Author Lisa See has Chinese heritage, and her first book, On Gold Mountain (1995), is a biography of her Chinese American family, describing her great-great-grandfather’s journey to the United States and the career of her great-grandfather, Fong See, who started a business in Chinatown and married a Caucasian woman. See’s first three novels form the Red Princess Mysteries series, featuring the detecting duo of Liu Hulan and David Stark as they uncover killers in modern-day Beijing and across China. Several of her other fictional works, including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), Dreams of Joy (2011), and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (2017) also feature Chinese characters and explore pivotal eras in Chinese history. The Island of Sea Women (2019) explores the culture of South Korea's female divers.

See recounts in interviews and an author’s note in Lady Tan’s Circle of Women that she came across an account of Tan Yunxian during the COVID-19 pandemic. The marriage bed in the novel, the enormous piece of furniture Yunxian inherits from her mother and takes with her to her own marriage, was inspired by a 16th-century bed for sale in the See family’s antique shop in Chinatown in Los Angeles.