For 27 years, Joan Burbick traveled frequently to China and Hong Kong, teaching and lecturing. Puzzled about her husband's Chinese family that had erased the life and death of his mother, she decided to understand why. She began her research with personal letters from his Chinese family and then continued by searching archives in Philadelphia, New Haven, and Boston. She stayed in places her mother-in-law would have lived or visited in the 1940s and immersed herself in the pathways of fleeing Chinese during the Japanese-occupation. She read histories of modern China and Shanghai wartime newspapers. Erased was based on these years of investigation. Previously, Joan Burbick published books on Henry David Thoreau, rodeo queens, gun culture in America, and national narratives in the United States. She landed in the world of fiction later in life. Stripland was her first novel; Erased, the second.