In April 2009, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez handed President Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. Published in 1971, this treatise details the history of European colonization of Latin America and argues that the United States has exercised a negative influence in the region throughout recent times.

Obama might now want to consider adding Galeano’s latest work—Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried—to his library.

A provocative and wholly original interpretation of human history, Mirrors consists of nearly 600 vignettes and succinct essays written in a meditative prose that leaves oneyou virtually breathless for its beauty and piquancy. Galeano’s writing style, which lilts in rhythmic back-and-forth exposition, then culminates into a final, salient point, parallels Gabriel García Márquez and John Dos Passos. However, neither magical realism nor surrealism is at work here—realism is.

Galeano believes the authentic history of mankind has been falsified by convention and the élites who retain ultimate authority over what is to be remembered, recorded, and propagated. His task is to unveil the realities of human existence that impact and form our shared identity throughout time—be they love, war, racism, creativity, repression, poverty, valor, prosperity, knowledge, diversity, death, memory, tyranny, or contentment.

Make no mistake, though. Mirrors is no easy stroll through the annals of centuries-old, oft-told chronicles of our past. While it offers moments of lightheartedness, it’s mostly a solemn book, free of smug congratulations, exalting the integrity of humankind. Galeano demands that the historical record be viewed through a revisionist lens, wresting history from its glut of constraining inaccuracies to reclaim truth-telling and exactitude.

In doing so, he creates a masterwork of mosaics. Stories of Harriet Tubman; Ho Chi Minh; Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, female Japanese writers whose novels "share the rare honor of being praised a millennium after the fact;" Hollywood; Vermeer; Queen Juana of Castile; Lenin; the Marquis de Sade; the Barbie doll; "outlawed writer" Isaac Babel; Peruvian liberator Túpac Amaru; Darwin; King Midas of Phrygia; Jomo Kenyatta; ITT, BMW, and IBM; Aphrodite and Apollo; and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson appear in a wondrous and seemingly endless procession of people, places, epochs, and events.

You have to marvel at Mirrors’ magnitude and Galeano’s dexterity. In the space of a ten- to fifteen-line narrative, he constructs scene, personhood, and a moment in time with precise poetic finesse and pieces together the magnificence and savagery of our "human adventure" here on Earth. Here are examples of Galeano’s thrifty, yet profound style:

“Word Smugglers”

    Yang Huanyi, whose feet were crippled in infancy, stumbled through life until the autumn of the year 2004, when she died just shy of her hundredth birthday.
    She was the last to know Nushu, the secret language of Chinese women.
    Their female code dated from ancient times. Barred from male language, which they could not write, women founded a clandestine one, out of men’s reach. Fated to be illiterate, they invented an alphabet of symbols that masqueraded as decorations and was indecipherable to the eyes of their masters.
    Women sketched their words on garments and fans. The hands that embroidered were not free. The symbols were.

“Resurrection of Camille”

    The family declared her insane and had her committed.
    Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum; held captive.
    It was for her own good, they said.
    In the asylum, a freezing prison, she refused to sketch or sculpt.
    Her mother and her sister never visited her.
    Once in a while her brother, Paul the saint, turned up.
    When Camille the sinner died, no one claimed her body.
    It was years before the world discovered that Camille had been more than the humiliated lover of Auguste Rodin.
    Nearly half a century after her death, her works came back to life. They traveled and they astonished: bronze that dances, marble that cries, stone that loves. In Tokyo, the blind asked and were allowed to touch the sculptures. They said the figures breathed.

    Mirrors follows a chronology—beginning with the delightfully paradoxical "Origin Of Man"—but doesn’t adhere to a fixed timeline. In story after story, you learn about acts of virtue and contributions to cultural identity that aren’t commonly known or valued, because they’ve been "rewarded with collective amnesia." "Legacy Denied" describes the eight-centuries-old "Muslim legacy" left behind by the Moors in Spain, "whose culture shone there as nowhere else" and of which "[m]any Spaniards know nothing." "Another Missing Father" tells of forgotten founding father Robert Carter and the freeing of his 450 slaves 70 years before the abolition of slavery, a deed that "condemned him to solitude and oblivion."

