My past lives include early childhood in India; middle childhood, adolescence, and anorexia in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City; three years of teenage modeling through the Wihelmina agency; a major in painting at Yale University followed by turns as a waitress in New York and a flight attendant with United Airlines. Between flights I wrote my first book, Solitaire, a chronicle of my passage through anorexia, which was published in 1979, when I was twenty-five.

That same year I made a family journey to China, my father's birthplace, and on the Great Wall I met my future husband. Within three months I'd moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles to be with him. Over the next ten years I worked as editor on two business journals and as an associate producer for NBC Today's medical segments, co-authored seven books on medical and psychological topics, raised two sons, and waited for the inspiration that would propel me to write my first novel.

Inspiration arrived in the form of the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing in 1989. My feelings of identification with the students in the square that spring forced me to examine my attitudes as a woman of mixed race. Though my first novel Face published by Warner in 1984, describes a wholly fictional family, it reflects this process of examination. It also prompted me to question my family more closely about my father's childhood in China and about the marriage between my American grandmother and Chinese grandfather. The result of that inquiry was Cloud Mountain published by Warner in 1998.

Books by Aimee E. Liu

Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu