基本信息出版社：Random House
页码：336 页
出版日期：2009年05月
ISBN：1400067111
International Standard Book Number：1400067111
条形码：9781400067114
EAN：9781400067114
装帧：精装
正文语种：英语
内容简介 In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters wave off authority and tradition, 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 carefree . . . 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 California 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 Chinese countryside, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the shores of America. In Los Angeles they begin a fresh chapter, trying to find love with the strangers they have married, 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 each knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other the most. Along the way they face terrible sacrifices, make impossible choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel hold fast to who they areShanghai girls.
作者简介 Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of Peony in Love, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net (an Edgar Award nominee), The Interior, and Dragon Bones, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles.
编辑推荐 Book Description
For readers of the phenomenal bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love--a stunning new novel from Lisa See about two sisters who leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles.
May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl’s parents arrange for their daughters to marry “Gold Mountain men” who have come from Los Angeles to find brides.
But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel’s Island (the Ellis Island of the West)--where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months--they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she’s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.
A novel about two sisters, two cultures, and the struggle to find a new life in America while bound to the old, Shanghai Girls is a fresh, fascinating adventure from beloved and bestselling author Lisa See.
Amazon Exclusive: Lisa See on Shanghai Girls
I’m writing this on a plane to Shanghai. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about all the things I want to see and do on this research trip: look deeper into the Art Deco movement in Shanghai, visit a 17th-century house in a village of 300 people to observe the Sweeping the Graves Festival, and check out some old theaters in Beijing. But as I sit on the plane, I’m not thinking of the adventures that are ahead but of the people and places I’ve left behind. I’ve been gone from home only a few hours and already I’m homesick!
This puts me in mind of Pearl and May, the characters in Shanghai Girls. This feeling--longing for home and missing the people left behind--is at the heart of the novel. We live in a nation of immigrants. We all have someone in our families who was brave enough, scared enough, or crazy enough to leave the home country to come to America. I’m a real mutt in terms of ancestry, but I know that the Chinese side of my family left China because they were fleeing war, famine, and poverty. They were lured to America in hopes of a better life, but leaving China also meant saying goodbye to the homes they’d been born in, to their parents, brothers, and sisters, and to everything and everyone they knew. This experience is the blood and tears of American experience.
Pearl and May are lucky, because they come to America together. They’re sisters and they have each other. I’ve always wanted to write about sisters and I finally got my chance with Shanghai Girls. You could say that either I’m an only child or that I’m one of four sisters, because I have a former step-sister I’ve known for over 50 years and two half-sisters from different halves who I’ve known since they were born. Is Shanghai Girls autobiographical? Not really, but my sister Katharine and I once had a fight that was like the flour fight that May and Pearl got into when they were girls. And there was an ice cream incident that I used in the novel that sent my sister Clara right down memory lane when she read the manuscript. I’m also the eldest, and we all know what that means. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the bossy know-it-all. (But if that’s true, then why are they the ones who are always right?) What I know is that we’re very different from each other and our life experiences couldn’t be more varied, and yet we have a deep emotional connection that goes way beyond friendship. My sisters knew me when I was a shy little kid, helped me survive my first broken heart, share the memories of bad family car trips, and were at my side for the happiest moments in my life. More recently, we’ve begun to share things like the loss of our childhood homes, the changing of the neighborhoods we grew up in, and the frailties and illnesses of our myriad parents.