And the attribute that may be most praiseworthy—that forces Mirrors to poke at your conscience and stay in your memory long after you’ve finished its last entry—is the way Galeano fuses past and present to demonstrate that there’s no veering away from time’s continuum. The present is molded from the past, just as the future is the fusion of every moment that precedes it:

“Guernica”

    Paris, spring of 1937: Pablo Picasso wakes up and reads.
    He reads the newspaper while having breakfast in his studio.
    His coffee grows cold in the cup.
    German planes have razed the city of Guernica. For three hours the Nazi air force chased and machine-gunned people fleeing the burning city.
    General Franco insists that Guernica has been set aflame by Asturian dynamiters and Basque pyromaniacs from the ranks of the Communists.
    Two years later in Madrid, Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German forces in Spain, sits beside Franco at the victory parade: killings Spaniards was Hitler’s rehearsal for his impending world war.
    Many years later in New York, Colin Powell makes a speech at the United Nations to announce the imminent annihilation of Iraq.
    While he speaks, the back of the room is hidden from view, Guernica is hidden from view. The reproduction of Picasso’s painting, which hangs there, is concealed by an enormous blue cloth.
    UN officials decided it was not the most appropriate backdrop for the proclamation of a new round of butchery.

In The Fray Contributor

 

About one-third into her new book, Barbara Ehrenreich recalls when she first lost hope in positive thinking while attending the National Speakers Association convention — the mecca of motivation. Leaving one panel, Ehrenreich asks one attendee if she is troubled by the use of quantum physics to explain how positive thoughts can manipulate matter. The woman, a “life coach” from California, smiles indulgently and asks, “You mean it doesn’t work for you?”

Aghast, Ehrenreich wonders, “If it ‘worked for me’ to say that the sun rises in the west, would she be willing to go along with that?” What empirical reality can we agree upon “if science is something you can accept or reject on the basis of personal tastes?”

What kind, indeed. But then, positive thinking isn’t known for its cozy relationship with science — or reality. So argues Barbara Ehrenreich, renowned muckraker launched to fame by her savage exposé Nickel and Dimed, in her latest work, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In a punchy 200-page critique, Ehrenreich cracks open the sugarcoating of “Think Positive!” and shows us the poison pill underneath. At a time when more and more Americans are choosing their own reality, whether deciding which news to hear, which science to believe, or how much debt they can afford, Ehrenreich’s book is a much-needed call for us to, in all possible terms, get a grip.

What could be so bad about thinking things are good? It’s a question we rarely ask ourselves amid constant exhortations to find a silver lining, be a team player, and always look on the bright side. From Oprah’s inspiring guests to the syrupy tales of Chicken Soup for the Soul, we are told that we too will soar to new heights if we just keep thinking happy thoughts.

Sadly, this just isn’t true. Not that Ehrenreich would rather we celebrate hopelessness and despair. But positive thinking demands we focus on ideal outcomes at the expense of recognizing real problems. “A chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he ‘hopes’ to win tomorrow’s battle,’” Ehrenreich observes. “He or she wants one whose plans include the possibility that things may go very badly, and fall-back positions in case they do.”

Yet in recent decades our fanatical devotion to optimism has led us pretty deep down the rabbit hole, into a world where Newtonian laws can be warped by our whims. Self-help guides like the 2006 bestseller The Secret promise that the “law of attraction” allows you to “visualize what you want and it will be ‘attracted’ to you.” Literally: Picture what you need, and the universe shall provide.

Ehrenreich traces the seeds of positive thinking to a group of 19th-century philosophers struggling to shake off the existential dread of Calvinism. Their New Thought movement held that “illness was a disturbance in an otherwise perfect Mind and could be cured through the Mind alone.” Ehrenreich attributes today’s industry of positive thinking — complete with books, posters, and 10-step programs — to social and economic change in the 20th century. As “more and more middle-class people were … employees of larger corporations, where the objects of their labor were likely to be not physical objects … but other people,” she theorizes, “interpersonal relations came to count for more than knowledge and experience.”

