The little girl giggles and runs back to her grandmother. I really should be going, but the child is so charming. More than that, playing with her gives me a sense that I belong and that everything will work out. She points at me and whispers to her grandmother. The old woman opens a bag, fishes around, and then places something in her granddaughter’s tiny hand. The next thing I know, the little girl is back in front of me, her arm fully outstretched, offering me a shrimp cracker.
“Shie-shie.”
The girl smiles at my thank-you. Then she climbs up next to me and starts swinging her legs and jabbering about this and that. I thought I was pretty good at the Shanghai dialect, but I don’t understand her nearly as well as I’d hoped. Finally, her grandmother comes over to where we’re sitting.
“You’ve met our disappointment,” she says. “Next time my husband and I hope for a grandson.”
I’ve heard things like this my entire life. I pat the little girl’s knee, a gesture of solidarity.
“You don’t look like you’re from Shanghai,” the old woman goes on. “Are you from Peking?”
“I’m from far away,” I respond, not wanting to tell my whole story. “I’m here to visit my father, but I’m lost.”
“Where do you need to go?”
I show her my map.
“I know where this is,” she says. “We could take you there, if you’d like. It’s on our way home.”
“I’d be very grateful.”
She picks up her granddaughter and I pick up my suitcase.
A few minutes later, we reach the Artists’ Association. I thank the old woman. I look through my purse, find the last of a roll of Life Savers, and give them to the little girl. She doesn’t know what to make of it.
“It’s candy,” I explain. “A sweet for a sweet.” A memory of my aunt saying that to me gives me a sharp pang of anguish. I’ve come this far and still my mother and aunt are with me.
After a few more thank-yous, I turn away and enter the building. I was hoping for air-conditioning, but the lobby is just as oppressively hot as the street. A middle-aged woman sits behind a desk in the center of the room. She smiles and motions me to step forward.
“I’m looking for an artist named Li Zhi-ge,” I say.
The woman’s smile fades and blooms into a scowl. “You’re too late. The meeting is almost over.”
I stand there, bewildered.
“I’m not going to let you in there,” she snaps harshly, gesturing in annoyance to a set of double doors.
“You mean he’s in there? Right now?”
“Of course, he’s in there!”
My mother would say it’s fate that I should find my father so easily. But maybe it’s serendipity. Whatever it is, I’m lucky, even if it’s only dumb luck. But I still don’t understand why the receptionist won’t let me in.
“I need to see him,” I plead.
Just then, the doors open and a group of people stream out.
“There he is now,” the receptionist says with a sneer.
She points to a tall man wearing wire-rimmed glasses. His hair is rather long and falls in a loose mop across his forehead. He’s definitely the right age—somewhere around forty-five—and strikingly handsome. He’s dressed in a Mao suit, but this one is different from the ones I saw on the street. It’s crisp and well cut, and the fabric looks richer. My father must be very famous and powerful, because the others follow closely behind him, practically pushing him to the street.
As they leave the building, I hurry after them. Once on the sidewalk, the others fall away, melting into the throng of pedestrians. Z.G. stands still for a moment, looking up through the buildings to a patch of white sky. Then he sighs, shakes his hands as though relieving stress, and begins to walk. I follow him, still lugging my suitcase. What will happen if I walk up and announce I’m his daughter? I don’t know him, but I sense this isn’t a good moment. Even if I thought it was, I’m filled with apprehension. At one point he stops at an intersection, and I pause at his side. Surely he has to notice me since I look so different—after all, everyone else has noticed me—but he seems completely preoccupied. I should say something. Hello, you’re my father. I can’t do it. He glances at me, still registering nothing, and then crosses the street.
He turns onto a quieter lane. Official-looking buildings give way to apartments and little neighborhood shops. He walks for a few blocks, then swings onto a pedestrian walkway lined on both sides with pretty Western-style, two- and three-story homes. I stay at the corner to watch where he goes. He passes the first three houses, and then he opens a low picket fence, enters a yard, climbs the stairs to the porch, and disappears through the front door. I take a few steps onto the walkway. I see patches of lawn, cymbidiums in bloom, and climbing vines. Bicycles lean against porches and laundry hangs on poles that jut from windows. The houses themselves are lovely—with tile roofs, nicely painted facades, and iron grillwork in art deco patterns covering windows, as peek-throughs for doors, and as decoration along the eaves and around mail slots.
This isn’t how Joe and my professors described Red China. I expected utilitarian communist quarters or even an artist’s single room. Instead, my father lives in an elegant art deco house with a lovely garden. What does this say about him exactly?
I take a deep breath, and then I climb the steps and ring the bell.
SHANGHAI GIRLS
Lisa See
A Reader’s Guide
Even Then,
It Was a Step into the Past
From the Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2009, by Lisa See
ALMOST ALL WRITERS write about place. Los Angeles writers are no exception. Walter Mosley, Michael Jaime-Becerra, and Janet Fitch, to name a few, capture the intimate details of very specific neighborhoods. Sometimes the sense of place is so strong that the natural topography, the streets and what’s on them, become as fully realized as a living, breathing character. The neighborhood I write about is Chinatown. Yes, a lot of my novels take place in China, but those stories wouldn’t—couldn’t—have been written if not for Chinatown.
