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Sister, Friend, Rival: Shanghai Girls

28 Monday Jun 2021

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Review: Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See
Random House, 2009. 336 pp. $17

Pearl and her sister, May, live the good life in Shanghai, in 1935. They earn money posing for an artist friend, who puts their faces on commercial calendars, so they are known as “beautiful girls.” They get good tables at clubs and restaurants and party at all hours, hardly noticing the vast ocean of poor surrounding them. Pearl, elder by three years, feels herself the less favored sister, though she’s gone to college, and May won’t ever. Their parents, traditional and strict, dote on the younger, prettier, daughter, to the point that Pearl doubts they even notice her, except to criticize, which her father does constantly. May’s not above using her favored position to twist him around her finger.

However, all that’s about to become irrelevant. To the sisters’ shock, their father says he’s had severe financial reversals. Not only does that mean the party’s over, he’s arranged marriages for them, to sons of his most important creditor, who lives in Los Angeles. After the wedding, a ceremony that pleases nobody, May and Pearl are to sail to Hong Kong, after which they’ll rejoin their new husbands in the United States. That’s it; no argument.

Needless to say, the sisters hate every part of this, and they tell each other they’ll do what no Chinese daughter ever does, disobey their father. They have no intention of leaving Shanghai. Their husbands are ridiculous matches for them, especially May’s groom, who’s only fourteen and seems not all there. But their father hasn’t told them the hardest truth, which is that he’s flat broke and in debt to loan sharks, who’ll throw the family onto the street in a couple days. As if that weren’t enough, May and Pearl don’t even have time to plead, because the Japanese attack. Leaving Shanghai now becomes a necessity as well as a chore.

The bombing of Shanghai, August 1937. This image captures the scene outside the Palace Hotel (courtesy Institut d’Asie Orientale, Lyon, France, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

You may wonder, as I did, how traditional Chinese parents—the mother binds her feet—have raised two daughters most people of that time and place would have called libertine (and only if they were being polite). But never mind. See writes with the force of gravity, and when the worlds she creates collide, the shock waves are enormous. Not only that, duty and tradition versus modernity and independence poses a crucial conflict, embodied in the sisters, so if their relative freedom seems a trifle convenient, See keeps returning to that struggle. Pearl feels that May is impetuous, selfish, self-centered, and brazen; May believes that Pearl is staid, masochistic, and too accepting by half. They’re jealous as hell of each other, and they’re both right.

But there’s a cultural context to every action or feeling, whether having to do with being female in a society that worships sons and despises daughters; having to obey a male authority, no matter who or how weak; and what money means. See spares no detail, sanitizing nothing, excusing nothing, and the cruelties of life are ever-present:

The Whangpoo River slinks past us to our left like an indolent snake, its grimy skin writhing, pulsing, slithering. . . .Sampans—hung with ropes, laundry, and nets—cluster together like insects on a carcass. Nightsoil boats jostle for right-of-way through ocean liner tenders and bamboo rafts. Sweating coolies stripped to the waist clutter the wharves, unloading opium and tobacco from merchant ships, rice and grain from junks that have come upriver, and soy sauce, baskets of chickens, and great rolls of rattan matting from flat-bottomed riverboats.

Many horrors happen to the sister, involving violence, heartache, bigotry, and degradation, whether as women, as Chinese, or as the newly unfortunate. Throughout, See dwells on the sister bond in which love, jealousy, protectiveness, and resentment reside as uneasy partners. As such, the author explores, again with unflinching focus, what it means to be Chinese, and how Pearl and May struggle to reconcile what they want for themselves with what their culture demands, which in turn must be regulated because of public pressure and the threat of censure or disclosure. What a bold, searing depiction.

I have doubts about Pearl, particularly some of her doormat moments, which I’d think her experience might have led her to rise above, at least on occasion. That question arises most particularly because she’s astute enough to recognize how Chinese women know how to endure without falling apart, whereas men seem more fragile, having to spend so much energy shoring up their stoic facades. Why, then, doesn’t Pearl try to move beyond the role she’s accepted, at least outwardly?

But if that’s a weakness in Shanghai Girls, a necessity to maintain the sibling conflict throughout this narrative and the next—there’s a sequel—it’s a small price to pay. Shanghai Girls is a terrific novel, one that will stay with you.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book at the public library.