Being positive was a veritable survival skill during the 1980s era of downsizing. CEOs employed motivational speakers, self-help books, and company retreats en masse to placate survivors of these brutal rounds of firing. Three decades later, pep has become the norm, even as our actual happiness has declined. We’re the 23rd happiest country in the world according to a recent analysis, surpassed by “even the supposedly dour Finns.” (We also account for two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants.)

Unbridled cheer has spread far beyond office culture, greeting Americans in church and even through academia. Bright-Sided’s chapters on megachurch “pastorprenuers” like Joel Osteen and “positivity psychology” are Ehrenreich at her best, bubbling with undisguised contempt. At Osteen’s church, we hear Joel and his wife Victoria celebrating the victory God gave them over a flight attendant who sued her for assault. (Victoria had demanded the attendant remove a stain on her first-class seat, then tried to enter the cockpit to complain when it was not blotted immediately.) It’s hard not to share Ehrenreich’s disbelief: “I look around cautiously to see how everyone else is reacting to this celebration of a millionaire’s court victory over a working woman … The crowd, which … appears to contain few people who have ever landed a lucrative book contract or flown first-class, applauds Victoria enthusiastically.”

Much of Ehrenreich’s wrath, unfortunately, seems spent by the book’s final chapter, where she unveils the pièce de la resistance: how positive thinking created the recession. She makes a strong case for how deluded CEOs refused to heed clear warnings about the toxic assets we now know as subprime mortgages. And she shows clearly how we dug ourselves deeper by believing the gurus who encouraged us to dream of “larger homes, quick promotions, and sudden acquisitions of great wealth” even as wages declined.

But then she seems to give up. After eking out 17 pages on her theory of the recession, the seemingly exhausted Ehrenreich cobbles together an even briefer postscript and drops the pen. More effective is the introduction to the book, in which she rants about how positive thinking pastes over our deepest social problems: “[It] takes the effort of positive thinking to imagine that America is the ‘best’ … Our children routinely turn out to be more ignorant of basic subjects like math and geography than their counterparts in other industrialized nations … We have … the greatest level of inequality in wealth and income.” In other words, positive thinking encourages neglect of our deepest social ills.

Such big-picture conclusions, unfortunately, are rare. We’re left feeling as though Ehrenreich has held back in all the wrong places, pouring vitriol into her anecdotes but failing to tie them into the all-encompassing “screw this” indictment that she alludes to in her introduction.

Yet fear not, those looking for the activist who wrote Nickel and Dimed. While the book is more diagnostic than prescriptive, Ehrenreich does urge us to disengage from the self-absorption positive thinking requires and invest ourselves in creating a genuinely happier world. “Surely it is better to … search one’s inner self for strengths rather than sins,” she writes. “The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all … Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?”

We indeed have real work to do. And we need to start by facing reality.

Chelsea Rudman Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.

 

The protagonists of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel Up in the Air and Jonathan Miles’ 2008 book Dear American Airlines represent opposite ends of the air-travel spectrum. Consultant Ryan Bingham, the narrator of Kirn’s book, spends virtually his entire life in transit, professing to prefer the rhythms of travel to a more stationary existence, while translator Benjamin R. Ford of Dear American Airlines finds a once-in-a-lifetime family obligation a good reason to leave his Manhattan townhouse for the first time in decades. Still, both these characters reflect that, however ambivalent Americans may be toward air travel, it’s a privilege they take for granted and are loath to give up.

Up in the Air’s Bingham has just resigned from his job as a “career transition counselor,” called in to talk to employees who have just lost their jobs — an occupation he fell into because he “wasn’t strong,” though it’s not hard to imagine him returning to it in this current economic downturn. (A movie adaptation starring George Clooney as a noticeably older Bingham, this time tailed by a bright-eyed trainee who openly challenges his lifestyle, is scheduled for release later this month.)

Bingham’s primary means of entertainment during the near-constant traveling (so intense, he has even given up his apartment) comes from racking up miles on the fictional Great West Airlines in pursuit of the elusive one-million-mile mark. He’s idealized the moment down to where it ought to happen (over the Great Plains) and how he’ll celebrate (with a disposable camera and a copy of a story he wrote in college about his happy childhood).

