Product Description

In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters wave off authority and tradition, they couldn’t be more different: Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid. Both are beautiful, modern, and carefree . . . until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from California to find Chinese brides.

As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the Chinese countryside, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the shores of America. In Los Angeles they begin a fresh chapter, trying to find love with the strangers they have married, brushing against the seduction of Hollywood, and striving to embrace American life even as they fight against discrimination, brave Communist witch hunts, and find themselves hemmed in by Chinatown’s old ways and rules.

At its heart, Shanghai Girls is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection, but like sisters everywhere they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. They love each other, but each knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other the most. Along the way they face terrible sacrifices, make impossible choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel hold fast to who they are–Shanghai girls.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #544 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-26
• Released on: 2009-05-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400067114
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
For readers of the phenomenal bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love--a stunning new novel from Lisa See about two sisters who leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles.

May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl’s parents arrange for their daughters to marry “Gold Mountain men” who have come from Los Angeles to find brides.

But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel’s Island (the Ellis Island of the West)--where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months--they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she’s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.

A novel about two sisters, two cultures, and the struggle to find a new life in America while bound to the old, Shanghai Girls is a fresh, fascinating adventure from beloved and bestselling author Lisa See.

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Amazon Exclusive: Lisa See on Shanghai Girls

I’m writing this on a plane to Shanghai. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about all the things I want to see and do on this research trip: look deeper into the Art Deco movement in Shanghai, visit a 17th-century house in a village of 300 people to observe the Sweeping the Graves Festival, and check out some old theaters in Beijing. But as I sit on the plane, I’m not thinking of the adventures that are ahead but of the people and places I’ve left behind. I’ve been gone from home only a few hours and already I’m homesick!

This puts me in mind of Pearl and May, the characters in Shanghai Girls. This feeling--longing for home and missing the people left behind--is at the heart of the novel. We live in a nation of immigrants. We all have someone in our families who was brave enough, scared enough, or crazy enough to leave the home country to come to America. I’m a real mutt in terms of ancestry, but I know that the Chinese side of my family left China because they were fleeing war, famine, and poverty. They were lured to America in hopes of a better life, but leaving China also meant saying goodbye to the homes they’d been born in, to their parents, brothers, and sisters, and to everything and everyone they knew. This experience is the blood and tears of American experience.

Pearl and May are lucky, because they come to America together. They’re sisters and they have each other. I’ve always wanted to write about sisters and I finally got my chance with Shanghai Girls. You could say that either I’m an only child or that I’m one of four sisters, because I have a former step-sister I’ve known for over 50 years and two half-sisters from different halves who I’ve known since they were born. Is Shanghai Girls autobiographical? Not really, but my sister Katharine and I once had a fight that was like the flour fight that May and Pearl got into when they were girls. And there was an ice cream incident that I used in the novel that sent my sister Clara right down memory lane when she read the manuscript. I’m also the eldest, and we all know what that means. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the bossy know-it-all. (But if that’s true, then why are they the ones who are always right?) What I know is that we’re very different from each other and our life experiences couldn’t be more varied, and yet we have a deep emotional connection that goes way beyond friendship. My sisters knew me when I was a shy little kid, helped me survive my first broken heart, share the memories of bad family car trips, and were at my side for the happiest moments in my life. More recently, we’ve begun to share things like the loss of our childhood homes, the changing of the neighborhoods we grew up in, and the frailties and illnesses of our myriad parents.

My emotions and experiences are deeply entwined with the stories I write. So as I fly over the Pacific, of course I’m thinking about May and Pearl, the people and places they left behind, the hopes and dreams that kept them moving forward, and the strength and solace they found in each other, but I’m thinking about myself too. As soon as I get to the hotel, I’m going to call my husband and sons to tell them I arrived safely, and then I’m going to send some e-mails to my sisters.--Lisa See

(Photo © Patricia Williams)

