Lisa See: teller of stories "lost, forgotten and deliberately suppressed"

Image from voa news Last month, Lisa See was a guest of Hal Wake at Incite, at the VPL. Before the event, I read Shanghai Girls. It had been sitting on my shelf since a writer friend recommended it a couple of years ago.

The story of the two sisters is a gripping tale of family, war, emigration, identity and the search for belonging. In the modern city of Shanghai, wealthy sisters Pearl and May are models of "beautiful girls." Their hand painted images are used to advertise products from batteries to bicycles. Suddenly the war and their father’s gambling habit and dangerous connections cast the family into poverty and danger. The girls’ mother, in spite of her bound feet, finds a way to help her daughters escape Shanghai.

Unfortunately, their plan to escape the marriages their father has arranged to save himself from the gang demanding repayment of his vast debts does not work. Instead of running away to Hong Kong, they escape to America to join their husbands in Los Angeles. Due to the strict screening of immigration, they are delayed on an island with other immigrants for many months. They enter the United States with a shared secret that changes both their lives for years to come.

In LA, as in China, nothing is as it seems. As situations shift and change, life becomes a long and often weary process of adaptation. When the moment of greatest crisis arises, it involves a new generation. Pearl and May. it seems have hidden the truth of their history in vain. Their subsequent travels to communist China portray two generations of desperate women, and a society in flux.