‘Shanghai Girls’ is a cultural awakening

We first meet Pearl, the novel’s 21-year-old narrator, and 19-year-old May in Shanghai, where they are living a westernized, cosmopolitan life, and modeling for “beautiful-girl’’ advertising posters. They advocate free or at least romantic love while they party their nights away with Russian and American friends.

Their parents, in contrast, straddle a line between traditional Chinese values and Western ways. Their adoring mother, who has bound feet, believes in birth signs and fate, warning that her daughters cannot “change who they are even if [they] tried.’’ Their self-made father has earned a “fortune by Chinese standards’’ and provides a comfortable life in this “Paris of Asia.’’

This enchanted world collapses for the Chin girls and for their city. Japanese invaders bomb Shanghai just as the sisters discover that their father has lost his fortune. They are his only remaining capital, so to save his house, he arranges marriages for each of them to the sons of a former neighbor now living in California. Pearl and May submit to the marriages but deliberately miss the boat to their new land. Their father disappears, and their gallant mother, although virtually crippled, leads them on a nightmarish escape from the marauding Japanese.

From this point, the Chin family’s experience becomes an exemplar for the Chinese-American experience. Before they join the husbands they have met only once, the sisters endure demeaning interrogation at the Ellis Island of the West, San Francisco’s Angel Island. Pearl’s baby, Joy, is born in the detention center. When Sam, Pearl’s husband, learns of the baby, he is thrilled. But May’s husband, Vernon, remains childlike and intellectually challenged.

The extended family lives in Los Angeles’s China City, a fabricated tourist attraction largely built from movie sets. May, and eventually Joy, work as extras. Because her skin is less pale, college-educated Pearl, who speaks British English, waitresses and cleans family shops.