Lord best-selling author of "Spring Moon: A Novel of China," "Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic" and the well-known children's book "In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson" serves on the Board of the Newseum, Freedom House and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1998, Lord was also awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Humans Rights by President Bill Clinton.
Invited to the College as a Montgomery Fellow by Montgomery Endowment Executive Director Richard Stamelman, Lord has visited several classes while on campus, including Zeiger's "Immigrant Women Writing in America," which perfectly corresponds with her own experiences, Lord said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Instead of a formal lecture, Lord's conversation with Zeiger will offer an opportunity for her to tell stories and share her experiences with students, faculty and local residents.
"I'll be hopefully just telling stories stories about my own life and stories about people I've met," she said. "But I was thinking about what kind of stories I would tell, and I thought to myself about how much of my life has been infused with luck stories [that] I've heard about people's luck and lucky things or unlucky things that happened to me."
As a self-proclaimed storyteller, Lord said she hopes that her stories will "entertain and edify" Dartmouth audiences.
"The things that I have to tell are really the events in my lifetime," Lord said. "Not because I'm so interesting but because I lived in interesting times and have had the opportunity of meeting people from so many worlds whether it's publishers in New York or dissidents in China or high school kids."
Lord was born in Shanghai and came to the United States with her family when she was eight years old, she said. "In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson" describes Lord's own experiences growing up in Brooklyn, illustrating an experience similar to her own immigration.
"I have myself in [my novels] because it's my knowledge of Chinese culture, Chinese traditions and Chinese cultural context but they're all made-up characters," Lord said. "Although, oddly enough, I've had more than a handful, much more than a handful, of readers write me and insist that I've written about their family."
The main character in "In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson" is Shirley Temple Wong, a name that Lord said is connected to her own name, as she was born the same year in which her namesake Bette Davis won the Academy Award for her role in "Jezebel" (1938).
"My parents decided, when we were coming to America, to give me an English name as well they named me Bette like Bette Davis," she said. "Now the other choice would have been after the movie, and I'm very glad they decided not to name me Jezebel."
In reference to her habits as a writer, Lord revealed that she is a "very slow writer," she said.
"Writing for me is really about rewriting and rewriting and rewriting," she said. "It took me six years to write Spring Moon.' In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson' took less because of its form. Once I decided to write it as a children's book, it was much easier to write. You have to find the point of view of your character."
She said that there are two questions she is most frequently asked about her writing process: when she writes and with what. Lord said that she avoids pen and pencil and works like a true night owl from midnight to 6 a.m.
"I cannot read my own writing, so I've always written on a typewriter of one kind or another," she said.
Lord said she is a member of a monthly book club, and this June will mark its 103rd meeting. This is not your average book club, however, as attendants include television actor Alan Alda of "MAS*H," children's book author Arlene Alda, biographer Hannah Pakula, journalist Robert MacNeil and journalist Calvin Trillin, she said. Trillin was previously in residence as a Montgomery Fellow in February 2011. The club is called "The Moveable Feast" because each person takes a turn to host, and the organization's only rule is that nobody is allowed to cook, she said.
"It always has to be take-out so we can concentrate on the book and not on the food," she said.
Like in her book club, Lord hopes to keep her "conversations" informal at this afternoon's event. She plans to focus particularly on telling the story of a nurse living in communist China after the cultural revolution. Lord said that the story may resonate with audiences in light of the recent conflict over Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, a legal activist who crusaded against forced abortions under China's one-child policy. The nurse in Lord's story, working in a maternity ward in the 1960s, is forced to kill a newborn baby because of the policy when a woman gives birth to twin boys, according to Lord. The nurse decides after this that she must leave China, believing she is "doing the work of the devil," Lord said.
Immigrating to New York, however, the nurse is separated from her son, with whom she is only reunited due to random circumstances 10 years later.
"That element of life, of luck, of happenstance, makes for wonderful stories of happiness and sorrow, both coexisting at the same time," Lord said. "And I think a lot of success and failure for students of [this generation] should not be regarded as a finish, but a beginning whether it is success or whether it is failure."
Lord is in residence at the College along with her husband Winston Lord, the former United States Ambassador to China, who delivered a lecture on Wednesday.
