December 2016
Photo © Hillery Stone.
A graduate of Stanford University and New York University’s Creative Writing Program, Lee has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo. She spent more than a decade in the publishing industry as an editor at Harper Collins Publishers and Lantern Books in Brooklyn, where she co-edited the anthology Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and the Sexual Politics of Meat. She has also worked as an English teacher in China, taught writing at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and served as a mentor with Girls Write Now.
Lee is the second-generation daughter of immigrants from China. She lives with her husband and son in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York City.
What are you reading? What's on your nightstand?
I just finished The Trespasser by Tana French, which was satisfying in the way only a long, complicated police procedural set in the British Isles can be. I love all of her Dublin Murder Squad books, but this one in particular kept me guessing until the end.
Where do you go to get inspired?
The newspaper. My most recent novel, The Art of Confidence, was based on an article I read four years ago about paintings forged by a Chinese immigrant living in Queens. It was definitely a case of truth being stranger than fiction.
What's something that surprised you recently (in a good way)?
For the first time, my toddler brought me the book he wanted me to read to him before bed—Blue Hat, Green Hat by Sandra Boynton. We’re big Sandra Boynton fans.
Where do you write?
At the kitchen table. Usually surrounded by unopened mail, pens that don’t work, random coins, and loose Cheerios.
What/who makes you laugh? Why?
John Oliver and Last Week Tonight. His coverage of the election almost made it bearable.
Favorite fictional character ever?
Charlotte the Spider in Charlotte’s Web. “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
What do you want readers to know about you and your books?
What are you working on?
I’m helping someone write a memoir about their struggle with mental illness.
"Rich and multilayered, Lee’s novel explores what it means to be a part of something, whether it’s a family or a culture. Told in Hua’s sparse, somber voice, the story grabs readers from the start and doesn’t let go until the final page. A truly memorable first outing."
—Booklist, ***Starred Review***
"An affecting exploration of the immigrant experience and the search for forgiveness, acceptance, and a sense of belonging."
—Booklist
"Lee delves into what propels people to do the right or wrong thing and centers the book’s unique perspective on the creation of a forged painting. . . . As the story unfolds from different viewpoints, the author moves back and forth in time, bringing depth and understanding to what motivates people in both their personal and professional lives."
—Publishers Weekly
"VERDICT This well-written mystery ponders the effects of one's decisions in the face of moral quandaries while depicting a lesser-known slice of the New York art world."
—Library Journal
"Revealed through viewpoints that shift between chapters, this is a sublime examination of what defines art, what gives art value, and the prices, far beyond the monetary, that we're willing to pay to view it, admire it, acquire it, and even let it go. Through fragile alliances, flawed relationships, and capricious loyalties, Lee's characters will lie, distort, betray, and ultimately accede to uneasy truths."
—Booklist
Across a Green Ocean by
Michael Tang and his sister, Emily, have both struggled to forge a sense of identity in their parents' adopted homeland. Emily, an immigration lawyer in New York City, baffles their mother, Ling, by refusing to have children. At twenty-six, Michael is unable to commit to a relationship or a career--or come out to his family. And now their father, after a lifetime of sacrifice, has passed away. When Michael finds a letter to his father from a long-ago friend, he impulsively travels to China in the hopes of learning more about a man he never really knew. In this rapidly modernizing country he begins to understand his father's decisions, including one that reverberates into the present day. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Ling and Emily question their own choices, trying to forge a path that bends toward new loves and fresh beginnings. Wendy Lee's powerfully honest novel captures the complexity of the immigrant experience, exploring one family's hidden history, unspoken hurts, and search for a place to call home. Along the whitewashed mud walls are large Chinese characters written in red, sometimes ending with an exclamation point. They look as if they are out of another time period, probably some kind of propaganda. Go back! Michael imagines them saying, in a private message just for him. This is a mistake! You won't find what you're looking for! What, or rather who, Michael is hoping to find at the end of his trip is a man named Liao Weishu. This is the name that is signed at the end of a letter that Michael discovered among his father's things after the funeral. Then his mother had come into the room, and he had put the letter in his pants pocket, where it stayed unopened for another nine months. Sometimes he would think about it, and be satisfied enough to simply know it was there. The postmark indicated it had been sent about a month before his father's death, from someplace in China that he had never heard of and didn't think he knew how to pronounce. Unfortunately, it was written in Chinese, except for one sentence toward the end of the letter--Everything has been forgiven.
The Art of Confidence by
"I suppose I did it because I wanted something to show for the thirty years--longer than I had lived in my homeland--that I had been here in America. Something that was properly appreciated, even if someone else got all the credit." Liu Qingwu doesn't set out to commit a crime. He only wants to sell a painting--something more substantial than the Impressionist knockoffs he flogs to tourists outside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the lucrative commission he receives from a Chelsea art dealer is more complicated than he initially realizes. Liu has been hired to create not an homage to Andrew Cantrell's modernist masterpiece, Elegy, but a forgery that will sell for millions. The painting will change the lives of everyone associated with it--Liu, a Chinese immigrant still reeling from his wife's recent departure; Caroline, a gallery owner intent on saving her aunt's legacy; Molly, her perceptive assistant; and Harold, a Taiwanese businessman with an ethical dilemma on his hands. Weaving together their stories with that of Cantrell and the inspiration for his masterpiece, Wendy Lee's intricate, multilayered novel explores the unique fascination of great art and the lengths to which some are driven to create it--and to possess it.
Happy Family by
When Hua Wu arrives in New York City, her life seems destined to resemble that of countless immigrants before her. She spends her hectic days in a restaurant in Chinatown, and her lonesome nights in a noisy, crowded tenement, yearning for those she left behind. But one day in a park in the West Village, Hua meets Jane Templeton and her daughter, Lily, a two-year-old adopted from China. Eager to expose Lily to the language and culture of her birth country, Jane hires Hua to be her nanny. Hua soon finds herself in a world far removed from the cramped streets of Chinatown or her grandmother’s home in Fuzhou, China. Jane, a museum curator of Asian art, and her husband, a theater critic, are cultured and successful. They pull Hua into their circle of family and friends until she is deeply attached to Lily and their way of life. But when cracks show in the family’s perfect fa#65533;ade, what will Hua do to protect the little girl who reminds her so much of her own past? A beautiful and revelatory novel,Happy Family is the promising debut of a perceptive and graceful writer.
