Juli Min will speak about her dazzling and ambitious debut novel, Shanghailanders, that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time—beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past—exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.
2040: Wealthy real estate investor Leo Yang—handsome, distinguished, a real Shanghai man—is on the train back to the city after seeing his family off at the airport. His sophisticated Japanese-French wife, Eko, and their two eldest children, Yumi and Yoko, are headed for Boston, though one daughter’s revelation will soon reroute them to Paris. 2039: Kiko, their youngest daughter and an aspiring actress, decides to pursue fame at any cost, like her icon Marilyn Monroe. 2038: Yumi comes to Yoko in need, after a college-dorm situation at Harvard goes disastrously wrong.
As the years rewind to 2014, Shanghailanders brings readers into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of the people in their orbit—a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. We glimpse a future where the city’s waters rise and the specter of apocalypse is never far off. But in Juli Min’s hands, we also see that whatever may change, universal constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair, and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets, and longing.
Brilliantly constructed and achingly resonant, Shanghailanders is an unforgettable exploration of marriage, relationships, and the layered experience of time.
Please note that Shanghailanders is not yet available in hard copy in China. Electronic copies may be purchased via the publisher’s website: https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/shanghailanders
Harriet Low herself chose the title Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life, for her journals. They chart her amazement at leaving Salem, Massachusetts, for Macao, a Portuguese colony off the China coast. Perhaps no greater contrast was imaginable in 1829. Harriet lived the constricted lifestyle of the foreign merchants’ wives, forced by the Chinese to live in Macao while their husbands traded tea and opium in Canton; balls, operas and picnics; Chinese customs and Catholic processions; true friendship and false; romance or religion are all reflected in the pages of her journal.
As ever for June 4th, this incredible picture of June 1989….. what a potential world was destroyed that day! The joy & the hope of China captured by (I think) Mark Avery of AP….
(In Portuguese) My latest column for Macao’s Paragrafo (the bimonthly literary supplement to Ponto Final newspaper) – The Macao of Shogun – the underlying importance of the Portuguese colony to Clavell’s great novel (Shogun). (English version out soon) – click here
Reading Truman Capote’s unfinished final novel, the catty Answered Prayers…. a little reference to Shanghai showing how the Bohemian sojounrer culture of the city permeated wider society once…
Jonathan Chatwin, whose new book The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future is the latest publication in my Bloomsbury Asian Arguments series (out now everywhere including Bloomsbury’s site here). Jonathan just wrote an interesting piece for CNN Style on how Zhongnanhai became the secretive centre of Chinese communist power….here…