Bingham sees himself as a citizen of “Airworld,” a largely anonymous, sanitized life in which recognizable chain restaurants represent open arms and every city is a series of ring roads, while simultaneously aware that his ardor for it is perhaps the most unique thing about him. As he faces the end of his traveling days, Kirn suggests he won’t be able to give up his highly mobile lifestyle by writing in a love interest (who, in a twist, was laid off by him on a previous trip) and dangling in front of him the prospect of working for a mysterious international conglomerate called MythTech, which Bingham believes is spying on him at various stops. While Kirn begins his book with the itinerary of Bingham’s last week, his destinations are unimportant; for Bingham, the cities are meaningless without the miles that will allow him to achieve his goal.

Bingham would never want to get in line for security behind Benjamin R. Ford, the narrator of Dear American Airlines, whose lengthy complaint forms the text of Miles’ debut novels. (Both narrators are writers, though Ford is largely a translator; Bingham’s book The Garage, which he discovers he unwittingly plagiarized from one of his counselees, is a vacuous management parable.) Unlike Bingham, Ford is not a frequent traveler, nor is he on the road on business. After receiving an invitation to his estranged daughter’s wedding in California, he decides to book a ticket based on a long-ago gibe he made to the girl’s mother about walking her down the aisle. (Both women are named Stella; since Ford formerly lived in New Orleans, inevitably he finds himself locked out of their shared house before his wife leaves him, yelling out her name before feeling properly foolish.)

Ford catalogs the indignities of his position — stranded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport — as if experiencing the well-known inconveniences of air travel for the first time: Each type of seating is uniquely uncomfortable; the best offer of a diversion is Sudoku; and the stores in the terminal don’t carry his brand of cigarette. As Ford periodically leaves the terminal for a smoke break, he believes that one particular guard has been singling him out for extra searches. For a middle-aged white man, such scrutiny is merely an irritant, but his predicament hints at the very real debate over racial profiling at security checkpoints.

As one of thousands stranded at O’Hare due to an undefined error, Ford is on the verge of not being able to fulfill his promise — “Dear American Airlines,” he writes, “since when did you start canceling flights in midair?” — but his request for a ticket refund blossoms under author Miles’ careful cultivation into an homage to a life well lived as well as a laundry list of regrets. In the final pages, he confesses that he was thinking of committing suicide at his destination, making his unexpected layover a Beckettian pause, not just a disturbing interruption. Like Bingham, Ford is on a quest, and he is never so insistent on his right to travel as when he believes that it is about to be taken away by the titular airline.

In believing himself alone in “Airworld,” Ryan Bingham errs; more Americans than ever took to the skies in the past 10 years thanks to discounted rates and the rise of new carriers to challenge the legacy airlines. But if the doomsayers are correct, Bingham’s way of life may become the stuff of fiction in a generation or two. Even though oil prices have fallen from last year’s highs, experts continue to predict the demise of affordable mass air travel.

In “Airworld,” it’s the Binghams, not the Fords, who fill most of its seats. Take away the road warriors — or make their journeys unnecessary with videoconference equipment and “greener” office policies — and the legacy carriers will be courting bankruptcy within a year. But the Fords, who choose to travel, will suffer the most as commercial flights become more expensive. In the closing pages of Dear American Airlines, Ford is finally headed to his destination, planning to make it if not to his daughter’s wedding, then to the reception. The obstacles to his journey have, if not exactly melted away, only served to convince him of its necessity.

In The Fray Contributor

 

The Heart of the Buddha is a moving novel about a woman who travels to the remote Asian country of Bhutan in search of her beloved twin sister. Author Elsie Sze uses the journey of Ruth Souza to shed light not only on a country that is fascinatingly different from the western world, but also on the Buddhist religion and the relationship between two very different women. Call it, perhaps, “chick lit” Bhutan style.

Ruth’s sister Marian is a librarian from Toronto (like Sze herself). She writes regularly to Ruth while working in Bhutan, but disappears after completing her six-month contract. Concerned about not hearing from Marian in over two months, Ruth embarks on her journey. The novel interweaves Ruth’s first-person account of her experiences with a “memoir” Marian had written about her life in Bhutan, which is Ruth’s “only key to the mystery of her disappearance.”