Victors and Vanquished: The Translation of Love

06 Monday Feb 2017

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Review: The Translation of Love, by Lynne Kutsukake
Doubleday, 2016. 318 pp. $26

Before the Second World War, thirteen-year-old Aya Shimamura and her parents lived in British Columbia, and though they weren’t rich, they had each other and enough to get buy–a house, a little land to farm, a community. But when war came, the government shipped them to an internment camp in the interior, confiscated their property, and drafted Aya’s father to help build the Trans-Canada Highway:

They gave him a pick to dig out the boulders and a shovel to scrape at the earth–only the white foremen could set the dynamite–and they paid him twenty-five cents an hour because, after all, this was Canada where they did not believe in slave labor. . . . But then they deducted the amount he owed for his food and bunk in the road camp, and because he had a wife and child, they further docked his pay to help cover the cost of their internment in a ghost-town camp in the interior mountains that no one had ever heard of.

Matters only get worse. Aya’s mother dies, and in 1946, her father must choose between moving east of the Rockies or “returning” to Japan, the country Aya has never seen. Grieving and distraught, her father signs the paper acquiescing to their deportation, and so they travel to Tokyo, seat of the postwar American occupation, led by General Douglas MacArthur.

From this riveting, heart-breaking premise comes an uneven, scattered novel that nevertheless gives off sparks. You just know that Aya, a quiet, troubled child whose only defense against her father’s (or anyone’s) attacks is to shut down even further, is headed for pain and isolation. And so it happens. Her schoolmates, brutal at the best of times, turn viciously on the shy newcomer, who struggles to learn their ways and routines and to understand their rapid, idiomatic Japanese. Most important, however, as native to the victor’s country–they mistake her for American-born–she’s both the object of envy and a traitor.

A licensed brothel that the Japanese opened for U.S. servicemen, hoping to protect the rest of the female population. MacArthur later closed all licensed brothels (Courtesy Yokosuka City Council, via Wikimedia Commons)

A licensed brothel that the Japanese opened for U.S. servicemen, hoping to protect the rest of the female population. MacArthur later closed all licensed brothels (Courtesy Yokosuka City Council, via Wikimedia Commons).

Kutsukake excels at portraying these cultural divides and ambivalent feelings, which she casts from various perspectives. There’s Matt, an American soldier of Japanese descent who translates the carloads of letters addressed to MacArthur from Japanese of every walk of life, containing gifts, advice, praise, or, most usually, appeals to help trace such-and-such a person or aid in small business matters. Matt takes his job seriously, much to his colleagues’ amusement, because they all know that MacArthur is unlikely to read them and surely won’t act on them. But Matt understands their desperation, pride, and sense of shame, and he feels guilty wearing an American uniform, especially when many soldiers behave badly toward the Japanese, at worst, trading food to a starving population in return for sexual favors.

Then there’s Fumi, a classmate of Aya’s assigned to mentor her but torments her instead. Fumi herself is twisted by loss; her older sister, the only person who has ever given her tenderness or kindness, has disappeared. Fumi wants to write a letter to MacArthur, hoping to trace her sister, and she cultivates Aya to write it, because, after all, the newcomer speaks fluent English.

Where Kutsukake lets the story unfold, the narrative works. But after a while, The Translation of Love begins to feel too much like a collection of vignettes, intended to show different perspectives on cultural and social issues. Part of the problem is the sheer number of narrative voices, which include every character I’ve mentioned plus a raft of others, even–bizarrely–MacArthur’s son. I like Aya’s, Fumi’s, and Matt’s voices, and that of the girls’ schoolteacher, Kendo. But the others sometimes seem like talking heads, contrived to explain the way life was and either to put the characters in hot water or rescue them from it.

All the same, I was glad to read The Translation of Love. I didn’t know that Canada had perpetrated the same bigoted, shameful crime on its Japanese residents as the United States. Kutsukake also renders everyday Japanese society of that time in vivid ways, penetrating the complex social politics of shame, pride, and public persona. Consequently, though The Translation of Love falls short as storytelling, the subject matter compelled me to finish it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

An Existential Warrior: Sword of Honor

23 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: Sword of Honor, by David Kirk
Doubleday, 2015. 441 pp. $27

Musashi Miyamoto, the young protagonist of this absorbing, far-ranging novel (and a real seventeenth-century figure), walks away after the battle of Sekigahara, determined to live. For this revolutionary decision, which the samurai code calls the height of dishonor, Musashi becomes an outlaw.

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor for Doubleday.

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor for Doubleday.

Three transgressions make the young man’s life forfeit. First, he fought for a lord on the losing side, for which Musashi should have committed seppuku, ritual suicide. However, he’s long detested that custom and goes into hiding instead. Second, he’s accused of having insulted a warrior from a powerful clan whom he slew in single combat, a charge he denies, to no avail. Thirdly, and most significantly, he announces to all and sundry that seppuku is criminal nonsense; that the samurai code, known to initiates as “the Way,” is morally false; and that any man who kills for a cause other than his own–as when a lord commands him to–is a coward. Not content with that, Musashi takes these views on the road, trying to prevent seppuku when he happens across it, and fending off the samurai despatched to kill him.