From Publishers Weekly
See (Peony in Love) explores tradition, the ravages of war and the importance of family in her excellent latest. Pearl and her younger sister, May, enjoy an upper-crust life in 1930s Shanghai, until their father reveals that his gambling habit has decimated the family's finances and to make good on his debts, he has sold both girls to a wealthy Chinese-American as wives for his sons. Pearl and May have no intention of leaving home, but after Japanese bombs and soldiers ravage their city and both their parents disappear, the sisters head for California, where their husbands-to-be live and where it soon becomes apparent that one of them is hiding a secret that will alter each of their fates. As they adjust to marriage with strangers and the challenges of living in a foreign land, Pearl and May learn that long-established customs can provide comfort in unbearable times. See's skillful plotting and richly drawn characters immediately draw in the reader, covering 20 years of love, loss, heartbreak and joy while delivering a sobering history lesson. While the ending is ambiguous, this is an accomplished and absorbing novel. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Janice P. Nimura Lisa See might be the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Caucasian women, but the Chinese great-grandfather who arrived in California in 1871 has proved the most influential of her ancestors. "I am Chinese in my heart," See wrote in her family memoir, "On Gold Mountain." She is also Chinese in her fiction, having mined her heritage for the vivid period details of foot binding, dowries and death rituals that boosted "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" and "Peony in Love" to bestsellerdom. As the third installment in See's women's-Chinese-historical sub-genre, "Shanghai Girls" moves away from the more remote and picturesque past and into the 20th century. In 1937, Pearl and her younger sister, May, are beauties just coming into flower, calendar girls who primp by day and pose at night, in thrall to "all things foreign, from the Westernization of our names to the love of movies, bacon, and cheese." Their beloved Shanghai, the Paris of Asia, "kneels before the gods of trade, wealth, industry, and sin"; the girls think nothing of stepping delicately around a dead baby on the sidewalk on their way to the French Concession. Rickshaws jostle alongside Daimlers. But the gilded girls and their gilded city are doomed. Within a few pages, their father marries off his daughters to pay his gambling debts, and Japanese bombs begin to fall. Pearl's reaction to her fate sets the stilted narrative tone that makes "Shanghai Girls" less absorbing than its predecessors. "I thought I was modern. I thought I had choice. I thought I was nothing like my mother," she anguishes. "I'm to be sold -- traded like so many girls before me -- to help my family. I feel so trapped and helpless that I can hardly breathe." The grooms are emigrant brothers, "Gold Mountain men" who expect their new wives to join them in Los Angeles. But the arrival of the Japanese in Shanghai interferes with their departure, and by the time Pearl and May make it to California, their pampered pinup-girl personae are in shreds. As they wait interminably on Angel Island for clearance to join their husbands, Pearl struggles to recover from a brutal rape by the Japanese, and May gives birth to a daughter, Joy, paternity a question mark. The girls' arrival in Los Angeles returns See to the setting of her own family history, and her expertise in the Chinese immigrant experience has a tendency to slow things down. Some of the color, as in the previous novels, is delightful: "If your nipples are small like the seeds of a lotus," says a fellow detainee on Angel Island, "then your son will rise in society." But much of it, though fascinating, is more undigested: the practice of becoming a "paper son" to sidestep the ban on Chinese immigration; the ersatz staginess of China City, a playground for Hollywood types where Pearl and May toil in their father-in-law's businesses; the urgency of proving one's Chinese ancestry during the war against the Japanese, and the peril of that same ancestry once Mao's communist regime is in place. See's emotional themes are powerful but familiar -- the bonds of sisterhood, the psychological journey of becoming an American -- and when she pauses for character development, clichés creep in. To console themselves, Pearl and May revisit childhood memories: "They remind us of the strength we find in each other, of the ways we help each other, of the times that it was just us against everyone else, of the fun we've had together." Pearl, responsible and demanding, was born in the year of the Dragon, while May is an affectionate, self-absorbed Sheep; as children, they rejected such backwardness, but after a lifetime of transplanted travails, they take unexpected comfort in tradition. This is poignant, and See should let it speak for itself; instead, she makes sure there is no room for misinterpretation: "We raised our children to be Americans, but what we wanted were proper Chinese sons and daughters." The temporal distance of "Snow Flower" and "Peony" allowed See to take liberties as a storyteller, re-creating lost worlds that were at once dreamily evocative and anchored in the habits and objects of daily life. "Shanghai Girls" reads like a family album, with See trying to cram in as many snapshots as possible: Pearl's Chinese American coffee shop, May's business providing props and extras for "oriental" Hollywood films, Joy in kindergarten wearing her favorite cowgirl outfit, Anna May Wong, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese men enlisting in the U.S. Army to win their citizenship. It's more history lesson than fairy tale. But China's 20th-century upheavals afford at least as much color as its days of old; "Shanghai Girls" will not lose See any fans, and it bravely moves her oeuvre into the challenging terrain of more recent history.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

A bit of a departure from earlier novels, but no less compelling
I'm a fan of Lisa See's two earlier novels, "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" and "Peony in Love", both of which were set in 19th and 17th century China respectively. In "Shanghai Girls", the author moves the setting of the novel to Shanghai and later to the US. Lisa See paints a vivid portrait of life in pre-World War II Shanghai and takes the reader on an unforgettable journey through the Japanese invasion of China and its aftermath.

