For Pearl and May, daughters of a wealthy Chinese businessman, nothing could be more exotic than growing up in 1930s Shanghai, "the Paris of Asia." They attend extravagant parties with other members of high society. They model for a calendar painter and shout orders for miso soup from the street vendor out the window, hoisting the brimming bowls up to the painter's studio with a makeshift pulley. They dine on "stewed plums besprinkled with licorice powder" and "steamed rice cakes made with rugosa rose and white sugar." Having been born into a modernized China--a China in which footbinding is against the law and marriages are now seldom arranged--they dream of running free and marrying for love.
They never could have imagined that their father would gamble away his family's wealth, that to repay his debts to the "monkey people" (or "dwarf bandits") he would sell his daughters into marriages they did not choose. With their futures out of their control and with World War II leaving its calling card along the streets of Shanghai in the form of gutted buildings and mangled flesh, May and Pearl are forced to leave their beloved city for a life across the ocean in "Haolaiwu"--Hollywood.
The Shanghai of today is both a stark departure from and a vestige to May and Pearl's Asian Paris. The Huangpu River divides the city in two. Puxi, a homage to the Shangai of the 1800s, sits on the west side while Pudong, a hub of futuristic high-rises (like the Oriental Pearl Tower) spans the river's east bank.
Shanghai's ornately decorated temples and monasteries are proof that even a fast-paced, avant-garde city honors its antiquity. First constructed in 242 AD and rebuilt in 977, the recognizable Longhua Pagoda was a favorite destination of See's protagonists and remains the only pre-modern structure in modern Shanghai. Teahouses, manicured gardens, and boisterous street vendors are the soul of old Shanghai--the Shanghai in which May and Pearl flew kites and rode in rickshaws and pedaled bicycles down quiet tree-lined avenues. Largely pedestrianized Nanking Road, today the busiest shopping street in the world, was for May and Pearl the place to experience Shanghai culture. "May and I stroll up Nanking Road," Pearl explains, "avoiding the refugees and eyeing Shanghainese and Shanghailanders to see what they're wearing." (Shanghainese were people native to the city while Shanghailanders were foreigners who settled there before the 1950s.)
After Chinatown was established in their adopted city of Los Angeles in 1938, the homesick sisters implanted themselves in the food and dress and culture of the life they had left behind. In Shanghai, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek had failed to defend the city from Japanese invasion and by the end of 1937 the city had fallen. Chairman Mao rose to power and whispers of a newly red China rippled throughout the streets of LA's Chinatown. Hearing of the destruction and corruption of their country, May and Pearl vow to never return. They find power in their resolve. What they cannot control, though, is Joy--Pearl's college-educated, American-born daughter who feels it is her duty to witness the changes in China for herself.
It is here that See leaves the reader, but only long enough to close the book, take a deep breath, and open Dreams of Joy, the sequel.