In other hands, perhaps, this arresting premise would merely provide excuses for grisly combat, of which there’s no shortage here, or an adventure story that makes the pages turn rapidly, as these do. But Kirk has much bigger psychological, political, and moral game in mind, and his epic sweep, focus on justice, and using a specific case to portray an entire society remind me of Kurosawa films like Rashomon or Seven Samurai. Throughout the novel, characters constantly challenge themselves and others to define what the purpose of violence is, and what an individual person is to make of that.

As a fellow fugitive from the Way haltingly observes:

What difference, what individual difference, did you and I make at Sekigahara? . . . Yet our army lost, and so we two must bear the shame. To be hated. What if our army had won? We would be loved, and yet we would have had the exact same effect upon the victory. Would have had . . . what we had before. But magnified. And what would we have done to earn it? Nothing. No. No. It is as though we . . . as though human beings are . . . buckets or, or, or . . . vessels.

Yet nothing’s so simple. Musashi sees no other choice–indeed, he seeks no other–than to prove by the sword that the Way is bankrupt. The contradiction is obvious, but not to Musashi, who believes he’s honest because he fights only for himself and his ideals. He assumes that each martial victory will convince other samurai to abandon the Way, and he’s astounded when they respond by trying to attack him.

But there’s more. The samurai sent to kill him, Akiyama, is himself an outcast, and Kirk exploits that, leading Akiyama to question why he’s been sent on this mission, and what, precisely, is the moral threat that his quarry represents. Along the way, Musashi lands with a blind woman and a young girl who challenge his assumptions, and among whom he becomes a different person from the raging swordsman who enjoys the combat at which he’s preternaturally gifted.

Is there yet more? Yes, there is. Musashi’s quest brings him to Kyoto, where an uneasy peace simmers with conflict. The Tokugawa Shogunate, the victors of Sekigahara, have moved the capital to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and left behind a military governor. Many people in Kyoto resent the Tokugawa for that, perhaps none more than the Yoshioka, a famous samurai school. It’s their champion whom Musashi allegedly insulted at the battle, and they’re a political power in the city. Staying out of trouble is therefore a full-time job for Musashi, and he’s no good at it.

Sword of Honor follows Child of Vengeance, which I reviewed December 8, 2014. Each stands on its own, though the precursor shows how Musashi has always had a dual nature, with healing impulses as well as violent ones. Sword of Honor is a deeper, more proficient novel, though, and I’m glad to see that Kirk has taken to showing his characters’ emotions more often than telling them, a flaw that marred the previous book at times. I could have done with fewer, less grisly battle scenes, but none seemed gratuitous, and there’s no denying that the samurai world, as with any knightly class, was based on violence.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, in return for an honest review.

Burdened by History

12 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: Night in Shanghai, by Nicole Mones
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 277 pp. $30

What’s that, an American jazz musician who can’t improvise? A Western-educated Shanghai beauty sold by her father to a crime lord? Put them together, and you have a romance as atmospheric as they get. Throw in the Japanese invasion of China, and you have Night in Shanghai, a late 1930s tale of back-stabbing politics and love against tall odds.

A girl scout, Yang Huimin, smuggled a Nationalist flag into a Shanghai warehouse besieged by Japanese forces in 1937. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

A girl scout, Yang Huimin, smuggled a Nationalist flag into a Shanghai warehouse besieged by Japanese forces in 1937. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Thomas Greene is a classically trained pianist, an African-American from Baltimore recruited by the agent of a Chinese mafioso to lead an all-black jazz orchestra. Jazz is a very big deal in Shanghai, and Thomas is startled and pleased to earn a good salary and live where his race doesn’t matter, or, as he puts it, “no one looked at him twice, for the first time in his life.” However, the music comes hard (he must have a written score, or he’s lost), and his struggles are so obvious that the more experienced jazzmen he’s supposed to lead look down on him. I liked this touch, which I thought made his character more sympathetic as well as unusual.

As Thomas gets the hang of his job, his eye falls on Song Yuhua, translator for the crime boss, who’d kill both of them if he (or his many henchmen) saw them together. But Song has her own secret: She’s a Communist, in a city where Nationalist thugs working for Chiang Kai-shek regularly murder Party members. She believes fervently in the cause, and she expects her superiors to share her ideals, because, after all, they’re on the same side. But history is working against her, just as it’s working against Thomas.