I lived with my mother, Carolyn See, when I was growing up. We moved eight times before I turned nine, so Chinatown, where my paternal grandparents and my grandfather’s brothers and sister worked in the family antiques store, became home base for me. To my eyes, Chinatown didn’t change. More than that, my Chinese American relatives didn’t move or change either. Rather, they were very much stuck in the past. It was a past that entranced me when I was a child; it’s a past I long for every day, and one I got to write about in Shanghai Girls.
Shanghai Girls is about two sisters who leave China and come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages in 1938. There were four Chinatowns in Los Angeles at that time: New Chinatown—with its neon lights and gaily painted buildings on Broadway; City Market Chinatown—for produce sellers and their families; Old Chinatown—comprised of the few buildings that survived the demolition required to build Union Station; and China City—a tourist attraction bordered by Ord, Spring, Main, and Macy streets. Pearl and May, my fictional sisters, live in the Garnier Building in Old Chinatown, where the Chinese American Museum is today, and they work in China City.
China City was supposed to be an “authentic” Chinese city, but was pure fantasy and stereotype. It was surrounded by a miniature Great Wall and built out of sets left over from the filming of The Good Earth. Visitors could ride rickshaws down the Passage of One Hundred Surprises, nibble on Chinaburgers, or drink pirate grog at the Chinese Junk Café (constructed from the old set for Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife). For all its wacky charm, China City was an ill-fated place, which is how I came to be connected to it. Much of it burned less than a year after it opened. It was rebuilt only to catch fire again ten years later. In 1949, China City closed. Within a few years, my family moved their antique store, the F. Suie One Co., into China City’s last remaining large building.
As a little girl, stepping into the store was like stepping into another time and place. Two large ma
rble lions flanked the moon gate, where every day my grandfather rolled a rickshaw out to the curb to attract customers. The long central hall was edged by what had once been some of China City’s little stores and kiosks. There were upturned eaves, an old wishing well, and the remnants of a goldfish pond.
The store itself was filled with Asian antiques, with separate rooms for bronzes, textiles, and ceramics. It was a beautiful place filled with extraordinary objects and redolent of teak, moth balls, and incense, but I was afraid of the warehouse, which was dark and seemed to have shadowy things lurking in the corners. I also got nervous whenever I had to go to the workroom with its roar of saws, gorgeous Chinese calendar girls on the walls advertising this or that Chinatown café, and clouds of sawdust. My grandfather and great-uncles were partly deaf and missing fingers because they didn’t use safety equipment.
My parents were in graduate school back then and they seemed very smart. But my Chinese relatives had a different kind of knowledge that still impresses me. My great-grandfather was a south China peasant. This meant, among other things, that his children were raised to be frugal. They knew how to turn an empty 5-gallon soy sauce can into a dustpan or make and use asphalt to “antique” baskets to sell as curios. They also knew what was important: food and family, maybe in that order.
For lunch, we ate homemade char siu sandwiches, or my grandfather would take me up Ord and across Spring to what he called “the little place,” where we would pick up cha nau (what is now more familiarly known as dim sum). Sometimes my grandmother took me to visit Blackie at the Sam Sing Butcher Shop with its life-size gold-leafed pig in the window, to chat with Margaret at the International Grocery, or to look in the window of Yee Mee Loo, which I believe was the first restaurant in the city to have an open kitchen. In the long afternoons, my grandmother and Aunt Sissee would tell stories about Old Chinatown and China City, gossip about upcoming weddings or one-month parties, or indulge in a little trash talking about New Chinatown, where some of our other relatives had stores and restaurants that “we” considered too touristy.
After the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, my family’s store and many other buildings along Spring Street were condemned. What had once been China City was officially wiped off the map. My family moved the F. Suie One Co. to Pasadena, where it’s celebrating its 112th year in business.
But my grandparents, all the aunts and uncles and their spouses, are gone now. What used to be called New Chinatown is now Old Chinatown. My great-grandfather’s second family and my great-grandfather’s uncle’s sons still have stores there, but they are surrounded by trendy art galleries. Although a lot of old-timers don’t look upon the galleries with much pleasure, I don’t have anything against them, except that they aren’t from my childhood—and how silly and self-absorbed is that?
I can’t help it, though. I know that all the people and places on the Chinese side of my family who have meant so much to me and who have given me the voice and courage to write will be gone within a few years. That feeling of loss—for my childhood memories of Chinatown; for no longer being able to hear my uncles’ stories of the various Chinatowns; for no longer having people who know exactly where I fit into the huge Fong See family tree; for no longer being able to slow down to that old country pace with people who know how to convert a soy sauce container into a handy-dandy dustpan; and for no longer having a place where I can enter through a moon gate, step into another world, and just be—became the emotional heart of Shanghai Girls.
Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again,” and for some that may be true. Here, in Southern California, almost all of us have come from somewhere else. We’ve all had someone in our families who was brave enough, scared enough, or crazy enough to leave their home countries—or their childhood in any of the other forty-nine states—to come here. Some people peel off layers of the past and abandon them in the same way pioneers threw excess weight from their covered wagons. But as they say, you can run but you can’t hide. No matter how far we go, and I haven’t strayed very far myself, we still carry our homes and pasts, for good and bad, in our hearts.
Writing about the fictional Pearl and May in Shanghai Girls allowed me to step back to a time before I was born, to places I’ve loved, and to spend time in the way that only writers can with fragments of people—their stories, the lilt of their laughs, the way they move across the floor—who are gone from me now. I’ll carry those people and places with me forever, and they’ll always be a part of my writing, whether it’s in a story set in a small Chinese village or one set right here in Los Angeles Chinatown.
Reading Group Questions
and Topics for Discussion
1. Pearl’s narration is unique because of its level, calm tone throughout—even when the events she describes are horrific. One is reminded of Wordsworth’s reference to “emotion recollected in tranquility.” It is almost as if Pearl is writing in a diary. What was Lisa See trying to accomplish in setting up this counterpoint between her tone and her narrative?
2. Pearl is a Dragon and May is a Sheep. Do you think the two sisters, in their actions in the novel, are true to their birth signs?
3. Which sister is smarter? Which is more beautiful?
4. Each sister believes that her parents loved the other sister more. Who is right about this? Why?
5. Pearl says that parents die, husbands and children can leave, but sisters are for life. Does that end up being true for Pearl? If you have a sister, to what extent does the relationship between Pearl and May speak to your own experience? What’s the difference between a relationship that’s “just like sisters” and a relationship between real sisters? Is there anything your sister could do that would cause an irreparable breach?
6. Z.G. talks about ai kuo, the love for your country, and ai jen, the emotion you feel for the person you love. How do these ideas play out in the novel?
7. Shanghai Girls makes a powerful statement about the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in the United States. Were you surprised about any of the details in the novel related to this theme?
8. How would you describe the relationship between Pearl and May? How does the fact that both are, in a sense, Joy’s mother affect their relationship? Who loves Joy more and how does she show it?
9. Pearl doesn’t come to mother-love easily or naturally. At what point does she begin to claim Joy as her own? How, where, and why does she continue to struggle with the challenges of being a mother? Do you think this is an accurate portrayal of motherhood?
10. There are times when it seems like outside forces conspire against Pearl—leaving China, working in the restaurant, not finding a job after the war, and taking care of Vern. How much of what happens to Pearl is a product of her own choices?
11. Pearl’s attitude toward men and the world in general is influenced by what happened to her in the shack outside Shanghai. To what extent does she find her way to healing by the end of the novel? Did your attitude toward Old Man Louie change? How do you feel about Sam and his relationship with Pearl and Joy? Did your impression of him change as the novel progressed?
12. The novel begins with Pearl saying, “I am not a person of importance” (p. 3). After Yen-yen dies, Pearl comments: “Her funeral is small. After all, she was not a person of importance, rather just a wife and mother” (p. 246). How do you react to comments like these?
13. Speaking of Yen-yen, Pearl notes: “When we’re packing, Yen-yen says she’s tired. She sits down on the couch in the main room and dies” (p. 246). Why does Pearl describe Yen-yen’s death in such an abrupt way?
14. After Joy points out the differences in the way Z.G. painted her mother and aunt in the Communist propaganda posters, May says, “Everything always returns to the beginning” (p. 267). Pearl has her idea of what May meant, but what do you think May really meant? And what is Pearl’s understanding of this saying at the end of the novel?
15. Near the end of Shanghai Girls, May argues that Pearl and Sam have withdrawn into a world of fea
r and isolation, not taking advantage of the opportunities open to them. Do you agree with May that much of Pearl’s sadness and isolation is self-imposed? Why or why not?
16. How do clothes define Pearl and May in different parts of the story? How do the sisters use clothes to manipulate others?
17. How does food serve as a gateway to memory in the novel? How does it illustrate culture and tradition both in the novel and in your own family?
18. What influence—if any—do Mama’s beliefs have on Pearl? How do they evolve over time?
19. Pearl encounters a lot of racism, but she also holds many racist views herself. Is she a product of her time? Do her attitudes change during the course of the story?
20. What role does place—Shanghai, Angel Island, China City, and Chinatown—serve in the novel? What do you think Lisa See was trying to say about “home”?
If you would like to see an interview with
Lisa See
and learn more about
Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy,
visit www.BeautyandtheBookShow.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LISA SEE is the author of five previous novels, including the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Peony in Love and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net (which was nominated for an Edgar Award), The Interior, and Dragon Bones. She is also the author of the widely 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.
www.LisaSee.com
Shanghai Girls is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known