spring 2009
By Julie Phillips

Shanghai Girls
By Lisa See
Random House
NOVELIST LISA SEE HAS FOUND
rich material in Chinese women’s
lives. Her bestseller Snow Flower and
the Secret Fanwas 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on to “outdated traditions…as a means of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.
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