Muñecas chinas (China Dolls)

by Lisa See

Overview

Es 1938 en San Francisco: se prepara una feria mundial en Treasure Island, una guerra se está gestando en el extranjero, y la ciudad está llena de posibilidades. Grace, Helen, y Ruby, tres mujeres jóvenes de muy diferentes orígenes, se conocen por casualidad en el exclusivo club nocturno Ciudad Prohibida. Grace Lee, una niña china nacida en Estados Unidos, ha huido del Medio Oeste con nada más que dolor de corazón, el talento, y un par de zapatos de baile. Helen Fong vive con su familia en el barrio chino, donde sus padres insisten en que, según la tradición, se custodie su reputación como un pedazo de jade. Y Ruby Tom rompe los límites de la convención a cada paso con su actitud desafiante y su ambición.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788490702475
Publisher:	Ediciones B
Publication date:	08/31/2016
Edition description:	Spanish-language Edition
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 1.40(d)
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

At first glance, Lisa See would not seem to be a likely candidate for literary voice of Chinese-American women. With her flaming red hair and freckled complexion, she hardly adheres to any stereotypical conceptions of what an Asian-American woman should look like, however, her familial background has given her roots in Chinese culture that have fueled her eloquent, elegant, and exciting body of work.

See grew up in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles. Although she is only 1/8 Chinese, her upbringing provided her with a powerful connection to that fraction of herself. "I really grew up in this very traditional, old Chinese family," she revealed in an interview with Barnes & Noble.com. "It was very traditional, but also quite magical in a lot of ways, because I really was in a very different culture then how I looked."

See's Chinese background was not the only aspect of her family that affected the course her life has taken. She also comes from a long line of writers and novelists. Her somewhat morose relatives initially led her to believe that writing must be the result of suffering and pain, which turned her off from literary pursuits at first. Ironically, despite her strong family roots, See only decided to try her hand at writing as a means of embarking on a lifestyle without roots. "I knew three things," See said, "I never wanted to get married, I never wanted to have children, and I only wanted to live out of a suitcase. How am I gonna do it? And I was really thinking about it, and then one morning, I woke up, and it was truly like a light bulb went off—`Oh, I could be a writer!' Many, many years later, here I am, married, I have children, [and] I am a writer."

In the wake of this unexpected epiphany, Lisa See began work on her first book On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. This highly detailed family history charted the events that led her great-grandfather Fong See to become the godfather of her Chinatown neighborhood and the 100-year-old patriarch of her family. See interviewed close to 100 of her relatives while researching the book that both gave her a clearer portrait of how her racially mixed family developed and broke her into the publishing business.

See then went on to explore other aspects of both Chinese and American culture via fiction. She followed her debut with a series of popular political thrillers set in China and featuring American attorney David Stark. Her novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan abandons Stark and his pursuit of justice for the time being with a tale that reaches much further back into Chinese culture, and more specifically, the subordinate role women have traditionally played in that culture. This more personal novel scored See accolades from The Washington Post, The New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, and The School Library Journal, while also further solidifying her role as a significant Chinese-American writer. And See's Peony in Love (2007) is a jarring historical novel set against the backdrop of an early-17th-century Chinese opera

See's position in the Chinese-American community has also extended beyond her writing. She was honored by the Organization of Chinese American Women as National Woman of the Year in 2001 and is also responsible for designing a walking tour of her Chinatown home in L.A. Her devotion to that apparently-small, but actually-vast, 1/8 of her ethnicity proves that well-worn adage about never judging a book by looking at its cover.

Hometown:

Los Angeles, California

Date of Birth:

February 18, 1955

Place of Birth:

Paris, France

Education:

B.A., Loyola Marymount University, 1979

Website:

http://www.lisasee.com