So what drew her to Lee's films in the first place? Why write a book about him and not another famous Taiwanese director?
"Ang Lee's first three films are a Chinese trilogy. He then goes on to make what is considered an English-language trilogy of Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm and Ride With the Devil. He shows himself to be a bridge between cultures."
That's an intellectual reason, I say. What attracts you from an emotional perspective?
"Well, in this world of globalization, I feel it is our responsibility to be bridges between cultures," she says. "I came to Taiwan as a young person in my 20s and I tried to understand as much as I could about this culture, so I feel like I switched places with Ang Lee. He went to America and understood my culture, and I came here and I wanted to understand - at the time that wasn't my motivation - but I feel that it's a great honor to be a bridge."
Dilley split her childhood between New York City and a town in suburban Connecticut called New Canaan. That town was the setting for Lee's 1997 film, The Ice Storm.
"In 1973 an ice storm hit the town over the long Thanksgiving weekend," she wrote later in an e-mail exchange. "I was a third-grader at South School in New Canaan, and I remember the ice storm vividly. I remember the sounds of the ice creaking in tree branches, huge tree trunks lying across the road, a [Volkswagen] Beetle abandoned in the center of the road, no electricity for days.
"Ang Lee came to my childhood town and made a movie ... . Christina Ricci rode her bike down the same street I had ridden mine. I took the same train back and forth from New York hundreds of times that Tobey Maguire rode on his odyssey-like journey home, and met my mother at the train station just the way he meets his family at the end of the film. The drugstore, the library ... it's my town."
The dynamic between Maguire and Ricci "precisely reflected my relationship with my own brother," she wrote. "That was my life!"
"Obviously, you really identify with him," I say towards the end of our interview.
"I do."
How long have you felt like that?
"From the beginning. When I first saw The Wedding Banquet, I just thought - 'I get this director.'"
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