My emotions and experiences are deeply entwined with the stories I write. So as I fly over the Pacific, of course I’m thinking about May and Pearl, the people and places they left behind, the hopes and dreams that kept them moving forward, and the strength and solace they found in each other, but I’m thinking about myself too. As soon as I get to the hotel, I’m going to call my husband and sons to tell them I arrived safely, and then I’m going to send some e-mails to my sisters.--Lisa See
(Photo © Patricia Williams)
“See is a gifted writer, and in Shanghai Girls she again explores the bonds of sisterhood while powerfully evoking the often nightmarish American immigrant experience.”—USA Today
“A buoyant and lustrous paean to the bonds of sisterhood.”–Booklist
“A rich work…as compulsively readable as it is an enlightening journey.”—Denver Post
“The glamour of prewar Shanghai is recalled in Lisa See’s deftly plotted Shanghai Girls.”—Vogue
“Splendid”—More
“An engrossing tale of two sisters.”–Time.com
“Shanghai Girls is one of those books I could not wait to continue reading, because her characters' stories are so compellingly told.”—St. Louis Dispatch
“As in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love, she has in her latest novel created ordinary women who, through willfulness and resiliency, accomplish extraordinary things…See, whose writing is as graceful as these '’beautiful girls,'’ pulls off another exceptional novel.”–Miami Herald
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
See (Peony in Love) explores tradition, the ravages of war and the importance of family in her excellent latest. Pearl and her younger sister, May, enjoy an upper-crust life in 1930s Shanghai, until their father reveals that his gambling habit has decimated the family's finances and to make good on his debts, he has sold both girls to a wealthy Chinese-American as wives for his sons. Pearl and May have no intention of leaving home, but after Japanese bombs and soldiers ravage their city and both their parents disappear, the sisters head for California, where their husbands-to-be live and where it soon becomes apparent that one of them is hiding a secret that will alter each of their fates. As they adjust to marriage with strangers and the challenges of living in a foreign land, Pearl and May learn that long-established customs can provide comfort in unbearable times. See's skillful plotting and richly drawn characters immediately draw in the reader, covering 20 years of love, loss, heartbreak and joy while delivering a sobering history lesson. While the ending is ambiguous, this is an accomplished and absorbing novel. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Janice P. Nimura Lisa See might be the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Caucasian women, but the Chinese great-grandfather who arrived in California in 1871 has proved the most influential of her ancestors. "I am Chinese in my heart," See wrote in her family memoir, "On Gold Mountain." She is also Chinese in her fiction, having mined her heritage for the vivid period details of foot binding, dowries and death rituals that boosted "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" and "Peony in Love" to bestsellerdom. As the third installment in See's women's-Chinese-historical sub-genre, "Shanghai Girls" moves away from the more remote and picturesque past and into the 20th century. In 1937, Pearl and her younger sister, May, are beauties just coming into flower, calendar girls who primp by day and pose at night, in thrall to "all things foreign, from the Westernization of our names to the love of movies, bacon, and cheese." Their beloved Shanghai, the Paris of Asia, "kneels before the gods of trade, wealth, industry, and sin"; the girls think nothing of stepping delicately around a dead baby on the sidewalk on their way to the French Concession. Rickshaws jostle alongside Daimlers. But the gilded girls and their gilded city are doomed. Within a few pages, their father marries off his daughters to pay his gambling debts, and Japanese bombs begin to fall. Pearl's reaction to her fate sets the stilted narrative tone that makes "Shanghai Girls" less absorbing than its predecessors. "I thought I was modern. I thought I had choice. I thought I was nothing like my mother," she anguishes. "I'm to be sold -- traded like so many girls before me -- to help my family. I feel so trapped and helpless that I can hardly breathe." The grooms are emigrant brothers, "Gold Mountain men" who expect their new wives to join them in Los Angeles. But the arrival of the Japanese in Shanghai interferes with their departure, and by the time Pearl and May make it to California, their pampered pinup-girl personae are in shreds. As they wait interminably on Angel Island for clearance to join their husbands, Pearl struggles to recover from a brutal rape by the Japanese, and May gives birth to a daughter, Joy, paternity a question mark. The girls' arrival in Los Angeles returns See to the setting of her own family history, and her expertise in the Chinese immigrant experience has a tendency to slow things down. Some of the color, as in the previous novels, is delightful: "If your nipples are small like the seeds of a lotus," says a fellow detainee on Angel Island, "then your son will rise in society." But much of it, though fascinating, is more undigested: the practice of becoming a "paper son" to sidestep the ban on Chinese immigration; the ersatz staginess of China City, a playground for Hollywood types where Pearl and May toil in their father-in-law's businesses; the urgency of proving one's Chinese ancestry during the war against the Japanese, and the peril of that same ancestry once Mao's communist regime is in place. See's emotional themes are powerful but familiar -- the