Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls

Finally secured a copy of Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, a bit late I know. I was a massive fan of See’s first book, On Gold Mountain, about her Chinese family’s immigration to California but her later books haven’t really done it for me. Shanghai Girls is much more my territory (blurb below as ever) and the initial part of the book set in Shanghai in that dreadful summer of 1937 is nicely evocative and detailed. There’s a few little errors of detail that creep in but they’re forgivable. I can’t comment on the accuracy or otherwise of the tale once it becomes a story of the wartime and post-war experience of Chinese immigrants to America but I found it all believable and pretty absorbing. Hopefully more of this from See in the future. The interesting bit is that this is the story of two privileged girls from Shanghai moving to LA rather than two penniless know-nothing peasants.  Coming from swinging Shanghai in 1937 to LA they are less than impressed which makes for a nice change to the usual – wow Gold Mountain! school of emigration stories.

Shanghai, 1937. Pearl and May are two sisters from a bourgeois family. Though their personalities are very different – Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid – they are inseparable best friends. Both are beautiful, modern and living a carefree life until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away the family’s wealth, and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to two ‘Gold Mountain’ men: Americans. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, the two sisters set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the villages of southern China, in and out of the clutches of brutal soldiers, and even across the ocean, through the humiliation of an anti-Chinese detention centre to a new, married life in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Here they begin a fresh chapter, despite the racial discrimination and anti-Communist paranoia, because now they have something to strive for: a young, American-born daughter, Joy. Along the way there are terrible sacrifices, impossible choices and one devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel by Lisa See hold fast to who they are – Shanghai girls.