Interview

Author Elsa Hart describes her international experiences and explains what drew her to 18th century China, the setting of her first novel Jade Dragon Mountain.

How old were you when your international experiences began?

I was born in Rome, Italy when my father was a foreign correspondent for U.S. News and World Report Magazine. When I was two, we moved to Moscow (at that point, the Soviet Union). These years of my life were characterized by fairy tales, my mother telling me the stories of ballets that we saw at the Bolshoi theater, and snow castles. In 1991 we moved to Arlington, Virginia, where we lived until my father began work at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, Czech Republic. I attended the International School of Prague. I moved back to the US in order to attend Swarthmore College. I lived in the Pacific Northwest and St. Louis before visiting China for the first time in the summer of 2010.

What brought you to China, and what were your initial impressions of the country?

My husband conducts research on the impacts of climate change on flowers of the high Himalayas. After I graduated from law school in 2011 we moved to Lijiang, the city that has grown up around the old town of Dayan, where we lived until October 2013. We split our time between a small apartment in the city and a field station on Jade Dragon Mountain.

I was living in a rural city in China, having ...