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Unbound

by Review-a-Day, May 17, 2009 12:00 AM

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

Reviewed by Julie Phillips

Ms. Magazine

Novelist Lisa See has found rich material in Chinese women's lives. Her bestseller Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was set in 19th-century Hunan and dealt with foot-binding, the secret "women's script" nu shu and the rivalrous bond between two women. The plot of Peony in Love turned on a 16th-century Chinese play. And in her latest, Shanghai Girls, she brings her characters from China to America. The Chin sisters, practical Pearl and beautiful May, grow up rich, educated and modern in 1930s Shanghai. For fun, they work as "beautiful girls": models for advertising artwork, like the painting on the book's cover. But these carefree times are cut short when their father pays off his gambling debts by selling them into marriage to two Chinese American brothers. Pearl and May have no intention of following their husbands to Los Angeles -- until the Japanese invasion changes everyone's plans.

Upon arrival in California, May and Pearl submit to months of interrogation at Angel Island, the immigration processing station in San Francisco Bay. (They deliberately delay the process in order to work a trick that will get them out of a jam and determine the course of their future.) Released at last to the custody of their husbands, they do not regain their freedom. In Los Angeles, they discover, Chinese Americans cannot live outside Chinatown, watch a movie except from the theater balcony or get hired for "white" jobs. May observes that in Shanghai, people of different backgrounds "walked on the streets together... Here everyone is separated from everyone else -- Japanese, Mexicans, Italians, blacks and Chinese. White people are everywhere, but the rest of us are at the bottom."

Worse, their husbands turn out to be "paper sons" who have entered the U.S. with false papers and live in constant fear of being deported. In this isolated, apprehensive community, even Pearl finds herself latching on to "outdated traditions...as a means of soul survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories." The 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which bars Chinese Americans from full citizenship, brings only partial solace.

See's tale of the two sisters' love and rivalry, their romantic adventures and long struggles to regain their balance in a new land is entertaining, if melodramatic. (A wartime rape, an unplanned pregnancy and a child born dead are some of its more soap-operatic elements.) But the plot mainly serves to keep the book moving past a series of fascinating backdrops. We see cosmopolitan prewar Shanghai, with its mix of Asians and whites, wealth and poverty; Angel Island, where women sleep three deep on wiremesh bunks and suicide by sharpened chopstick is the alternative to deportation; Los Angeles' China City, a faux Chinese neighborhood designed by whites and built from leftover film sets; the real film sets where May finds work providing costumes, arranging for extras and occasionally getting a tiny speaking (or screaming) part. Well-researched and highly readable, Shanghai Girls is a moving and revealing story of the Chinese American experience.

Julie Phillips is a book critic for the Dutch daily Trouw and the author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin's Press, 2006), which won the National Book Critic's Circle Award.

Books mentioned in this post

Peony in Love

Lisa See

Shanghai Girls

Lisa See

Snow Flower & the Secret Fan

See, Lisa

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3 Responses to "Unbound"

Larry Sells May 18, 2009 at 09:19 AM

Sharon, See's first important work may be of interest to you -- "On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of a Chinese-American Family." It provides a fascinating look at what Chinese immigrants have dreamed about and experienced in coming to the U.S. over a long time period. She interweaves her family's story with the large historical and cultural events that affected their American experience. This book provides rich context for "Shanghai Girls." You may also be interested in the exhibition based on the memoir See developed for The Smithsonian -- http://www.apa.si.edu/ongoldmountain/ As for "Shanghai Girls", I would encourage you to read the novel and judge it for yourself, not on what any literary critic says about it. Larry

Larry Sells May 17, 2009 at 10:38 AM

Julie Phillips' review of "Shanghai Girls" is both thoughtful and insightful. A couple of caveats, however. May's husband Vern is not a paper son, being born in America. This is important because May's actions are motivated in part because May knows she won't be sent back to China on this account. Second, Pearl's clinging to "outdated traditions" is more complicated than Ms. Phillips suggests. As Pearl grows older, she comes to venerate many of the Chinese traditions she found old fashioned in her mother. In fact, Pearl grows more and more like her mother as the novel progresses. A woman with a deep love of the U.S., Pearl gradually finds a way to blend her new found Christianity with the traditions of her homeland. Larry Sells Oklahoma City

s h a r o n May 17, 2009 at 06:00 AM

More instructive and useful and important to me than books like this one, would be first-person accounts of natives of other countries (usually referred to as "third world"). What I want to be able to do is see the United States of America as others see it who have not seen it (even from inside an immigration facility) and whose parents and grandparents have not grown up here. I'm pretty sure such accounts exist but know of none off-hand. Is the "magic" and "pull" of the USA an outgrowth/function of the magical and dream-like quality of another land that is not as full of crowded cities, that excites the imagination of what it would be like to be free or less restricted by one's government? Is the magical pull more a function of pleasurable contrast to one's existing life in their country of birth? What does it feel like to first experience an inkling of a life outside one's own national experience? How does one first come to an exposure of such a "different life"? I know I take for granted many of the freedoms and lifestyle comforts of my life as a function of "American freedom"; but what I am not able to do is actually put myself in the place of another who first comes to understand that another possibility exists, then what it feels like to actually experiences an alternative. Such an account would be difficult--a kind of stream of consciousness, as-it-happens kind of thing, which requires both reflection and a disambiguation of expectation and current reality. This review makes the book sound promising in a limited way, but the "soap opera" allusion puts me off. And again, it seems to be an account of how the girls see this new country after the fact--not so much how they and others first hear the siren song of its promises in the context of their native existence--before they make the difficult leap into the new culture.

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