 years, wrote freelance for magazines such as Vogue and also wrote three books in the 1980s under the pseudonym Monica Highland with her mother and her mother’s partner John Espy.

“It was great fun, it was like an apprenticeship,” she says of historical novels Lotus Land and 110 Shanghai Road, and art book Greetings From Southern California.

It seemed natural then to tell the actual story of her father’s family in On Gold Mountain. She also wrote her first detective novel, Flower Net, set in modern Beijing, partly to provide a window into Chinese culture.

“I get to go so much deeper into the traditions and holidays that are so much a part of life that we’ve forgotten their meaning,” she says about her books. “Even though the books are not about my family exactly, they continue my family’s traditions.”

See is no armchair researcher. She first heard about nu shu, the women-only alphabet central to Snow Flower And The Secret Fan, while writing a review of a book about foot-binding. In order to find out more, she headed to China in 2002. With a translator, she visited villages in Hunan province via car, cart, boat and foot to interview women who might know of the language.

For Dreams Of Joy, her newest novel, she headed to China’s Anwei province and interviewed elderly folk who remembered the famine and hardship of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961. They shared stories of starvation, of families trading babies for food and in the hope that the child would fare better under foster care.

Asked if she was surprised by how easily the survivors opened up to her, she says no.

“I have found that people who are older want to tell you their stories. They have this attitude – ‘What can they do to me now?’ With my own grandmother, she felt that she had outlived her husband, friends, she could say whatever she wanted to say.

“People are willing to share their life stories with you if they know they are never going to see you again,” she adds.

Her research adds depth and texture to her novels, which are lauded by book reviewers and honoured for adding to the Chinese-American story.

The Los Angeles’ Chinese American Museum gave her its annual “historymaker” award in 2003, while the Organisation of Chinese American Women named her its 2001 Woman Of The Year.

Academics are also starting to pay her the sort of attention so far granted to the doyenne of Chinese-American literature, Maxine Hong Kingston, author of the 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior. Perhaps the only popular author ranked with Kingston in academia is Amy Tan, whose 1989 tearjerker The Joy Luck Club turned the sub-genre into a mass-market success.

Now See’s critically acclaimed 2009 novel, Shanghai Girls, is seen by some as a seminal work. The prequel to Dreams Of Joy and set during the Sino-Japanese conflict of the 1940s, Shanghai Girls was also set last year as a text for a post-graduate class in Chinese-American literature at the National University of Singapore.

The university’s literature professor, Walter Lim, 52, is also including See in a book on the history of Chinese-American writing.

“She is part of the community of Chinese- American writers who are fashioning themselves into communicators and purveyors of history,” says Dr Lim, who has taught Chinese-American literature for more than two decades.

The author herself puts it this way: “I’ve always been interested in stories that are lost or have been covered up. It’s not always horrifying, like the Great Leap Forward, just something that people would be interested in.” – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network

Irrational fear abounds, jetting the Malay psyche!

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Irrational fear abounds

MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

Prejudice and discrimination, both rooted in fear of the unknown, can always be dispelled with better knowledge, at least in those willing to learn.

TEN years ago the world turned a decidedly nastier place for Muslims. Although Islamo­phobia already existed before Sept 11, the events that day ratcheted it up several notches. Suddenly Muslims in the United States and all over the world found themselves under intense scrutiny, much of it hostile.

Stereotypes abounded. Although Islam is a religion of peace, all Muslims were branded terrorists, undemocratic, violent, oppressors of women.

The only images seen in the media were of angry bearded men wielding weapons and shouting threats to the West. Only Muslim women covered head to toe in dour black, were seen. It did not help that some Muslims themselves provided fodder for these images.

Tales of aggression against Mus­lims abounded. Headscarves were pulled off, insults hurled and, at airports, anyone with the slightest tinge of an Arabic name was pulled out for special inspection. Some people suffered even more violence, resulting in injury and even death.

New perspective: One of the biggest boosts to the image of Islam and Muslims has been the Arab Spring where young Muslims, including women, were seen at the forefront of the revolution. – Reuters 

Sometimes entirely wrong people became victims of the prejudice. A Sikh man got shot because he wore a turban, a bunch of Orthodox Jewish rabbis were pulled off a plane because they were praying in a language other passengers didn’t understand.

Fear ruled and with it came prejudice and discrimination, much of it fuelled by the media. Most of it stemmed from ignorance about the world of Islam, which is not only large but also diverse.



A Muslim in the Middle East is culturally different from a Muslim in Asia, but that was not appreciated in much of the West. Indeed Middle Eastern Muslims comprise only 15% of the entire Muslim world. Further­more there are many Western Muslims who look and act no different from their fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq only angered Muslims, who then reacted in ways that ingrained the stereotypes about them.

The early post-Sept 11 Islamo­phobic madness only lessened when much better information and knowledge about Islam and Muslims became available. This took two forms.

One, many Muslims took it upon themselves to educate non-Muslims about Islam, and in particular reached out to other faith communities to talk about their commonalities, rather than differences.

And two, thousands of students flocked to universities to learn more about Islam. Both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars of Islam did much to teach students about the real religion, rather than the one perpetuated by the media.

Ten years later, although it cannot be said that Islamophobia has disappeared, Western perspectives on Islam have become more measured and based on better knowledge. One of the biggest boosts to the image of Islam and Muslims has been the Arab Spring.

Suddenly the images of Muslims were young, modern, and protesting not about the West but about their own corrupt leaders. Although they did not explicitly talk about religion, in 2011 the Middle East became associated with the yearning for freedom and democracy, one not too different from what developed countries enjoyed.

Women were seen at the forefront of the revolution, both head-scarved and not, and changed the image of the oppressed Muslim woman.

