It’s safe to say that while I always knew I’d write a novel, I never dreamed I would write The Painter from Shanghai.

Growing up, reading obsessively from Woolf and Wolfe, H. James and James J., I’d always imagined patterning my own first book along the same lines. I saw it—quite modestly—as another seminal, semi-biographical coming-of-age story; something that would draw from my own vivid if somewhat mundane experiences as a glum teen in Wellesley, MA, magically morphing them into a luminous work of great wisdom and beauty. If anyone had told me that my debut work would draw from not my own life, but one infinitely more distant; one not only largely undocumented (at least, not in words) but also set in a land across the globe, a half-century before my birth, amid struggles and turmoils and revolutions of art and culture and government that would take me years of scholarship to even start to understand—well, I would have said one thing: “You’re crazy.”

In fact, this is precisely what I did say when the idea of writing about Pan Yuliang was first suggested to me, at the Guggeheim Museum, nearly ten years ago.

My husband Michael and I were viewing a show of modern Chinese art. When I saw my first Pan Yuliang painting it intrigued me: lush and Cezanne-esque, it pictured (like, I’d learn, so many of Pan Yuliang’s pictures) the artist as a young woman, sad and wistful against her Parisian windowscene. When I read the accompanying biography (prostitute-turned-concubine-turned-pioneering-modern-painter; really?!) my jaw dropped.

“Look,” I exclaimed to Michael. “Look at this AMAZING woman.”

My husband—a filmmaker with a good eye for plot and image—took in Pan’s striking image, her stunning lifeline and my rapt, breathless expression. Then he turned to me.

"This,” he announced, “is your first novel."

“You’re crazy,” I told him.

And at the time, I really thought that he was. It was true that I had a Master’s in international relations; that I’d lived in Japan and China. But I knew nothing about Asian art, or even about art in general. And I’d only started seriously writing fiction—albeit mostly semi-autobiographical, longish short stories that had little of the authorial pull I’d hoped for (which, in retrospect, is not surprising; there’s only so much literary depth to be plumbed from a despondent upbringing in an upper-middle-class suburb).

And yet what had seemed a startling proposal slowly took root. In following months I sought out pieces of Pan’s life and work like the parts to some enormous puzzle—if one I could only dream of completing. In some ways, the more I learned the more daunted I became—who was I, who could barely manage to master her own, dull story on paper, to take on that of a wounded, talented, unimaginably brave Chinese painter? Plus, there was so little to go on—even in Chinese; there was, I learned, little concretely known of Pan. Her only legacy was her art; some 4000 odd paintings and sculptures that were—sadly for me—mostly locked away in storage, in China. Even the dates on her Paris gravestone are debated. How, I wondered, could I possibly weave a compelling, credible story from such sparse materials?

I found both my answer and inspiration, in part, in Pan Yuliang’s own work: the gorgeous and defiantly Western images (often nude, often herself nude) that had so shocked her countrymen in the last century. The images—whether lush pears or lithely curved female bodies—spoke to unrepentant fascination with beauty; with female strength; with sexuality; with the often-fuzzy lines that delineate culture, nationality, morality. Artistic voice. If her somber self-portraits (in only one I’ve seen is she actually, openly smiling) gave me a clue to her temperament and harsh past, her vibrant palette and fanciful blendings of post-Impressionism and guohua, of Eastern discipline and Western romance and perspective, gave me insight into her dreams, longings, her unique artistic eye—or at least, so I liked to think. At any rate, in many ways they were the strongest sources I had.

So in the end, I ended up working largely through those images; searching lines and hues and expressions for clues into the life that Pan Yuliang might have lived when she painted them. It was, as I imagined it, a life of beauty, pain and drama; of more than a hint of real darkness. Of a lush love of form and color. Oddly enough, though, as I pieced together this portrait I also—in the process—painted my own, after all. It wasn’t a Woolf-esque meditation on shattered homes and lost loves and painful lessons in the wake of adolescence. It was a larger story, equally important to me and immeasurably more colorful; a story of an artist finding her way. Creating her work out of unlikely and—initially—vastly alien materials. In Pan’s case, those materials were nude bodies and Western techniques and the boldly unrepentant tones of the Fauvists. In mine, they were foreign countries (China) and subjects (art; prostitution) and a shaky determination that—at very least—somehow—I would see this thing through to the last word.

And in the end, I suppose, we both succeeded. Despite a life that ended in poverty, illness and obscurity—and the virtual exclusion of women from the current Asian art boom—Pan Yuliang is now experiencing a renaissance in China. The museum in Anhui Province (to which she left all her work when she died) recently has restored many of her paintings, and has dozens of them proudly on display.

As for me—well, Painter may not be a breakout bestseller. And I’m still just a girl who grew up in a rich suburb. But my book is being greeted warmly by the press and most readers I hear from, which is gratifying. They find, as do I, inspiration and wonder in Pan’s story and her work. Though they do ask why I chose this topic, instead of something closer to home.

Hmmmm. How to tell that story….

Nude by Pan Yuliang (1963). Collection: Anhui Provincial Museum, Hefei, China.

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To hear the author read the following excerpt from The Painter from Shanghai (published by W.W. Norton, 2008), please click