Review: Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See

Shanghai Girls is a vibrantly written novel that opens with sisters May and Pearl working as Beautiful Girls (as models were called) in 1930s Shanghai. Their status opens doors to clubs, bars, and society, while their father's riches have made their lives comfortable to an extent that many Chinese of the time could only imagine. Very quickly, however, their father reveals that he has lost all of his money through gambling, and he has sold his daughters to the man that holds all of his debts, as brides for the man's two sons, one an articulate man of about twenty, the other a fourteen year-old mentally handicapped child. They refuse to go, and as they begin to calculate a way out, Japanese bombs begin to fall on Shanghai. Penniless and homeless, the girls and their mother flee, meeting almost unmentionable horrors as they eventually make their way to America, the unwelcoming home of the husbands they must now accept to survive. As for most Asians in the US at that time, nothing is as it seems, and the girls, with their new families, must struggle each day to keep themselves alive and safe from those who would deport them. Sometimes, the sources of these dangers are from the communities, while others, the threats are from within their own walls. Regardless, the women do what they feel they must to protect the lives they have cobbled together, bringing about their own simultaneous salvation and destruction.

See is working on a sequel, which is wonderful both because her work is so tightly woven and because the ending leaves the reader hanging. May and Pearl, middle aged by the end of the book, come to a terrible, unexpected crossroads because of decisions each has made over the years, and must begin a new journey, separately, but also together. The new novel, which will hopefully be out by next year sometime, will follow them this time as parents chasing their own child's destiny.

It's difficult to come up with negatives about this story, but if I had to, I would say that it's a little over-descriptive, and for non-history buffs the detailed information on Chinese political history may be a bit much.

I will definitely be reading more of See's work. In a comparison of Asian-fiction writers, her level of storytelling is par with one of my favorite writers, Gail Tsukiyama, and overall I am looking forward very much to seeing what the rest of her library entails.

Rating: five stars - engrossing, gorgeous, and heartbreaking