In the memoir, Marian reveals herself as impulsive (maybe an alter ego for Sze herself) and more in touch with her sensuality than the more straight-laced Ruth. She has gone to Bhutan to have “an experience few will ever have” and, on an excursion into the Himalayas, ambles by a naked man preparing an outdoor steam bath. “He had an athletic form, with broad shoulders, brawny arms, a well-proportioned torso: an Apollo in action,” she writes in the memoir. She is interested yet embarrassed when she realizes he is a Buddhist monk.

Six days later, they bump into each other under ordinary circumstances (dressed), and while conversing, seem to find themselves falling head over heels for each other. Unfortunately, Buddhist monks aren’t allowed to experience carnal love (reminiscent of Catholic taboos), but since the librarian and the monk cannot ignore their passion, they take a secret and dangerous journey into Chinese-occupied Tibet to retrieve lost Bhutanese religious writings in order to atone for the sin that will be committed when he leaves monkhood. The countryside and religion of Bhutan are revealed to us as the memoir unfolds.

For her part, Ruth finds herself attracted to her Bhutanese travel guide. She too tries to deny these feelings, but passion, again, is hard to resist. “At last we were no longer (just) sending signals with looks and touches like high school boys and girls,” she says. Marian, who is usually guided by her feelings, becomes more rational, while Ruth, the logical one, becomes more passionate. Sister stories are often tales of integration of conflicting aspects of oneself. As Ruth says, “Perhaps, like the yin-yang circle, we complement each other, and our differences make us whole.”

Sze is Chinese-Canadian herself and identifies the sisters as Chinese-Portuguese. She lived in Bhutan while researching the book and lovingly evokes the atmosphere and landscape of the country. Ruth visits a small town to attend a religious event, and she describes the scenery as “golden terraced mustard fields, scattered with farmhouses and prayer flags, sloped down to a river valley. In the further distance were hazy layered foothills ranged across the sky like a blushing dream. A majestic chir pine decked with a white prayer flag at its top trembled by my balcony.”

However, the focus is more on the Buddhist religion of Bhutan than its everyday culture. The use of phallic symbols and statues to portray sex in the Buddhist tradition is depicted humorously. Ruth listens to a loudmouthed couple from Texas who describe their experience at a special temple:

“As soon as I walked in, this young monk touched my head with an ivory phallus, then a bamboo one,” Marge said, breaking into a brassy chuckle. “At my age, it will take a lot more.”

“He hit me with them too. I bet they’re more potent than Viagra. I feel I can carry on until I’m ninety,” her husband cackled.

Sze suggests that this way of combining sexuality with religion is strange and very different for those who come from the Christian-based world in which body and spirit are separate.

What’s intriguing but confusing is that the handsome young monk who Marian meets isn’t allowed to indulge when he desires the librarian. Sze doesn’t explain why monks can’t have a relationship. Is it similar to Catholicism insofar as clergy are committed only to their service to God? Since Buddhism appears to appreciate physical love, it would be fascinating to know why the monks can’t express their sexuality.

The parallel stories of the sisters are interesting, but the flow of the story seems a bit stilted. Sze says she wrote this book in English only and doesn’t feel proficient in Cantonese. But the book feels like it was written by someone whose second language is English, and Sze’s prose has a slight hesitancy. Or maybe the writing style just demonstrates the innocence of sheltered young women as they experience first love. Ah, charmingly shy naïvete!

In The Fray Contributor

   

     The rescue in June 1993 of nearly 300 illegal immigrants from a ship called the Golden Venture which had run aground off Queens, New York, was the culmination of a harrowing voyage that had begun 120 days earlier. The immigrants were from China’s Fujian province, lured, like so many others, by the promise of freedom in America. Considering their ordeal and the repressive regime from which they had fled, they might have expected to be welcomed with open arms. But as international crime reporter Patrick Radden Keefe shows in his incredibly well-researched The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, they instead became unwitting victims of the ambiguities of U.S. immigration policy. Some would be held in prison for nearly four years while applying for political asylum.

