Book Journey

It is the mid 1930’s in Shanghai and May and Pearl are beautiful, sophisticated, and well educated.  When their father gambles away all the family owns, they are on the verge of losing everything.  In order to save their home, May and Pearl’s father arranges for his daughters to be married to two brothers who live in Los Angeles and within a few days of making this decision the girls are shocked, horrified… and married.
When the girls went on the boat to be delivered to their new home in the states, they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months along with many other women trying to get to the US.  It is as thought the lives they once knew had crumbled right before their eyes.  When May discovers she is pregnant the girls make a pact that no one can ever EVER know.

Once in the states they find that life is not as they had been told, their father in law is not the rich man that he portrayed himself to be in Shanghai.  Instead he is close to poverty, relying on what his sons, and now his daughter in laws can provide him by working and giving him the money.  Together May and Pearl learn to survive in a new world, in new ways.

My first experience with Lisa See was Snowflower and The Secret Fan.  I devoured that book and knew I wanted to read more of her work.  That time has come with Shanghai Girls which has turned out not only to be an incredible fiction experience. 

What at first I thought was going to be mainly about their new lives and how they adjusted to this new life (much like A Buddha In The Attic), I was surprised to find that Lisa See winds a much deeper story within the story and when I caught on to what she was doing, I was really thrilled.  As this book is about two sisters from Shanghai and their lives, it is really about the sisters Pearl and May.  While Pearl narrates what she sees and how things are, you get a very strong feeling of who they are.  Here in lies the beauty of Lisa See’s writing.

I also learned a few things I did not know before.

Like what?

Have you ever heard of paper sons?  It really is a fascinating (and sad) topic of how during the Chinese Exclusion Act (read more about that here on Wikepedia) immigration to the US was restricted.  That being told, false papers were being drawn up where US citizens would claim children and even adults  as their own and these papers could create access to the states for these people.  The people would then live with the American families under their US family name to ensure they were not found out, forever giving up their true ancestors and name.  Thus the term paper sons came to be as they were truly only sons on paper. 

The experience the girls, May and Pearl have on the boat the states is heart wrenching.  Not only as I listened to this on audio, but also as I suspect this is actually what happened when women traveled alone to get to the states on these boats.  They were raped repeatedly.  They were beaten and starved. 

One moment that sticks out for me is later in the book May refers to some women she sees as FOB’s.  I kept wondering if she was swearing at them, only soon to figure out that FOB meant “fresh off the boat”.  LOL…. I am going to use that some day in a sentence…. 😀

Shanghai Girls is a look into two girls lives from their youth as beautiful girls to their experiences lives, marriages, and more in the United States.  Lisa See does a wonderful job of making this book feel more fact than fiction.

Check out a few other reviews from awesome bloggers:

Devourer Of Books

She Is Too Fond Of Books

Books On The Brain

Always With A Book

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

Borrowed from my local library

How does one describe The Buddha In The Attic?  It is a narration of the collected voices of young women brought over from Japan to San Fransisco as brides nearly a century ago. 

The Buddha In The Attic traces their lives as they travel by boat (I wonder what it will be like to live in the states?), meet their husbands (he is not rich as I was believed he would be!), face uncertain futures (what will become of us?), becoming new wives (what does he expect of me?), working the fields (other men will not leave us alone), mastering a new language (do I pretend still not to understand?), child birth (what if my child is born under the wrong sign?) and eventually to war.

It really is hard to explain The Buddha In The Attic, which is really why prior to listening to this on audio… I still did not fully get what it was about even by the synopsis.  What I did know:

1.  The title made me want to know more

2.  The cover led me to think of things hiding, secrets of the unknown…

So here I am after listening to this short audio book (4 cd’s) and now kind of basking in the experience. 

The Buddha in the Attic as narrated by Samantha Quan and Carrington MacDuffie is told as a collective “we” and never an “I”.  There is no sole character.  In 8 chapters a different aspect of Japanese immigrant life is unfolded for us to view in the raw:

“Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse at Stockton’s Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us. Home was a flea-ridden mattress in a corner of a packing shed in Dixon. Home was a bed of hay atop three apple crates beneath an apple tree.”

and so on… each chapter reading out like that, a description of their life in this new world and then told in 20 or more different ways.  Yes, at first it was a little hard to follow, my bookish mind kept waiting for the story, but the sharing of information, IS the story. And as this went on, from having children, to losing children, to what they did with the children, and so on….

I found a rhythm. 

It is safe to say this is poetry.

It is raw.  It is real.  At times it is painful.  At times it will make you mad. In the end… I find that I am better for having listened to it and I an appreciate the collective whole. 

No I would not seek out this style of writing, but a sampling of it like I just had is good.  I am glad I listened to it over reading it.  The narration is beautiful, the words, and the undertones, I thought were brilliantly read. 

Side note:  It is interesting that I am also listening to Shanghai Girls at this time and the stories and time frames are similar.

Here are a few other reviews from great bloggers:

nomadreader

Fizzy Thoughts

Take Me Away Reading

Reading On A Rainy Day

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

Borrowed from my library!