When East Meets West: Author Dori Jones Yang

The daughter of an Ohio bookseller, Dori Jones Yang grew up reading tales of exotic places and adventurous eras in history. That passion for exploring the "foreign" is coming to Mercer Island bookstore this weekend as the bestselling author tours with her most recent book, “Daughter of Xanadu."

Yang once read as much Nancy Drew and Tolkien as she could find while shelving books in her father's store at age 11, and grew up feeling that Middle Earth was so familiar that she wrote notes to her friends in Elvish.

Yang also developed a love of the far-away land of China, and wanted a career as a foreign correspondent.

“Unfortunately, they don’t teach journalism at Princeton, so I majored in history so I’d know what was going on in the world,” said Yang. “I also had jobs with the local papers in the summer and worked in Washington, D.C., the summer Nixon resigned.”

Yang's yearning to travel to the East got her a fellowship to teach English in Singapore, where she learned Mandarin Chinese, and then embarked on a backpacking tour of Southeast Asia. In 1978, she received her Master’s degree in International Relations, and continued to study China, which was closed to journalists at the time.

“I wanted to combine my interest in journalism with my fascination with China and my dream to become a foreign correspondent,” she said. “Once I was hired by Business Week (magazine), they sent me to Hong Kong as their bureau chief soon after the United States had opened diplomatic relations with China, and I fell in love with Chinese culture and language.”

Yang also fell in love with a native of Hong Kong, married and had a daughter during her tenure in China. Soon after the Tienamen Square demonstrations, when it appeared that China would shut down foreign relations, Yang’s husband, who had lived briefly in the Pacific Northwest, insisted that they move back to the area, and they settled in Newcastle.

Yang worked as the Seattle bureau chief for Business Week until the mid-'90s, when she was asked to ghost-write a book with Howard Shultz, the founder of Starbucks. The result was “Pour Your Heart Into It,” a New York Times bestselling memoir. Yang also wrote a children’s book called “The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang” about a girl who moves from China to Seattle and loses her ability to speak, which also garnered awards.

At the turn of the century, while working at US News and World Report, interviewing technology luminaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Yang started working on her historical fiction book, “Daughter of Xanadu.”

“Marco Polo was the first person from the West (Venice, Italy) who went to China and wrote a book about it,” she said. “I call him the Godfather of China writers.”

Yang notes that when Marco Polo got to China, it was ruled by the largest contiguous empire in history, the Mongol empire.

“I didn’t know anything about the Mongols or Mongolian culture, so I went to Mongolia twice and learned about Kubla Khan, their leader, who built a summer palace called Xanadu.”

Yang visited the ruins of Xanadu, rode camels, stayed in a yurt, practiced Mongolian archery and drank fermented mare’s milk, just as the nomadic Mongolians had centuries before.

“I was fascinated by the whole period of time that Marco Polo was there, but he never mentions, in his book, any love affairs, so that’s where my imagination got going, and I invented Kubla Khan’s fictional granddaughter, Emmajin, as a romantic interest for him.”

Though she was adept at research from her years as a journalist, Yang said that learning to write a plot, settings and dialog was a challenge for her.

“But I’ve loved reading fiction and storytelling since I was a girl, so I realized that Marco Polo was a storyteller and an entertainer to Kubla Khan,” she said. “It was a joy discovering Mongolian history. One of the biggest scenes in my book was a battle scene from Marco Polo’s own book about the battle with the Burmese army, who used elephants, so it was horses versus elephants, which was exciting to write.”

Yang notes that the boundaries of China have returned to the boundaries set by Kubla Khan, who also made Bejing the capital city of his empire. “Marco Polo was in China when the Mongolian Empire was at its peak,” she said. “So Emmajin grew up in the world's only superpower, and fell in love with a foreigner, which was strange for that time.”

And therein, as Yang would say, hangs the tale.

Dori Jones Yang will be reading from her book, “Daughter of Xanadu” at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 12 at .