Shanghai Girls

Lisa See

Bloomsbury

Otago Daily Times, October 5th 2009

Shanghai Girls follows the lives of Pearl and May Long sisters from China in 1937 to America in 1957.  Daughters of a middle-class family in Shanghai, they eschew their parent’s traditional Chinese values as outdated and irrelevant, priding themselves on their Western clothes, flawless English and their jobs as ‘beautiful girls’ (their portraits selling everything from cigarettes to cod-liver oil).  

When their father suddenly arranges their marriage to Chinese-American brothers, they refuse to follow their husbands to America, only to find that they had been sold to settle gambling debts.  Not only has their defiance placed them all in great danger, the Japanese invasion of Shanghai has begun, and when their father disappears, they and their mother flee the city. 

Eventually Pearl and May manage to find passage to Los Angeles, and after months in detention are permitted to join their husbands. Life is often hard, demeaning and lonely, but they have each other, and the precious, US-born Joy. Then, as anti-Communist feeling intensifies in the 1950’s, US citizenship is promised to all those who expose ‘paper’ (illegal) immigrants. No mainland-born is safe, and in this atmosphere of fear and paranoia, secrets are revealed that test the limits of sisterly love (yes it is that melodramatic).

 Shanghai Girls gives an insight into American and Chinese history at a particularly troubled time and explores the difficulties of maintaining cultural identity in a foreign land. While not a ‘must read’ book, it is fast-paced, engaging and well told-worth borrowing from the library, if not buying outright.