Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995), a detailed account of See's family history, and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007) and Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list.

See's novel, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (2017), is a story about circumstances, culture, and distance among the Akha people of Xishuangbanna, China.

Shanghai Girls (2009) chronicles the lives of two sisters who come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages and face, among other things, the pressures put on Chinese-Americans during the anti-Communist mania of the 1950s.

Writing under the pen name Monica Highland, See, her mother Carolyn See, and John Espey,[5] published two novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988), a collection of early 20th Century postcards and commentary on the history they represent.

Her latest novel, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, was published in June 2023 and became a Goodreads nominee for Best Historical Fiction that year.

[8] Set in 15th-century China under the Ming Dynasty, the novel is inspired by the true story of a woman physician who struggled to break free from traditions imposed by her arranged marriage in order to help women with their illnesses.