Bestselling Author Lisa See to speak at museum

Wednesday, March 10, 2010
10:30 a.m.

Free admission to all visitors

Lisa See, author of many critically-acclaimed international bestsellers, will visit Stockton on Wednesday, March 10, for a late morning reception and remarks at The Haggin Museum.

Her appearance at 10:30 a.m. is sponsored by the Marian Jacobs Literary Forum of the Stockton Arts Commission and hosted by the Museum and the Hilton Stockton. The public is invited without charge.

Light refreshments will be served in the Hull gallery prior to her 11 a.m. remarks in the Haggin room. Copies of her books will be available for purchase and signing, including the new and first paperback edition of her bestselling “Shanghai Girls.”

Arts Commissioner Bill Maxwell chairs the Literary Forum, which honors the Commission’s founder and charter chair, Marian Jacobs, who invited the award-winning author to Stockton.

See is perhaps best known for her novels “Peony in Love” and “Snow Flower.” For “Secret Fan,” she was only the second foreigner to visit remote areas of China; MGM Studios has acquired the motion picture rights.

“On Gold Mountain,” her first book in 1995, was a non-fictional account of her family’s journey from China to Los Angeles, where she now lives and where her great-grandfather became the “godfather of Chinatown.” She later wrote the libretto for the opera based on the book. In that, according to Maxwell, “she is not unlike Stockton-born author Maxine Hong Kingston, who also wrote the opera libretto for her first book, ‘The Woman Warrior’.”

See has written three bestselling mysteries, “The Interior,” “Dragon Bones” and “Flower Net,” which was nominated for an Edgar Award and drew critical comparisons to Upton Sinclair, Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Apart from writing, she designed a walking tour of the Los Angeles Chinatown (depicted in Roman Polanski’s film “Chinatown”) and wrote the guidebook to celebrate the opening of the MTA’s Chinatown metro station. See was born in Paris but raised in Los Angeles, where for the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage she curated an exhibition on the Chinese-American experience. It later traveled to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

She developed and curated the Family Discovery Gallery at the Autry Museum, an interactive space for children that focuses on her bi-racial and bi-cultural family as seen by her father as a 1930s-era schoolboy. She also curated the inaugural exhibition — a retrospective of artist Tyrus Wong — for the gala opening of the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles. See was honored as National Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women in 2001 and was the recipient of the Chinese American Museum’s History Makers Award in 2003.