It just goes to show that prejudice and discrimination, both rooted in fear of the unknown, can always be dispelled with better knowledge, at least in those willing to learn. There are of course many who simply refuse to open their hearts and minds to such enlightenment, but progress has been made in incremental steps.

It is also clear that very often those who steadfastly refuse to eliminate their prejudices do so because they think it is politically profitable to them. The loudest Islamophobes always seem to be politicians trying to win the populist vote. And the only way they maintain those votes is by keeping people ignorant. Hence, their refusal to engage at all with Muslims.

Every phobia about groups of people who are different from us works in the same way. They rely on stereotypes and on the fear that allowing these minority people the same basic rights as others would mean that they would demand more.

Thus, although no Muslim ever asked for it, some people in the US insist that there are plans to impose syariah law there. The media stokes the hysteria and stigmatisation. Unjust accusations and calls for depriving them of citizenship becomes the norm.

Although those baying for blood are small in number, they still make innocent people suffer. People who have never harmed anyone else suffer distrust and hostility from their former neighbours. Violence against them is justified, sometimes with religious backing. The entire atmosphere is poisoned by hate.

This past week, where some people seem to be proudly picking on the powerless, has reminded me of that Islamophobic hysteria. I fear for our country and where we are heading.

For sure public advocacy is here to stay, jetting the Malay psyche!

Nik Nazmi Nik AhmadTweet

CERITALAH By KARIM RASLAN newsdesk@thestar.com.my

Where in the past we would have dealt with controversial matters surreptitiously, nowadays such delicacy and tact are considered old-fashioned if not deceitful.

TO most onlookers, it would appear as if Malaysian public life had been hijacked by extremists – with Perkasa fronting ethnic nationalists and PAS’ ulama leading the religious fundamentalists.

Indeed, the notion of ‘Malay-ness’ is increasingly being determined by these two forces alone – leaving the “middle-ground” empty and forgotten.

At the same time, there’s also been a noticeable spike in identity politics as more and more people seek to define themselves according to race, religion or sexual preference – witness the Seksualiti Merdeka festival.

The once-hesitant ways in which Asians regarded hot-button social issues has been replaced in some parts by a more open, Western assertiveness.

When these two very different forces collide, the net result can be combustible. Moreover, it’s hard to see how these controversies can be resolved given the starkly opposing world-views in operation.

One thing’s for sure: we can’t turn the clock back. Public advocacy is here to stay. Where in the past we would have dealt with such matters surreptitiously, nowadays such delicacy and tact are considered old-fashioned if not deceitful – the hyper-transparent Wikileaks culture cuts all ways.

This also applies to hard-charging NGOs like PAGE who have been in the vanguard of the pro-PPSMI camp.



Looking back on the past, I cannot help but feel however that our previous willingness to live with internal contradictions and differences was also a hallmark of the “Malaysian Consensus” – basically an unwritten understanding to tolerate our country’s myriad complexities.

In essence, your private life and intellectual beliefs were your own business as long as you ‘towed the line’.
This epitomised the “middle-ground” of national politics. It wasn’t necessarily honest or straightforward, but it did steer us away from potentially destructive confrontations.

However, there are some figures who are trying to champion the “middle-ground” even though the Malaysian Consensus has to a large extent been lost.

These leaders are very important, since they act as a balancing force, bridging, negotiating and then resolving tensions between the various pressure groups.

At their best, they act as a kind of social and moral anchorage for the Malay community.

They’re definitely proud of being Malay and Muslim. On the other hand, they aren’t alarmist or defeatist like Perkasa. They refuse to exclude anyone due to race or religion and civil liberties matter to them. They also understand that politics is about discussion, debate and compromise.

Some are in PKR (Rafizi Ramli and Nurul Izzah Anwar), while others remain in Umno (Deputy Minister for Higher Eduction Saifuddin Abdullah). It could be argued that former minister turned maverick Datuk Shahrir Samad is their standard-bearer.

By certain measures MPs Khairy Jamaluddin and Nur Jazlan Mohamad also belong to this amorphous group.

They’re complemented by civil society stalwarts like the passionate activists in PAGE and the IDEAS Malaysia think-tank.

PKR state assemblyman for Seri Setia, Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, is this group’s most prolific and impressive writer.

Just 28-years-old, he has published his second book Coming of Age: A Decade of Essays 2001-2011. I reviewed Nik Nazmi’s first offering Moving Forward: Malays for the 21st Century in 2009 and was eager to read his second.

Coming of Age is a collection of Nik Nazmi’s writings from his student days to his unexpected win in the 2008 general elections and his on-going career as a legislator. It covers an eclectic range of topics from Islam to football.

Thankfully, Nik Nazmi’s journey has not been at the cost of his belief in the transformative power of politics. From his writings and actions, he is able to straddle both Malay- and non-Malay milieus.

Indeed – and he freely admits it – Nik Nazmi is a product of the NEP’s success in creating a viable Malay middle-class. These are confident, public service-oriented young Malays who aren’t bound by the legacies of the past.

Born of the rakyat, they have the credibility to speak with the masses.

Malaysia needs these leaders to succeed. We need them to moderate and modulate the political and moral absolutes that Perkasa and the Islamists are trying to ingrain into the Malay psyche.

As Nik Nazmi writes: “At a time when people are talking about globalisation, communalism seems to be an outdated ‘ism’. Being open-minded about the realities of the world does not mean that we should forget our roots. We should all appreciate differences in heritage. We should not look at our respective cultures as a barrier, but an opportunity to learn from one another.”

Of course, there are differences amongst this new “Malay middle-ground”, such as over PPSMI — but that is to be expected.

What is more important is for them to continue to take a clear, principled and moderate stand on the great questions of the time, and show the world that not all Malay voices are reactionary or fearful.

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Jetting into the Malay psyche!