Daughters of the Sun and Moon
Daughters of the Sun and Moon
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Lisa See on Daughters of the Sun and Moon
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A family origin story hiding in plain sightThe massacre that became the novel’s engine first appeared in See’s writing more than thirty years before the book existed. She had already published her 1995 family memoir, ‘On Gold Mountain,’ when the thread between that violence and her own bloodline became impossible to set down.
My great-grandparents — a mixed-race couple when it was against the law for Chinese and whites to marry in California — moved to Los Angeles in 1897, believing, correctly, that the city would be safer for them and their children. So, in many ways, the Night of Horrors is part of my family’s origin story.
What locked the project in place was a single, specific number. In Los Angeles in 1870, the Chinese population was already a fraction of the city’s total residents. Inside that fraction, women were nearly invisible. The arithmetic of that absence refused to leave her alone.
There were 5,000 people in Los Angeles back then. One hundred and ninety of them were Chinese. Of those, only thirty-four were Chinese women. I can’t stop thinking about what their lives must have been like in what was considered to be the wildest of the Wild West towns.
The research this book demanded could not be contained inside a single project timeline. When a reader on Goodreads asked how long the work had taken, she answered in a way that collapsed the distance between the memoir, the family history, and the novel into one continuous act of attention.
So how long did it take to do the research? Two years, thirty years, or maybe a lifetime...
The ‘two years’ is the archival sprint before she wrote. The ‘lifetime’ is the Chinatown childhood, the Chinese-American family, and the family memoir that lodged the Night of Horrors in her mind in the first place.
How she wrote it
Handwritten court files and a little white poodleThe archive that made the book possible survived only because other records had been deliberately destroyed. After the massacre of October 24, 1871, city officials worked to erase the paper trail. What remained ended up at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, where See spent long days working through nineteenth-century handwriting.
But nothing was more important to me than looking at the legal files from 1870-1871 that are held at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. Although some of the initial massacre records ‘disappeared’ and many of the court documents were destroyed, the Huntington has preserved what has survived. All of this was written by hand in the 19th century. By the end of the day, I felt like a cartoon character with my eyeballs hanging down to my feet, but this was amazing material.
The three main characters each trace back to real people, and the ratio of real women to fictional women she had to work with was uneven from the start. She described the arithmetic of that problem in a video interview.
Daughters of the Sun and Moon was inspired by actually four real women who I have turned into three characters. [paraphrased from audio]
The character Moon, who narrates from 1926 at age eighty-two, came almost entirely from a single newspaper line: the wife of the city’s most prominent Chinese man had survived the massacre with a small white poodle. See had almost nothing else. In a video interview, she described what she built from that one detail.
I just was fascinated by that little white poodle. How did a little white poodle get to Los Angeles in 1870? And I kind of built a whole character from just that. [paraphrased from audio]
Three characters drawn from four real women required three structurally different ways of telling the story. Petal narrates in first person and present tense. Dove appears in third person, because the historical record treated the real woman behind her as an object passed between courtrooms and custodians, and See wanted the narrative form to enact that erasure. Moon speaks from age eighty-two, decades after the events, a distance See chose for a precise reason: she needed a character who could ask readers to trust an unfamiliar version of Los Angeles. In a video interview, she explained what Moon can do that the other narrators cannot.
Moon can say, in the very first time you see her... ‘Listen, this isn’t like it was.’ [paraphrased from audio]
That retrospective voice does practical work. Without it, the Los Angeles of 1870 — a dirt-road settlement of 5,000 people, routinely more violent than any other Western town — might read as a novelist’s invention rather than a documented place.
Her daily practice during the writing was strict and unvarying. No flexible word-count targets, no finishing early. The discipline she described to the Godmothers interviewer is what turned years of archival material into a finished draft.
When I’m writing, I write a thousand words a day. I will not leave until I get the thousand.
What she wants us to sit with
Whether we repeat what we eraseLong before she finished the novel, See had a corrected portrait of Los Angeles she wanted to press into readers’ hands. She is a fifth-generation Angeleno, and the distance between the city’s founding violence and its promotional mythology is something she has spoken about with real urgency. She made the case plainly to an Alta Online interviewer.
We don’t learn this, but Los Angeles was considered to be the wildest of all the Wild West towns. More murders, more rapes, more assaults, more lynchings — we were one of the most violent, and L.A. was just a little dirt blob.
She did not begin the book with its political moment in view. She started writing three years before publication, with no way to anticipate the rise in anti-Asian violence after COVID, renewed legal pressure on birthright citizenship, or the immigration enforcement climate her readers would be living inside when the book arrived. She described the collision of timing in a video interview.
I started the book three years ago. I didn’t know what was going to be happening in the world when it came out. [paraphrased from audio]
The full list of things she hopes readers carry away is long, but the final question she appended to the Better Reading Australia Q&A is the one that stays. It brings the friendship, the history, and the massacre into a single frame.
I hope they’ll come away with a renewed appreciation for friendship — how we make friends, how they sometimes disappoint us, what they bring to our lives, and what we get from these deep-heart relationships. I hope readers consider the history of Los Angeles in its early days and how those roots can be felt locally, nationally, and even internationally today. And last, but hardly least, that readers will think about what was happening to the Chinese in America in the 19th century and more specifically during the Night of Horrors in Los Angeles and how those events relate to what many immigrants are experiencing around the world today. Can we learn from our mistakes or are we doomed to repeat them?
That last question is not rhetorical decoration. See sits on the board of the 1871 Chinese Massacre Foundation, and the women at the center of her novel — bound-footed, without legal standing, considered historically unremarkable — are her evidence that the question has always had an answer, even when the people living it could not see one.
The women the book follows were not famous. None of them appear in the history See was taught. Her argument for why they belong in a novel at all comes back to a claim she made in a video interview about ordinary people placed under conditions designed to destroy them.
even within people’s ordinariness, is the capacity for extraordinary bravery, persistence, and endurance. [paraphrased from audio]