The protagonists in this novel are two sisters - Pearl and May. Pearl is the older sister, born in the auspicious Year of the Dragon, yet frowned upon by her Baba [father] who dislikes her tall appearance. Pearl is also educated, having completed college, and is proficient in a few languages and dialects. In contrast, younger sister May, born in the Year of the Sheep, is shorter yet lovely, and has only managed to complete high school. Yet, for all Pearl's accomplishments, it is May that is the apple of her parent's eyes, and uses this partiality to her advantage. Both sisters live a life of privilege, yet they work as 'beautiful girls' posing for pictures used in ads and posters and earn a good living. This may appear surprising given their parent's conservative outlook [the girls' mother has bound feet], yet not altogether strange as later events bring to light the family's dire financial straits.

When the girls are told their father has huge debts and has decided to marry them off to a pair of brothers, Gold Mountain Men residing in LA [men who have left China to go to America to seek their fortunes, returning to find China Brides], they realize their days of freedom are over and decide to revolt. Unfortunately, the Japanese invasion of Shanghai puts an end to any of their plans. Fleeing the Japanese is not without its horrors and ultimately Pearl and May find themselves alone except for one another.

Even after leaving China, the pair find their situation is still dire as upon arrival in the United States, Pearl and May are detained on Angel's Island for months undergoing untold suffering. They finally meet their 'spouses' but life for the sisters still has many trials in store, and a secret shared between them threatens their future.

"Shanghai Girls" is a well-woven narrative that flows well and Lisa See credibly evokes the bond between two sisters, whose love for one another is strong, yet also fraught by rivalries. This is not just a story about siblings for it is also about the clash between East and West as the sisters struggle to find their footing in a new world, even as the bonds of their old world remain strong. Lisa See is truly a gifted author for being able to portray both the old world of 17th and 19th century China [as seen in Peony and Snow Flower] and the new as seen in "Shanghai Girls". Final verdict: a compelling read.

Emotional Rollercoaster
I was tired when I finished the book. It was one of those where I had to stay up one night to finish it because when I tried to put it down, the story kept turning over in my head. I had an honest like and dislike for some of the characters. I do have to admit that part of me kept wondering what else could go wrong as the story progressed.

The most striking thing about this book was that it is the first time that I, as an African-American, could feel the effects of discrimination against another people. The author is able to really make you feel what the characters feel. Additional kudos goes to the author for illustrating how dangerous it is to see things from only one point of view. Ever story has at least two sides.

Aside from wondering how much more hardship could possibly befall the family, I found the book to be an excellent read. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a challenging read.

Not bad; not great
I felt I had a duty to finish this advance copy in order to write an honest review about the novel. I can't say that it was pulling teeth to finish it. But I can't say that I would have finished it if I had simply checked it out of the library and had no obligation to review it on Amazon.

The writing is meh. You'll find that the author's major lacking is in the use of descriptors and imagery. While there was plenty of opportunity--from the Chinese cooking, to the sights of Shanghai, to the horrors of war and the trauma of rape, to the physical beauty of the women subjects--the author's descriptions could have been far more vivid and compelling than they actually were. The plot was not bad, but it was somewhat predictable. The flow of the story actually picked up a great deal towards the last 1/2 of the book, and towards the end, I was reading at a rapid clip b/c of the suspense. Unfortunately, the book ends with a pretty major cliffhanger, so it's obvious that the author probably has a sequel in mind for these characters.

If you want a better read on life in China during the pre-war period, I highly recommend Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking which is compelling and heart-wrenching. If you want a great read on mother-daughter and sisterly relationships in the context of intergenerational and intercultural American-Chinese differences, I would greatly recommend just about anything by Amy Tan, whose characters and their relationships are so vividly narrated and rich, that I am often convinced that she is writing about my own Chinese mother and myself (a first generation Asian American woman). I particularly recommend Tan's The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, and The Bonesetter's Daughter. Between Tan and Chang, I'm not entirely sure that Lisa See has a lot to offer a reader that's much different or better.

Nevertheless, one can see that a great deal of research and personal interviews went into the making of the novel, and it comes off as fairly genuine and well-conceived. I do also really like the author's angle of living as an illegal Chinese or even as a Chinese-American during the post-war Red Scare in the United States. I only wish that the narrative was more fleshed out.