Book Review: Shanghai Girls (2009)

 Shanghai Girls is a novel about two sisters living in Shanghai at its pre-WWII peak, working as model girls for an ad painter. They are just becoming adults, and are stuck between the cosmopolitan lifestyle of modern Shanghai and the customs of their parents. Similar to the stories of the mothers in The Joy Luck Club, turmoil strikes and they are forced to make their way as immigrants to the United States, or more specifically, San Francisco. However, this book goes much deeper into the Chinese immigration experience and is a better story for it. Indeed, the sense of history Lisa See provides the reader is the most charming part about the novel. We feel the struggle and pain of the characters, who have to go through hell just to live in a land where they are treated perpetually as foreigners and with suspicion. They have to live cautiously as not to be accused of being Mao sympathizers. I am ignorant of the factual history that Chinese immigrants of this period faced, but if Ms. See's fiction could be considered accurate then it is masterfully told. BUT, and this is a big "but" for it is all-caps, the novel's non-ending left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I can hardly recommend it or even suggest it without placing this large caveat on it. It was as if the author felt like the story was getting long enough and just chose to end it. If the condition of literary blue balls exists, then this novel surely causes it. Needless to say, I felt quite a sense of let down with the author. I have followed her for 300 plus pages, forsaking all other reading materials to read her story. Why would she sell herself short and call this a finished work? Thus, if I can summarize this work, it is an interesting and graphic dramatization of the Shanghai of the period and the Chinese immigrant experience. It has hiccups with predictable circumstances that try to be passed off as dramatic revelations and issues with some slow sections that don't contribute to the overall plot and test the reader's attention. The non-ending cannot be merely brushed off as something to let the reader fill in the blanks. There is just too much left untold. It is difficult to recommend as a novel, and I need to do my own research before being able to pass it off as an educational tool if one wishes to learn about the period.

Book Review: The Joy Luck Club (1989)

The Joy Luck Club is an inter-generational novel about four mothers who grew up in China and emigrated to San Francisco and their daughters. Every chapter is told in the first person perspective of one of these eight women, each one getting two chapters; the first set are the mothers' experiences in China, the next are the childhood experiences of the daughters growing up as the children of immigrants, then those children as adults, and finally the recent experiences of the mothers, along with further details of their lives since being in China. Being such, it reads more like a set of independent short stories rather than a cohesive novel. A further difficulty is that the experiences of the daughters are so similar (more so when they are adults than as kids, the latter of which are much more entertaining to read) that I had trouble keeping them straight and they became more of a homogeneous blob of information rather than unique stories. But this apparent blemish can actually be turned into an advantage, which I will explain. It is the stories of the mothers that make The Joy Luck Club worthwhile. The reader is told of stories of one mother who lived in an impoverished village but made local women feel like trendy socialites by hosting potluck gatherings where they would play mahjong. Such comforts weren't to last, however, because this village was soon to be encountered by the invading Japanese. We witness the hardship of this mother who had to carry by hand everything that was precious to her, including her twin infant daughters. Another one of these mothers faced the difficulties of an arranged marriage and gives a humorous account of how she dealt with it. And another tells the story of how she came to live with her mother who was one of the many wives of a well-to-do man. It was stories like these that I was looking for when I began my novels about Asian women binge. The advantage I mentioned is that these auxiliary stories about their daughters could imaginably be skipped over without losing much of the overall flavor of the book. Thus, if one is interested in the subject, I would highly recommend the chapters pertaining to the elder generation with the advice that the cost of skipping the middle chapters is quite low.