I liked the prose in Night in Shanghai the best, redolent as it is of the local food, manners, and metaphors. “To bring it up now would only create fear, just as speaking of a tiger makes one pale.” Or, of a person privileged by birth, “the waterfront pavilion gets moonlight first.” The physical descriptions are vivid too, as with this passage about Suzhou, adjacent to the city outskirts:

 

Beyond the gate, cobbled streets unwound beneath overhanging willows, soft in summer with green-dappled light. Canals were crossed by stone bridges whose half-moon arches made circles in the water. From the ponds and fields and wooded hills came peddlers with live flapping fish, caged ducks, bundles of freshwater greens, and tender shoots of baby green bamboo.

Unfortunately, the other aspects of the book didn’t always measure up, especially when compared with A Cup of Light, Mones’s gentle mystery novel about a porcelain expert. In that story, the tension never lapsed, even with nothing earthshaking at stake. But Night in Shanghai, for all its sound and fury, lets the protagonists off too easily, at times, diluting its power and promise. Writing so close to history is partly to blame–many secondary characters actually existed–so fact restricts what may or may not happen. I admire Mones’s commitment to the record, yet, after such a fine setup, history works against the narrative instead of for it.

Even so, I can recommend Night in Shanghai as a story about an unusual place at a crucial time. I learned more about China and the Japanese invasion, Shanghai as a city flooded by refugees (it required no entry visa), and, most particularly, that many African-American jazz musicians flocked there. The novel opened up this world to me, which I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Blood and Honor

08 Monday Dec 2014

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Review: Child of Vengeance, by David Kirk
Doubleday, 2013. 321 pp. $26

Like his father before him, Bennosuke trains to be a samurai, a killing machine sworn to carry out his lord’s commands, no matter how vain, narrow, or immoral they may be. To fail means dishonor, redeemable only through suppuku, ritual suicide; but success means stifling compassion, sensitivity, trust, or emotional connection.

General Akashi Gidayu preparing to commit Seppuku after losing a battle for his master in 1582. He had just written his death poem. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

General Akashi Gidayu preparing to commit seppuku after losing a battle for his master in 1582. He has just written his death poem. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Remarkably for a thirteen-year-old boy, or, as David Kirk so vividly describes, just about anyone in seventeenth-century Japan, Bennosuke rebels against this choice. Following his father’s instructions but also the teachings of his uncle, a monk who raised him during long years of parental absence, the boy believes he can be a loyal samurai and a moral, righteous, feeling man.

Bennosuke’s inner struggle is the premise, but there’s as much action as introspection here. Kirk sets Bennosuke’s search within the context of outward battles, whether between father and uncle for the boy’s soul and future, against enemies who bait father and son into mortal combat, or to survive the political tempests of feudal Japan.

I have no patience for hidebound warrior codes or the concept of killing to save face, but I read Child of Vengeance despite its subject matter. I’m glad I did. Not only does Kirk know his ground and how to make it coherent and understandable, he presents moral dilemmas inherent in the samurai way of life. Bennosuke never asks himself whether he’d have preferred to be a peasant, but the story plumbs both sides of this question.

The peasant, forbidden to bear arms, will never have to defend his honor–it’s assumed he has none–nor go to war. However, war will come to him, and he pays, either in taxes or by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is it better to be able to defend yourself, even in someone else’s service? Is the right to bear arms, and the duty that goes with it, a freedom or a curse? The only characters Bennosuke meets who think for themselves, starting with his uncle, aren’t samurai–samurai can’t afford that luxury. So who’s happier in the end, warrior or peasant?

There’s never a dull moment here, and Kirk writes with psychological insight, always a pleasure. However, too often, he tells you what the characters feel–that old devil explanation, again–and Bennosuke’s insights toward the end seem unearned, as if the author has gotten ahead of his character’s development. Sometimes, too, the language feels laden with portent or skating just this side of cliché. Consider this passage:

History is changed by the smallest of things; a single drop of rain, say, is blown by a freak gust of wind into the eyes of a ship’s captain, so that in the blink that follows he misses the sign of the reef ahead. . . . What left Arima’s mouth was no more than a pale green gob of phlegm, but within it was the catalyst that put fire in Bennosuke’s soul.

I like the images, yet I’ve read this before in other guises. Maybe the weak point is that the Arima in the passage fights for an archvillain clan, who–unlike anyone else in the novel–show little depth.

But these are relatively small issues, and I believe David Kirk will write better novels. Meanwhile, Child of Vengeance is worth your time.