Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: The Movie

The trailer for the film version of Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is out. The movie is scheduled for release this summer. It looks like it could be a nice break from the standard summer action movie fare.  What do you think? The Playlist has an interview with director Wayne Wang,

But what also attracted Wang to the film was the opportunity to tell a part of Chinese history about women that has never really been seen on screens before. “There’s so much about what women have gone through that has never been on the screen. Whether it’s in China, or here. I just felt very strongly this story has to be told,” the director explained. “Things such as feet-binding, things such as this really contractual, very emotional marriage between women called laotong, and things such as the nu shu which is a women’s language they wrote to each other that they only understood. All these things are [topics] I wanted to talk about. And no one has really done this kind of story.”

Check out our previous post on the book here.

Round-Up: Familiar Authors in Unfamiliar Places

In our latest round-up, we find many of our authors stretching their wings in new genres and finding new audiences:

• Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is to be a movie directed by Wayne Wang.

• Film critic Roger Ebert is a fan of W.G. Sebald and shares some video tributes on his blog. Check out the one from the architecture students for an Austerlitz flashback.

• John Conroy (Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People) has converted his investigation of allegations of the use of torture by Chicago police officers into a play.  He described it for the NYT, “I wanted to indict the whole city of Chicago.”

• Meanwhile, Lone Star Opera (Fort Worth) has made Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls into an opera.

• Louise Erdrich (Tracks) will participate in the PBS series Faces of America which explores the genealogical histories of a dozen prominent Americans.

• Helene Cooper (The House at Sugar Beach) takes time off from the White House beat to report on surfing in Liberia.
  

• Will Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) pen a graphic novel?

• Ann Cummins (Yellowcake) reviews books for the Arizona NPR affiliate and she's got some interesting regional picks!

• Walter Mosley (Little Scarlet) and Roberto Bolaño (Amulet) show up on LA Laker coach Phil Jackson's gift list to players.

• At the New Yorker, you can hear Junot Diaz read and discuss Edwidge Danticat's story "Water Child" and Danticat discuss Diaz' "The Dating Game."
  

• The photographer Pieter Hugo has published a collection of photographs, Nollywood, about the Nigerian film industry.  Chris Abani (Graceland) and Zina Saro-Wiwa, daughter of Ken Saro-Wiwa supply the text.  Preview this striking collection here.
  

• Orhan Pamuk (Snow) explains how his latest book, The Museum of Innocence, lead him to curate an actual museum and the NYT provides a slideshow of some of its holdings.  Want more Pamuk? How about a stroll with him through downtown LA?: "I like it when there is history, when there is decay. I'm very much impressed that this city has a decaying face. I identify it with my own." And then compare that to Istanbul.  Not juicy enough?  How about this literary match: ‘No secret, Kiran’s my girlfriend’. 

• Finally, remember our exploration of afropop legend Fela Kuti when we discussed Uzondinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation?  Kevin Mambo, star of the Broadway musical "Fela!" and Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's Executive Director discuss the musician's commitment to human rights (and Obama's Nobel speech) on WNYC. More from NPR here.

Rights Readers Round-up

Another of our periodic round-ups of what's happening with Rights Readers authors:

For a while there I thought the Wiwa v. Shell trial had been eclipsed by the Sotomayor nomination and Prop 8 ruling. But no, it was just delayed again. In the meantime here is Ken Wiwa's statement about the case from the Guardian,

I am not interested in retributive justice but a justice that is creative, a justice that enables all stakeholders in this affair to account for and learn lessons from the past so that we can all move forward within a constructive and sustainable framework

Breaking: Settlement Reached in Human Rights Cases Against Royal Dutch. Ken Wiwa reacts: Some release from the torments of the past

Paul Farmer, the subject of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains is under consideration for head of USAID.

Sister Helen tweets!

• Things are changing with death penalty in the US. Even in TX & LA juries aren’t handing down death sentences much any more. #
• In LA, nary a death sentence for 12 years! In the buckle of the death penalty belt, Harris County, TX, no d.p. from juries in a whole year. #

If you're not a twitterer, you might find want to follow the author of Dead Man Walking at her blog.

Walter Mosley (Little Scarlet) explains why he needed to create a new character to reflect the age of Obama at Slate V.

Martha Minow didn't make the Supreme Court cut, but she was on the frontlines promoting her Yale law school classmate.

Finally, Lisa See, promoting her new book Shanghai Girls, on her family's history in Chinatown and Pasadena,

After the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, my family's store and many other buildings along Spring Street were condemned. What had once been China City was officially wiped off the map. My family moved the F. Suie One Co. to Pasadena, where it's celebrating its 112th year in business.

Our January Author: Lisa See

Lisa See, the author of this month's book, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, has her own website, LisaSee.com (be sure to check out the Events section for an up-coming San Marino event!). Bloomsbury.com offers an article by See about her interest in nushu and an audio interview with the author is available here. Another interview with odd bits can be found at WaterBridge,

Bob Dylan has been a huge influence on my writing. He knows how to tell a whole story in just a few minutes and he has a wonderful way with words. Of course, the guy can’t sing, but you can’t have everything.

OK, not really seeing the Dylan connection in Snow Flower, heh, but not knocking the insight-- and looking ahead to her next book check out this interview at the The Elegant Variation,

The new novel’s tentatively called Shanghai Girls. It starts in 1937 with two sisters in Shanghai. They come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages. (We often read about arranged marriages in other countries, but a lot of people don’t know that we had and still have them here in the U.S.) They live in a place called China City, which was built from the leftover sets from the filming of “The Good Earth.” So in some ways Shanghai Girls will be an exploration of what it means to be Chinese or American, and what is real and what is just façade. I’ll also be looking at the Confession Program, which took place in the 1950s, when the U.S. government targeted Chinese to try to get them to confess that they were here illegally and at the same time rat out their friends, family members, and neighbors as being Communists.

I wasn't much interested in the discussion of footbinding in the book, but NPR and the BBC both have good backgrounders. I was more obsessed with the discussion of nushu. World of Nushu has a wealth of information, including pictures from Jian Yong Prefecture. Omniglot and Ancient Scripts have some nice side by side comparisons with Chinese and this article may be a bit academic for some, but it answered some of my questions about how nushu functioned in women's society.

For January: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

We have selected Lisa See's Snow Flower and Secret Fan for our January meeting,

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.