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Showing posts with label Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The Roots of Success !


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

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

The world is run by Tiger Wives, Tiger Moms





The world is run by Tiger Wives

Wendi Deng is not alone in lashing out when her spouse is under fire.

Wendi Deng Murdoch, Cherie Blair and Melania Trump are formidable in defence of their husbands-The world is run by Tiger Wives
Wendi Deng Murdoch, Cherie Blair and Melania Trump are formidable in defence of their husbands Photo: REX FEATURES/GETTY,By Cristina Odone

The hearings were beginning to pall. What had started as the trial of the media’s biggest mogul was settling into the siesta of the patriarch: Rupert Murdoch seemed to be talking in his sleep, while James Murdoch fanned away the MPs’ annoying questions, lest they disturb Dad.

Viewers longing for drama felt short-changed. None of the lawmakers had laid a glove on the media mogul. And then – splat! – the (slapstick) comedian Jonathan May-Bowles threw a “pie” of shaving foam at Murdoch Senior and unleashed the Tiger Wife.

In an instant, Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s Chinese-American spouse, leapt to her feet and sprang past bystanders to pummel her husband’s assailant. MPs, Murdochs and media types could only gape, electrified as proceedings fast-forwarded from Perry Mason to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

By the time Rupert Murdoch’s bodyguard had reached his master, the 42-year-old Wendi had landed a sensational right-hook on her opponent.

She then gained her husband’s side, and gently cleaned his face of foam. Within minutes, Deng was the toast of Twitter: hailed as a “smack-down sister” in her native China, and as a heroine and stunning show-stopper everywhere else.

Those who know Wendi well (and they include Tony Blair, Mark Zuckerman and Bono) won’t have batted an eyelid at her jaw-dropping performance. Rupert Murdoch’s third wife has form.

A volleyball player from southern China doesn’t climb to the top (Murdoch’s personal fortune remains a healthy $340 million) without fierce determination. Other people on Wendi’s ascent have already experienced her fury.

The first victim was Joyce Cherry, a pleasant American who, together with husband Jake, befriended Wendi during their trip to China. Impressed by the teenager’s brilliance and thirst for self-improvement, Joyce and Jake sponsored Wendi’s application for a student visa to America. Alas, 19-year-old Wendi soon bewitched Jake, who left poor old Joyce to marry their young protégée.

Victim number two was Jake himself: his usefulness came to an end a few months later when Wendi, now armed with the right papers, won a place to study business at Yale University.



Days from graduation, Wendi had a job at the Murdoch-owned Star TV, where she quickly caught the Big Boss’s eye. Hence the third corpse in the trail to marry Murdoch: Rupert’s second wife, Anna.

Within 17 days of his divorce, Wendi wed Rupert. If the Wendi house conceals a few skeletons, it also offers glimpses of her protective instincts.

Conscious of the 38-year gap between them, Wendi has placed Rupert on a tough regime of 6am weightlifting, washed down by a fruit and soy protein cocktail. She wags her finger at his workaholic schedule and has hired a personal trainer to put him through his paces (even at the price of her husband turning up on front pages in baseball cap and tracksuit).

None of this marital nurturing distracts Wendi from pursuing her own agenda: she has just released a film, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, that aims to promote a more positive image of China.

She enjoys a glittering social life, attending film premieres and art gallery openings. And she remains her husband’s chief adviser on his business in China.

Yet Wendi the film producer, like Wendi the business consultant or Wendi the mother of Rupert’s young daughters Chloe and Grace, has failed to fire our imagination. But Wendi Deng, invincible Tiger Wife, has transformed Rupert Murdoch’s image around the globe – from dodderer in the dock to prized partner in his wife’s life.

In a culture that mourns marriage as a moribund institution, one spouse leaping passionately to the other’s defence fills us with admiration. Even the most hardened cynics couldn’t help thinking, as the warrior in a pink blazer bounced into the ring: “Wow, she really believes in this union!”

Wendi Deng’s slap didn’t just scotch rumours that hers was a sham marriage: a purely trophy wife would have winked at the assailant for giving the old man a heart-stopping scare. With a quick right hook, she jumped to the head of the queue of the defenders of matrimony. It is a short but colourful roll-call that stretches from Cherie Blair, to Anne Sinclair (aka Mme Strauss Khan), Melania Trump and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

From the moment she moved into No 10, Cherie Blair was under constant attack for her (supposed) greed, stinginess, and self-importance. She let the criticisms bounce off her like spring rain. But let anyone touch her Tony, and Mrs Blair roared. She hissed at the ungrateful electorate that did not deserve a paragon of virtue like her husband; she gnashed her teeth at the sleazy media that insinuated Tony was a disappointment.

Her manner resembled the termagant’s fury rather than the bride’s solicitude, but no one could doubt Cherie’s heartfelt loyalty. It won her few fans: among the cheats and cuckolds of Westminster, the sight of a prime minister’s wife defending her husband was unusual; it also reassured voters that despite new Labour’s destruction of cherished institutions from the House of Lords to foxhunting, marriage would remain intact.

Far more testing has been Anne Sinclair’s lot. When her charismatic husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested on rape charges in New York, the French TV journalist sprang to his defence: “I do not believe for a single second the accusations levelled against my husband.” She flew to stand by her man and stumped up the $1 million bail to move him from prison to his plush Manhattan apartment.

Such wifely devotion may yet save the former IMF chief’s political career: his wife’s total support, as much as the derailing of the case against him, may prove a great boost to DSK’s credibility as a presidential candidate.

Her counterpart in the French presidential contest, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, also wants to show the world that she looks out for her husband’s interests. The First Lady of France, pregnant but still displaying every sign of focus and competitiveness, has imposed a culture vulture’s menu on her philistine hubby: he is to watch films by Alfred Hitchcock, as well as Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky; and read the French classics, from Balzac to Hugo.

Driving this self-improvement, say insiders at the Elysée Palace, is Carla’s ambition: she wants her man to be re-elected, and fears his present lowbrow image won’t do.

Nor should we forget Melania Trump, fearlessly vocal in her millionaire husband’s defence: Donald Trump is “brilliant”, everyone is envious of his success, and America should be so lucky to have him as their Republican Party candidate.

But Mrs T also gives us a revealing insight into their marriage when she confides that she has two children: “I have a big boy, Donald, and a little boy, Barron. I take care of both very well.”

Tiger Wife often needs to play Tiger Mother, it would seem.

The Tiger Wives’ Club is small but perfectly informed: these women know that their husbands need their commitment and support. In her eagerness to make her man shine, the Tiger Wife will disarm any assailant. She knows that her spouse is less than he seems; and that she, in fact, is rather more. She’s plucky; he’s lucky.

Source: The Daily Telegraph