bonds of sisterhood, the psychological journey of becoming an American -- and when she pauses for character development, clichés creep in. To console themselves, Pearl and May revisit childhood memories: "They remind us of the strength we find in each other, of the ways we help each other, of the times that it was just us against everyone else, of the fun we've had together." Pearl, responsible and demanding, was born in the year of the Dragon, while May is an affectionate, self-absorbed Sheep; as children, they rejected such backwardness, but after a lifetime of transplanted travails, they take unexpected comfort in tradition. This is poignant, and See should let it speak for itself; instead, she makes sure there is no room for misinterpretation: "We raised our children to be Americans, but what we wanted were proper Chinese sons and daughters." The temporal distance of "Snow Flower" and "Peony" allowed See to take liberties as a storyteller, re-creating lost worlds that were at once dreamily evocative and anchored in the habits and objects of daily life. "Shanghai Girls" reads like a family album, with See trying to cram in as many snapshots as possible: Pearl's Chinese American coffee shop, May's business providing props and extras for "oriental" Hollywood films, Joy in kindergarten wearing her favorite cowgirl outfit, Anna May Wong, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese men enlisting in the U.S. Army to win their citizenship. It's more history lesson than fairy tale. But China's 20th-century upheavals afford at least as much color as its days of old; "Shanghai Girls" will not lose See any fans, and it bravely moves her oeuvre into the challenging terrain of more recent history.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Like Lisa See's previous works, Shanghai Girls is a rich, historical novel that portrays the immigrant experience and the bonds of sisterhood. In deft, graceful prose, See depicts the challenges and hardships -- many unimaginable -- that the Chin sisters face. However, despite the realistic detail and excellent research, particularly in the portrayals of Angel Island and the poverty-ridden China City, some critics thought that the descriptions about the women's divergent lives in Los Angeles slowed the story. And while most reviewers praised the sympathetic, flesh-and-blood characters, a few thought they succumbed to cultural platitudes and lacked introspection into their relationships and self-deceptions. Yet despite these flaws, Shanghai Girls is a compelling, educational portrait of Chinese assimilation, sure to be enjoyed by readers of See's previous work.
From Booklist
Today they would be called fashion models. But in early-twentieth-century China, sisters Pearl and May were known quaintly as “beautiful girls,” whose sophisticated cover-girl images set the standard for young Chinese women and exemplified the hopes of an ancient nation catapulted into anxious modernity as it balanced on the brink of war. Paradoxically, Pearl and May were also the products of a traditional upbringing in which their father controlled their destiny, selling them into marriage to Chinese men from America to settle gambling debts to a depraved Shanghai mobster. The tortuous route they take to first avoid, then accept, and finally embrace their abrupt fall from grace is rife with the most heinous tragedies—rape and murder, betrayal and abandonment, poverty and servitude. Through it all, one thing ensures their survival: the sisters are tenaciously devoted to each other, though time and events will strain this loyalty nearly to the point of destruction. Examining the chains of friendship within the confines of family, See’s kaleidoscopic saga transits from the barbaric horrors of Japanese occupation to the sobering indignities suffered by foreigners in 1930s Hollywood while offering a buoyant and lustrous paean to the bonds of sisterhood.
文摘 Chapter One
Beautiful Girls
"our daughter looks like a South China peasant with those red cheeks," my father complains, pointedly ignoring the soup before him. "Can't you do something about them?"
Mama stares at Baba, but what can she say? My face is pretty enough- some might even say lovely-but not as luminescent as the pearl I'm named for. I tend to blush easily. Beyond that, my cheeks capture the sun. When I turned five, my mother began rubbing my face and arms with pearl creams, and mixing ground pearls into my morning jook-rice porridge-hoping the white essence would permeate my skin. It hasn't worked. Now my cheeks burn red-exactly what my father hates. I shrink down into my chair. I always slump when I'm near him, but I slump even more on those occasions when Baba takes his eyes off my sister to look at me. I'm taller than my father, which he loathes. We live in Shanghai, where the tallest car, the tallest wall, or the tallest building sends a clear and unwavering message that the owner is a person of great importance. I am not a person of importance.
"She thinks she's smart," Baba goes on. He wears a Western-style suit of good cut. His hair shows just a few strands of gray. He's been anxious lately, but tonight his mood is darker than usual. Perhaps his favorite horse didn't win or the dice refused to land his way. "But one thing she isn't is clever."
This is another of my father's standard criticisms and one he picked up from Confucius, who wrote, "An educated woman is a worthless woman." People call me bookish, which even in 1937 is not considered a good thing. But as smart as I am, I don't know how to protect myself from my father's words.
Most families eat at a round dining table, so they will always be whole and connected, with no sharp edges. We have a square teakwood table, and we always sit in the exact same places: my father next to May on one side
……