Lisa See heads to historical source for ‘China Dolls’

Details are key in historical novels: The right details set the scene, develop the characters and transport the reader to another time.

And sometimes an author ends up spending 40 hours researching women’s underwear to get those details right.

Author Lisa See knows firsthand how important details are, which is why she spent those 40 hours – and many, many more – on research for her latest book, “China Dolls” (Random House, 376 pages, $16 paper).

The novel follows the lives of three Asian-American nightclub performers between 1938 and 1948. Naive Grace was born in America to Chinese parents and left her Ohio hometown to escape an abusive father and to perform on a larger stage. Reserved Helen comes from a traditional Chinese family that has made a comfortable, if restricted, new life in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Outlandish Ruby is from Hawaii, of Japanese parentage but “passing” with a Chinese stage name. The three women form a lasting bond working as dancers in the Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco, then survive the ups and downs of World War II, life on the so-called “Chop Suey Circuit,” and professional and personal rivalries.

The author’s key research for this book came not from books and documents but from performers themselves. In a recent telephone interview, See talked about her sources of information for this book. She spoke with a lot of Asian-American performers and children of performers (excerpts of See’s interview with actress Jodi Long and her mother, performer Trudie Kim, are included in the paperback version of “China Dolls”), as well as people connected with the industry.

Among the people she interviewed were Dorothy Toy, known as the “Chinese Ginger Rogers,” and another famous dancer, Mai Tai Sing. She spoke with the daughter of the owner of the real Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco, who also gave her a transcript of an interview her late father had given years before, to get a sense of what the club was like in its heyday.

Additionally, See discovered that the Museum of Chinese in America had a trove of information about the China Doll nightclub in New York: oral histories and interviews with more than a dozen performers, costumes, scrapbooks, and so on.

So how did See end up spending all those hours on lingerie? Costumes. Early in the book, Grace is changing into her homemade audition costume, and See was curious about what she would have had on underneath. See said she found that between 1938 and 1948 there were “really dramatic changes” in what women wore in general, from fashion coming out of the Depression to the shortages during WWII that led to repurposing men’s suits for women’s wear to a brief period of tropical and Cuban influence to the resurgence of French and Italian fashions a few years after the war – all of which makes it into the book one way or another.

Many of the performers See interviewed spoke about their costumes. Trudie Kim sewed every sequin on by hand, as pre-sequined fabric was not available. Mai Tai Sing said her favorite costume was made from “15 yards of monkey fur.” Detail like that is difficult to use, See said, because real life really is stranger than fiction. But she couldn’t have made something like that up, and the detail sneaks into the book as one of Grace’s outfits.

Research isn’t everything, though, and as richly detailed as “China Dolls” is, it’s also a compelling story of showmanship, hardship and, at the heart of it all, friendship.

This story was originally published March 22, 2015 at 10:07 AM with the headline "Lisa See heads to historical source for ‘China Dolls’."