    The ill-fated voyage of the Golden Venture was arranged by Cheng Chui Ping, a grandmother and Fujianese immigrant to New York known around Chinatown as Sister Ping, who had thrived as a “snakehead,” shuffling mostly young Fujianese men from country to country with fake passports and visas, eventually landing them at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. She was, says Keefe, “something like a village elder in the claustrophobically intimate corner of Chinatown where she resided.” One admirer told a local newspaper she was “even better than Robin Hood.”

    Smuggling-by-air was expensive so, hoping to increase her profit margins, Ping partnered with a Chinatown gang member in purchasing the Golden Venture to make regular trips to the United States. The old vessel survived the crash off Queens, but just barely — the crew was so clueless that it nearly docked the boat off South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials took the passengers into custody.

    The grounding of the Golden Venture happened on the watch of President Bill Clinton, who, according to Keefe, was still smarting from the June 1980 riot of thousands of Cuban refugees from the Mariel Boatlift who had been housed in the Fort Chaffee Reserve Center in Arkansas. Amid outrage over his decision to accept the refugees, he lost his bid for re-election as Arkansas governor later that year. Clinton, suggests Keefe, wasn’t going to give his critics any more ammunition by appearing “soft” on the Golden Venture passengers.

    Bill Slattery, director of the INS’ New York office, led the charge to classify the passengers as criminals, not victims. Shipped out of state to Pennsylvania and Louisiana for their asylum hearings, they were out of reach of the pro bono representation they could have gotten in New York, where many more immigration cases were handled. At the time, notes Keefe, “asylum caseloads were exploding, and immigration judges were often underresourced and overworked. As a result, this most solomonic determination — who should be saved and who should be sent back — became an arbitrary and erratic activity.”

    The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 made the United States more sympathetic toward Chinese immigrants, but that attitude didn’t last — the State Department, working with Slattery, felt secure in disregarding most of the Golden Venture passengers’ stories of persecution. One passenger told Keefe he left his home in Fujian at age 17 after police told his family he was being targeted for arrest. Of the boat’s total payload, only about 10 percent were granted asylum.

    These days, ambitious sons and daughters of China are just as likely to move to a different province to learn English and management skills, as chronicled in Leslie T. Chang’s excellent Factory Girls, as they are to stow away on a ship to an uncertain and low-paying job on foreign shores. But human smuggling on a global scale is far from over, and those who formerly came to the United States from China will be replaced by those from Iraq or Morocco or Ecuador. As Keefe points out, “spoiler countries” have not ratified the United Nations’ anti-smuggling protocol, effectively making them portals for “snakeheads” and their passengers. Those traveling on the Golden Venture passed through at least two of these countries — a low count compared to some of Sister Ping’s other voyages.

    Was the Golden Venture an aberration? The current debate over health care reform certainly suggests future refugees could suffer a similar fate (anti-immigration activists have portrayed immigrants as a costly drain on any publicly-funded health care system). “We don’t need illegals,” one protester yelled at a town hall meeting last month in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “Send ’em all back. Send ’em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

    As for Sister Ping, she was arrested in Hong Kong in 2000 after six years on the lam from U.S. officials, using false passports and contact with her husband to continue plying her “snakehead” trade. She is now serving a 35-year sentence in federal prison — mandatory retirement in the land of the free.

In The Fray Contributor

Shanghai Girls: A Novel
By Lisa See
Random House. 336 pages.

To dismiss Shanghai Girls, with its flowery, pink-tinged cover, as “women’s fiction” or even as a light summer read belies the very serious nature of author Lisa See’s ambitious novel. What starts as an amusing tale about two young women — sisters Pearl and May — frolicking through bohemian Shanghai, posing for paintings in their new silk gowns, and wondering which of them is prettiest, turns sinister quite quickly. The violence that engulfs China with the advent of World War II parallels the violence that they experience when they truly begin to understand their status as women. They are bargaining chips for their father, who has traded them away in arranged marriages to pay off his debts. They are targets for prowling Japanese soldiers. And when they come through these struggles with the scars to prove it, they become workhorses and, hopefully, son-producers for their shared father-in-law in America (they’re paired off with brothers in arranged marriages), although eventually, they form real family ties with the husbands they’ve been bound to on paper.

