'The Island of Sea Women' author Lisa See coming to Sonoma Valley library

Writer Lisa See was born to two young, starving students and spent her first six weeks sleeping in a dresser drawer in a cramped Parisian apartment.

“It sounds romantic, but the reality was probably horrible,” See said. “They had three other roommates ... and no money.”

As an adult, See has planted herself firmly on the other side of the Atlantic, in the City of Angels. A proud fifth generation Angeleno, the 64-year-old author inherited the storytelling gene from both sides of her family. Her late mother, university professor Carolyn See, wrote 10 books, including a couple of popular novels with her daughter in the early ’80s.

“I was looking through my mom’s papers at UCLA, and I found a letter from her father written to my mom when she was 20,” she said. “He said, ‘If you really want to be a writer, you have to write 1,000 words a day.’”

Now the author of 10 novels herself plus a 1995 family history, “On Gold Mountain,” See has stuck to the 1,000 words a day rule, a discipline that catapulted her from book critic to a National Book Award-winning author of women’s fiction, including “Snowflower and the Secret Fan” (2005) set in 19th-century China and her latest, “The Island of Sea Women” (2019) set on the Korean island of Jeju in the 20th century.

As part of the Sonoma County Library’s Distinguished Speaker Series, See will discuss “The Island of Sea Women” and her cultural roots at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Sonoma Valley Regional Library.

See’s curiosity about Asian culture and history was whetted by her paternal side, especially her larger-than-life Chinese-American great-grandfather - a godfather of sorts for Los Angeles’s Chinatown.

“He died when I was 2, so I didn’t know him,” See said. “But I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, going to work with them in Los Angeles. At the end of the day, they would gather in the antiques store and have a drink and chat and tell stories, and they loved to out-story the next person.”

“The Island of Sea Women” starts in the 1930s and hinges on the friendship between two women from different backgrounds. Mi-ja and Young-sook work in their village’s all-female diving collective (the Haenyeo, or “sea women,” who freedive for shellfish) and come of age in a community where women are the primary breadwinners, doing dangerous work in frigid seawater.

Over the course of several decades, the two friends experience horrors and losses beyond their control, from the Japanese occupation of Korea and World War II to the Jeju Uprising, a civil war that led to the massacre of innocents at Bukchon in 1949. As these forces unfurl, the women’s friendship frays to a breaking point. Ultimately, they find forgiveness.

“When I learned about the massacre and also that the island (of Jeju) is known internationally as the Island of Peace ... really at the heart of the book is forgiveness,” See said.

Here is an edited version of our interview with See, who spoke from her home in Los Angeles.

Q: This is the first time you’ve set a novel in South Korea. What drew you to this country?

A: It was really about these divers, a matrifocal culture focused on women, that they did this extraordinary thing, diving down 60 feet on a single breath for 2 or 3 minutes, and that they were older and the idea that they were the breadwinners, and the men were the ones who stayed home and did the cooking. I was interested in how they navigated all that.

This is something I had been thinking about writing for a long time. And about four years ago, UNESCO gave the divers a recognition ... because they are expecting this culture is going to disappear in about 15 years. I already knew the divers were in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and I felt like I couldn’t wait to interview them.

Q: Why are the Haenyeo disappearing on Jeju?

A: Around 1978, the New Village Movement was started by the then-president. He wanted to improve sanitation and move toward toilets and changed the way houses were built. One thing was that girls could go to public schools for the first time. So these women started saving up money to send their daughters to school for the first time, and those women went on to college and universities and became doctors and engineers and teachers. So they didn’t have to do this really hard, dangerous work. That’s the main thing that contributed to the decline.

Q: Book critics often praise your research. What did that look like for this book?

A: I try to do research in every way that you could think of. I went to the library at UCLA and found a dissertation that was written by a woman in the late 1960s who lived for two years in a Haenyeo village. I actually got quite a bit from that because it was so authentic.

All the biological aspects are fascinating, so I probably looked at 20 different scientific studies. I found that material so incredible. ... They had the greatest ability of any human group on earth to withstand cold. Was this an adaptation or genetic?

I always go to the places I write about, so when I was on Jeju, I talked to scientists at the marine institute there. I talked to a woman who was one of the first to study these women as a culture and also record all of their music. Then I interviewed the women themselves.

The majority of the time is spent on the research, the writing is the least amount of time, and then editing is the middle amount. It took about two years.

Q: Your mom must have been a big influence on your writing life. What did you inherit from her?

A: The first would be the goal of 1,000 words a day. I do think there is something about just sitting down and doing the work, When people who are aspiring writers start out, I tell them you just have to sit down and do it. You can’t wait for the muse to show up. She’s busy.

The other thing is that my mom was writing and getting published when there weren’t many women who were being published, especially out here in California. For the paperback (of “The Island of Sea Women”) that’s coming out, they have a Q & A, and one of the questions is, “How do (you) find new stories to write about women?”

To me, this really does connect to my mom. If you think about world literature, there are very few women who were writing. There’s Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and then you get to Virginia Woolf about 100 years ago. It’s really only in the last 75 years, and more like the last 30 to 50 years, that women have been published in a pretty broad way.

For all the history of literature, most women’s stories have been told by men. To me, that means that everything is fresh. There’s a bazillion stories about women we haven’t heard yet.

My mom was very aware of that, and she inspired a lot of writers and help them get published for the first time ... and I was one of them. Maybe I was the one she helped the most.

Q You write so much about women’s friendships. What fascinates you about them?

A What I’m interested in is that women will tell a friend something that we would not tell a husband or boyfriend or mother or child. It’s a very unique relationship and very unique type of intimacy. And whenever you have that kind of intimacy, you are vulnerable to being hurt and being betrayed. There are lots of things that have been written about female friendship, but I am interested in the dark, shadow side of mothers and daughters and sisters.

Q: How did the theme of forgiveness make its way into “The Island of the Sea Women?”

A: I didn’t realize it until the last book, but I’ve been circling around forgiveness in several of my books. With “Snowflower,” they don’t really have time to forgive each other. Lily has the last half of her life to atone for Snowflower, but she can’t be forgiven because Snowflower is dead. In “Shanghai Girls,” there are two sisters and a bad thing happens - that book has a sequel - and they eventually find forgiveness, but they only see each other again on the last page.

Forgiveness is very difficult. There are all kinds of ways that people sort of approach it. If you’re a country, you might forgive but never forget, but how does that work within your own family? I think it’s something I struggle with - that’s why I keep coming back to it.

You can reach Staff Writer Diane Peterson can be reached at 707-521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@dianepete56.