Book Review: Shanghai Girls by Lisa See.

Pearl and younger sister May enjoy a carefree life of relative wealth and privilege in Shanghai in the 1930s. As what is known as “beautiful girls,” the sisters model for painters who create advertising calendars, wear the most beautiful and fashionable clothing, and scoff at their parents’ outdated ways. But their happy life is cruelly interrupted by their father’s confession that his gambling debts have crippled the family finances and he has sold the girls into arranged marriages in order to pay off his debts. Reluctantly, the girls marry Sam and Vern, the sons of a Chinese-American businessman who controls most of their father’s debt…but they refuse to accompany their new husbands to California.

However, when Shanghai is bombed by the Japanese the girls and their mother are forced to flee for California after all. An encounter with Japanese soldiers along the way leaves their mother dead and older sister Pearl scarred mentally and physically. Upon arrival at the Angel Island immigration base in San Francisco, the girls are interned for months—just long enough for May to give birth to a child who is not her husband’s, and for Pearl to adopt it as her own. However, even once released into the custody of their new family, Pearl and May learn that their new homeland does not really want them, and that here they are no longer beautiful girls, but second class citizens forced to live and work only in designated areas.

Filled with fascinating historical detail and well-drawn, complex characters, “Shanghai Girls” will not disappoint. My only quibble was the ending, which felt rushed and unfinished, as though the author had written herself into a corner and didn't quite know how to write her way back out. But excepting that only, this is a very well-written and fully-fleshed historical.