Well, a lot of my books talk about Chinese traditions or traditional literature and the reason why is because, as I said earlier, when I was growing up I spent a lot of time trying to pretend I wasn’t Asian. And I was really very uninterested in my culture.
It was only as I grew older I realized I felt like there was something I had lost and I felt like very sad about this. I realized when I was in art school I realized I knew more Italian history, I knew more Italian art then I did about my own parents’ culture. I didn’t know any Chinese. I didn’t know anything about their art or their culture.
So a lot of the books I do now are kind of like my way of trying to recapture a culture that I felt that I lost. I do a lot of research because it’s what interests me. I feel like there is things that I missed that I want to find, that’s why it’s a very, very influential thing in my work is trying to find the Asian culture that I feel is a part of me that I don’t know.
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon probably the greatest example of what I was saying trying to recapture the culture that I wanted to find. This book is very much based on Chinese folk tales and mythology. When I was younger, as I said, I was very, very uninterested in Chinese culture. And my mom was very disappointed that she could not get any of her children interested in it. But she did know that I loved to read and she did know that I loved almost all books. And so, she, one day decided to put about 6-12 Chinese fairy tale books on the bookshelf.
She didn’t say “Look at these books,” because she knew if she tried to push them on us we would reject it. So she just left it there very slyly. And of course, I was completely unable to resist the lure of a new book. And I said “Oh what are those?” And I picked them up and I started to read them. And they were, they were Chinese fairy tales and at first I was kind of disappointed with them because they were translated from Chinese to English. So the translations were very rough. And the illustrations were very, very plain compared to the books I was reading I was reading these beautifully illustrated books by like, by Arthur Rackham all of those beautiful illustrated fairy tale books. And these kind of like line drawings seemed really plain to me. I didn’t really think that these books made that much of an impression on me until many years later.
And when I started getting interested in my culture again and I had a great opportunity to travel to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. When I was there, all of sudden both stories I had read when I was younger came back to me. I was like this reminds of that story I read when I was child and I didn’t remember all of the details. I didn’t remember exactly even the exact storylines.
And so, it started to create a new narrative and the new details kind of came into play. That’s what became Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. It’s kind of like my own fairy tale mixed in with traditional fairy tales.
Am I Min Lee? Sometimes. In some of it. In some situations, I feel that I am because she was definitely on a search, Min Lee, in the book was definitely on a search to find happiness. During the time that I wrote this, I was definitely on a search to find happiness too.