Lisa See Comes to Dutton's With Her New Book, The Interior

Sasha Stone

Mirror staff writer

   You'd never guess author Lisa See was one eighth Chinese,with her red hair and lightly freckled face; yet her heritage consistently informs her writing. The Interior, See's latest suspense thriller is no exception. 
   In its first week of release, TheInterior debuted at number six on the LA Times Bestseller List. Seeremains baffled by this, "I just did a signing at Vroman's," she said."And that was it." Fans will have a chance to meet the author who will read from and sign copies of The Interior at Dutton's this Wednesdaynight.
   The Interior, the follow-up to See's last book, the wildly popular The Flower Net, catches up with Liu Hulan, a Chinese cop. Hulan is one of the reasons readers are captivated by these suspense novels. Described by the New York Times Book Review as "a provocative mix of vulnerability, bitterness and hardheaded practicality," Hulan stands out among female protagonists, shattering stereotypes about Chinese women being submissive, quiet followers. 
   See brings the world of peasant villages and sweatshops alive as the novel's central mystery and the ongoing romance between Hulan and love interest, American attorney David Stark, unfold within it. Thebook also examines the different manifestations of love -- between mother and daughter, father and son, men and women. The reader of The Interior becomes as involved in the machinations, loves, triumphs and treacheries of the characters as with the fate of this complex, wonderful and sometimes terrible nation and its people, who are caught in the inexorable wheel of progress. 
  Unlike The Flower Net, which took Hulan and Stark through crowded, industrialized thoroughfares of Beijing, TheInterior draws them into the alternately bucolic and violently abusive interior landscape of the vast nation of China, where peasants light their homes with candles and work for slave wages in American toy factories.
   American-owned businesses continue to set up shop in China, the more remote the better, where they are able to ignore domestic and international labor, safety, and environmental laws. "Nearly everything we use, wear, buy for our children was made in China by workers making $24 a month, "That's for six and half days a week and 12 hour shifts," See says. "And that bothers me."
   Growing up in a Chinese-American home (her father is one-quarter), See noticed things about her relatives she didn't understand,"They saved everything, even bent nails." It wasn't until she traveled to China this past summer, to do research for The Interior, that she was able to connect those memories to something: her heritage as Chinese peasant stock.
   See saw their ways echoed in the people she came to know as her Chinese relatives when she journeyed to the interior of the country to research her follow-up novel. "They were the poorest of the poor," she remembers. Like her own grandmother, they too saved everything, but they did it out of necessity. 
   See has written extensively of her Chinese family's move to America in "On Gold Mountain," a national bestseller and a New YorkTimes Notable Book. It is the inspiration for an exhibition at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, which will run from August 2000 toJanuary 2001. See is also writing a libretto based on the book for the Los Angeles Opera, which will premiere as a community opera in May 2000.
   It seemed a natural progression that, when See began writing thrillers, she would choose to set them in modern China. "One out of every four people on the planet are Chinese and one out of every six is a Chinese peasant," says See. "Yet most Americans know nothing about them." Pearl Buck was the last known author to delve into the deepend of China and her people. Lisa See is bringing it all back home.
   See will sign copies of The Interior at Dutton's Brentwood Books at 7 p.m., to reserve a copy, call (310) 476-6263.