
It gives me a little more freedom to tell a story."
#Lisa chop suey plus
I can take stories from a group of people and plus research, and put one character in that situation and then draw from different places. "Sometimes, fact is stranger than fiction, but it sometimes can also be more limiting," she says with a chuckle. "They had a lot of challenges, faced a lot of difficult situations and showed extraordinary perseverance."ĭespite her reporting background and the inherent drama in the real-life stories, she wasn't tempted to write non-fiction. They had to settle for being the Chinese Fred Astaire and the Chinese Ginger Rogers. And they never got to be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. "They were doing what they dreamed of doing, but they faced a lot of discrimination. "These people had a lot of fun," says See, 59.

"What I've found is the older you get, it becomes kind of a payback moment: 'I'm gonna tell.' The other thing is 'I've outlived everybody else, so who can do anything to me now?' And then there's, 'I'm never gonna see her again, so why not tell?' "Īs with a lot of immigrant stories, the stories were both joyful and sad.

She laughs as she discusses her theories on the subject. Many of the people she interviewed were surprisingly open about their memories, some of which were quite bittersweet.

"(That's) why I think she's able to evoke such a cinematic feeling in the novel." "Lisa is a devoted researcher and fully immerses herself into the periods she writes about," Cesare says. The book boasts, a rich, vivid atmosphere, which Kara Cesare, See's editor, attributes to painstaking research.
