THE STORY
In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, full of great wealth and glamour, home to millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister May are having the time of their lives, thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business. Though both wave off authority and traditions, they couldn’t be more different. Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid. Both are beautiful, modern, and living the carefree life ... until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth, and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from Los Angeles to find Chinese brides.
As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the villages of south China, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the foreign shores of America. In Los Angeles, they begin a fresh chapter, trying to find love with their stranger husbands, brushing against the seduction of Hollywood, and striving to embrace American life, even as they fight against discrimination, brave Communist witch hunts, and find themselves hemmed in by Chinatown’s old ways and rules. At its heart, Shanghai Girls is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends, who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection. But like sisters everywhere, they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. They love each other but they also know exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other sister the most.
Along the way there are terrible sacrifices, impossible choices and one devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding novel by Lisa See hold fast to who they are – Shanghai girls.
ABOUT THE ENDING
If you reach the end of Shanghai Girls and find yourself wanting more of the story . . . please note that Lisa See wrote a sequel to Shanghai Girls called "Dreams of Joy"
PRAISE FOR SHANGHAI GIRLS
"If you're looking for one of those wonderful "take me someplace exotic" books for summer, you won't do better than Shanghai Girls, the latest from novelist Lisa See, who has carved a rich career chronicling the lives of Chinese women. In Shanghai Girls, she takes readers on a lively journey both tragic and hopeful, from the Shanghai of the 1930s to Los Angeles' Chinatown in the mid-20th Century. She renders both settings with loving, precise strokes that create a world her narrator, Pearl Chin, and her sister May fully in habit along with the reader." --The Dallas Morning News
"Lisa See excels at drawing her readers into the rich history of China and providing her narrators with voices so unique that readers truly know and care about these women within a few pages, if not paragraphs… Shanghai Girls is a graceful, meticulous examination of the lives of two irrepressible sisters, Pearl and May, first in Shanghai, and then in California, from 1937-57… And See, whose writing is as graceful as these "beautiful girls," pulls off another exceptional novel." -- The Miami Herald
"See's skillful plotting and richly drawn characters immediately draw in the readers, covering 20 years of love, loss, heartbreak and joy while delivering a sobering history lesson." -- San Francisco Examiner
"Shanghai Girls is a rich work, one that portrays an immigrant experience as well as plumbing the relationship of sisterhood, with its friction as well as its support…See brings their experiences to life with thoughtful and deft prose. The result is as compulsively readable as it is an enlightening journey." --Sunday Denver Post
"See's splendid new novel opens in China in 1937, where sisters Pearl and May work as models…The story delivers an emotional punch as the women journey to the U.S. and struggle to assimilate in L.A.'s Chinatown." --More Magazine
"Well-researched and highly readable." --Ms Magazine