Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

A few years ago, I enjoyed See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, so when Shanghai Girls came out I put it on my library queue. Yes, I know the cool kids have Netflix queues, but I have a library queue. In any case, I shouldn't have been in such a rush because it was not one of the best things I've read this year.

The story follows two sisters who grow up in Shanghai in the mid 1930's with every privilege. Suddenly, their father is bankrupted and he promises them to Chinese men living in the U.S. to pay off his debt. Young, naive, and reluctant, they go to America and their lives change completely.

While See's writing is very good and the story moved quickly, I didn't get that 'into' the book. The narrator, who is the older sister, had a detached style of storytelling. While this may have been an attempt to create a character who protected herself by being unemotional, it ended up creating a character who I didn't care enough about. There were also a few parts of the book where ostensibly large secrets were revealed, but they weren't surprising to me at all.

What kept me most interested in the book was the descriptions of the environs in which the sisters lived, both in Shanghai and in Los Angeles. See did a great job of describing scenes on the street, interiors of stores and restaurants, and details around everyday life that transported me to the settings she was describing. In Shanghai, it was the upper-class life the girls lived, and in Los Angeles it was the tourist-friendly Chinatown that was alien to the Chinese characters. I wish See had made the characters and story as compelling as the settings were.