Revisiting Lisa See.
Last month’s Word By Word conversation was with the talented graphic artists Maia Kobabe and Trinidad Escobar who shared verbal descriptions of Maia’s lushly illustrated comics The Thief’s Tale, and her award-winning Tom O’Bedlam, and Trinidad’s biomythography, Crushed which explores the interior landscape of her experience as a magikal, transnational Filipino adoptee.
During our conversation, Trinidad shared how she needed to carry a dead baby’s first name for most of her life because adoption paperwork had already been approved with that name. I made reference at that time to the Chinese immigrant “paper sons” that Lisa See wrote about in her novel Shanghai Girls and talked about on a Word By Word show broadcast in June, 2009.
Listeners let host Gil Mansergh know they were unable to find a podcast of that show, so he takes care of that problem by doing this rebroadcast.
In that show, Lisa See shared stories of her Chinese ancestors, and introduced us to Shanghai Girls Pearl and May, sisters who escaped from the war-torn China on the 1930’s to Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay and on to Los Angeles where they got involved in the movie business.
Listeners will be glad to hear that in Lisa See’s novel Pearls of Joy they can read about Pearl’s 19-year-old daughter Joy, who makes the trip the other way—back to a China trapped in the disastrous consequences of Mao’s cultural revolution.
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