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I have truly loved Lisa See’s previous books (Snow Flower and Peony), so I was very exciting to see this new addition. Her lyrical writing and the depth of her characterizations have always held my interest.

Shanghai Girls relates the story of two young Chinese women as they experience war, escape, rape, arranged marriages, and a journey to America where they eventually begin to come to grips with their complicated relationship. Pearl, the elder and narrator, was charged with the protection of her younger sister, May, as they navigate the challenges before them. Yet, she also constructs a stance of victim, which tempers her decisions and her path.

The story is satisfying and engrossing, yet the ending leaves too many loose ends for me. May is left behind with her invalid husband, and Pearl begins a journey back to her homeland to find Joy, the daughter they shared, but who ran away when Joy learned the truth of her parentage and birth. One can only hope that Ms See will continue their story, for this one is very unfinished.
Rating: 3 / 5

Shanghai Girls features a story that is simply all too cliched, like something we’ve seen in a movie or read in another novel before. (In particular, its general plot reminded me of the 1994 Zhang Yimou film “To Live.”) It’s full of stereotypes against Asian men: Chinese men as irresponsible gamblers, and Japanese men as brutal rapists. The two sisters are totally unlikeable — actually annoying — as characters, so I found it difficult to understand how they were supposed to generate sympathies from the reader. I didn’t enjoy the book at all because of the prejudiced writing.
Rating: 1 / 5

The first Lisa See book I read was last July, when I picked up “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel” at Borders (see my review on that page, if you’d like to know how my experience with the novel went). I decided to give See a second chance and purchased this yesterday. I was thinking, footbinding was more depressing and a darker topic than immigration from an Asian country to a Western one.

I really wanted to like this book, but as you can see from my review… I didn’t enjoy it all that much. The novel is loaded with cliches. Any person who has spent time in Asia or a less fortunate foreign country would probably experience some of these events, or hear of them through word of mouth.

We start off the book with a rich man who moved his wife and two young female children from Guangdong (or Canton, as is the Western spelling and what See refers to the province in this book) to the largest city in China, Shanghai. He has racked up six handymen to help around the house, including but not limited to: a cook, gardener, and servants.

Unfortunately, the reader’s fascination and awe with this rich family in China falls short, and fast. In a surprise announcement, their father breaks the news that, because he foolishly gambled away the family fortune, he has set up arranged marriages for his two daughters, who have already made it through the pains of childhood and being a teenager in the first few pages of the story. They are of legal ages, respectively: May is eighteen and Pearl twenty-one.

Several awkward entourages with the Chinese American men follow. Their mother passes away, and the girls never again come into contact with their father or other family members. May does not lose her virginity to the man her father told her to marry, nor do they ever manage to have a strong bond, but somehow becomes pregnant through casual sex with somebody else. On the other hand, Pearl is infertile. Throughout all this, the four have arrived at Angel’s Island, a cramped, dirty immigration camp in San Francisco. When her sister becomes pregnant, Pearl lies to everybody else and claims that she has become pregnant with her first child. She and her husband raise the daughter as their own, even after the four move to Los Angeles.

Many more tragic, long events follow. At many times throughout the book, I could not remember how the sequence of events followed. It was difficult for me to keep up with all the new incidents and ideas (most of them tragic) that Lisa See kept pushing towards the reader. I found most of these, along with the dialogue, to be bland and unbelievable. When I finally had pieced out that one thing in the story had happened, another completely new event or concept would come along to wipe it out. I often wanted to just put the book down and go to sleep. Needless to say, I could not relate to the characters in any way.

Lisa See’s books are often aimed at an Asian immigrant audience, or children of those people. I hate to say this, but many other writers, such as Amy Tan, can and have done a lot better than her. She often tries to incorporate self-researched tidbits of East Asian history and shove it into her novels. It would be fine if she could manage it, but as a couple other reviewers have noted, her novels often come published appearing as a history major’s university notes: good details and hints, but not satisfying for some to have as pleasure reading material.

Overall, it just really depends on what you’re looking for. Her historical facts this time around were well-chosen and structured for such a book, the plot was actually organized and made sense (even though I felt it was cliche), compared to her other books. I won’t be reading another book put forth by See again, but it seems she did sprinkle a little effort into this latest one. Two stars.

Oh, and I don’t know why, but as I write this, the book is insanely overpriced. It was released in late May of this year and I still paid $27.44 USD for it at Borders. I returned it the next day, after staying up all night to finish it. Paperback doesn’t come out until next February, nearly an entire year after the original hardcover did.
Rating: 2 / 5

After starting this novel, and being drawn in by the story, though improbable at times, the ending was what prompted the one star. The characters were poorly drawn, and the story quite uneven. It seemed the author wrote the required pages, and didn’t know how to end the story, but end it she did. I will not waste my time on this author again.
Rating: 1 / 5