and the latest trends for ethnic literature; she also
conducted several interviews with famous novel-
ists such as Michael Chabon, Cynthia Kadohata,
and others. Her work as a journalist turned out to
be crucial to her writing career.
Between 1983 and 1988, with her mother and
her collaborator John Espey (under the joint
pseudonym of Monica Highland), Lisa See pub-
lished Lotus Land, 110 Shanghai Road and Greet-
ings from Southern California. It was in 1995
that See’s first full-length solo project, On Gold
Mountain: The One Hundred Year Odyssey of My
Chinese-American Family, was published to wide-
spread critical acclaim. It became a national best
seller and a New York Times Notable Book. This
comprehensive family portrait chronicles the life
of See’s Chinese-American family from the 1860s
to the present. It starts with Fong Dun, See’s great-
great-grandfather, leaving China to work on the
transcontinental railroad in California, and traces
the struggles of four generations of Chinese Amer-
icans founding businesses, dealing in art, antiques
and furniture, marrying Caucasians and looking
for social acceptance in frequently hostile Los An-
geles. The book is the result of exhaustive archival
research and five years of interviews with nearly
100 relatives. It mixes elements of personal remi-
niscence with the social history of the Chinese ex-
perience in the United States. U.S. journalists have
praised See’s research and her insight into both the
American and Chinese cultural backgrounds of her
family, while pointing out the apparent contradic-
tion between her long account of her Chinese past
and claim to a Chinese identity, on the one hand,
and her Caucasian appearance on the other.
In 1997 See published Flower Net, her first mur-
der mystery featuring Chinese inspector Liu Hulan
and American attorney David Stark. Set in the
United States and China, the thriller begins with
the discovery of an American corpse in China and
a Chinese corpse in the United States. To solve the
mystery, the detectives have to trust their cultural
knowledge more than their forensic education.
Two other mysteries featuring the same characters
were released in 1999 and in 2003: The Interior and
Dragon Bones. Great commercial successes, these
novels sometimes manage to challenge some ste-
reotypical views held by Americans about China
and by Chinese about America. See lives in Los
Angeles with her husband, Richard Becker Kend-
all, an attorney, and their two sons.Bibliography
Liu, Xian. “Lisa Lenine See.” In Asian American Novel-
ists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed-
ited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 323–331. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
See, Lisa. “Lisa See.” Beatrice interview by Ron Hogan
(1996). Available online. URL: http://www.bea-
trice.com/interviews/lisasee/. Accessed October
16, 2006.
Manuela VastoloSeth, Vikram (1952– )
Born in Calcutta, India, to an upper-middle-class
family, Seth is among the foremost Indians writ-
ing in English today. More versatile, perhaps, than
his contemporaries, Amitav Ghosh and Salman
Rushdie, Seth’s creative oeuvre consists of a host
of well-received, critically acclaimed works of fic-
tion, carefully crafted collections of poetry, an
award-winning travelogue, a collection of short
stories from around the world for children, and a
libretto for the English National Opera that he was
specially commissioned to write. Widely traveled,
Seth has studied at Oxford, Stanford, and Nanjing
Universities, in the United Kingdom, the United
States, and China, respectively. He abandoned his
doctorate in Economics at Stanford, after the pub-
lication of The Golden Gate in 1982, to concentrate
his energies on being a creative writer.
In 1980 Seth published Mappings, a collection
of poetry that includes translations of poems in
Hindi, Chinese, and German. In 1983 came a trav-
elogue, From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang
and Tibet, which won the Thomas Cook Award for
the best travel book. It tells of his hitchhiking trip
through China to Lhasa in Tibet, and a subsequent
journey through Nepal. Written with an observant
eye for local color and the character eccentricities
of the various people he met, it describes a jour-
ney born out of serendipitous circumstances that264 Seth, Vikram