Lily Yang grew up with storytellers in north China. From bedtime stories of ghosts and dragons from her adored father, to Buddhist legends from an ancient village woman about the divinities who rule rural life in China. Etched in her consciousness are also the personally experienced stories lived through as a child of the Cultural Revolution, more fantastic in their own way because these ghosts still exist in her memory and in two generations of Chinese people. Together, the ancient and modern stories are an almost unbroken line of phantoms, night-terrors and iconic beings which inhabit the lives and beliefs of hundreds of millions of Chinese. Now, she is the storyteller, shaped by her past with a love story for the ages which she retells in her first book. Lily is married and lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her two "doggies" as companions and memory-makers. She's also a social commentator, blogger and, as a happy affront to the puritans of the world, "madam" of one of Melbourne's best-known bordellos.