From escaping the shelling of a fashionable Shanghai street, to crouching in abandoned shacks as they listen to soldiers on the march committing murder, to tossing and turning on their long trans-Pacific journey, to sitting stoically through endless interrogation as they try to enter this country, the sisters endure atrocities and privation. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of their story is its deviation from the “immigrant-family-makes-good” cliché. Try as they might — and they do try — Pearl, May, their husbands, and even a college-bound daughter are never quite accepted into mainstream American society. In fact, as the story draws to a close, they’re being interrogated by the FBI for alleged communist ties, with calamitous results.

See, the daughter of novelist Carolyn See, is a Chinese American herself who has devoted much of her work — including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005) and Peony in Love (2007) — to exploring Chinese culture and history. As we follow Pearl and May’s journey in Shanghai Girls, See tells dozens of historical stories that illuminate the struggles of her characters. One of these stories captures the glamour and excitement of prewar, pre-Communist Shanghai, full of smoky cafés, artists, radicals, and beautiful women. There are also incredibly dark stories about the Japanese invasion of China, the fate of immigrants stalled in limbo at California’s notorious Angel Island, the endless striving of immigrant families once they reached these shores, and the endless discrimination that met them here. There’s even a story about the way Hollywood treated Asian characters and actors (not very well, needless to say).

But the sweeping narrative is anchored by the intimacy of the two women. Together throughout all their trials and tribulations, Pearl and May are classic fictional sisters — both unimaginably close and fearfully jealous. “She’s funny; I’m criticized for being too serious. She has an adorable fleshiness to her; I’m tall and thin,” Pearl, the narrator, explains in her staccato, singsong tone.

She’s convinced that she’s the sister everyone thinks is inferior, the sister who has borne the most burdens over time. After their family suffers a horrific wartime trauma on the road out of Shanghai, Pearl’s resentment of her sister simmers beneath the surface for decades, even if she and May continue to stick together and even adore each other. But in the course of several knock-down, drag-out fights between the sisters, See suddenly, like a flash of light, switches to May’s point of view. “You’ve always been jealous and envious of me, but you were the one who was cherished by Mama and Baba,” May says to her sister in one of the novel’s final scenes. When she speaks, it’s sure to put a wrinkle or three in Pearl’s version of the truth.

Even though May’s final revelation of a long-kept secret is ultimately predictable, the sisters’ dueling outlooks create tension when the plot slows down, and their ability to reconcile and forge on together provides a ray of hope. “Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life,” Pearl explains.

See — whose copious acknowledgments at the end of the book confirm her considerable research — arrives at an uncomfortable truth about the American past. America, she shows, hasn’t simply laid out its golden-hued dream at the feet of hardworking newcomers. Those who work double shifts and play by the rules don’t (and didn’t) necessarily end up in the house with the white picket fence, particularly if they look too different or are plagued by cruel stereotypes. But to her credit, See also infuses Shanghai Girls with a positive message about forgiveness and the way friendship and family can help us pick ourselves back up even after the worst has happened.

UPDATE, 3/8/13: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.

 

To dismiss Shanghai Girls, with its flowery, pink-tinged cover, as “women’s fiction” or even as a light summer read belies the very serious nature of author Lisa See’s ambitious novel. What starts as an amusing tale about two young women — sisters Pearl and May — frolicking through bohemian Shanghai, posing for paintings in their new silk gowns and wondering which of them is prettiest, turns sinister quite quickly. The violence that engulfs China with the advent of World War II parallels the violence that they experience when they truly begin to understand their status as women. They are bargaining chips for their father, who has traded them away in arranged marriages to pay off his debts. They are targets for prowling Japanese soldiers. And when they come through these struggles with the scars to prove it, they become workhorses and, hopefully, son-producers for their shared father-in-law in America (they’re paired off with brothers in arranged marriages), although eventually, they form real family ties with the husbands they’ve been bound to on paper.

From escaping the shelling of a fashionable Shanghai street, to crouching in abandoned shacks as they listen to soldiers on the march committing murder, to tossing and turning on their long trans-Pacific journey, to sitting stoically through endless interrogation as they try to enter this country, the sisters endure atrocities and privation. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of their story is its deviation from the “immigrant-family-makes-good” cliché. Try as they might — and they do try — Pearl, May, their husbands, and even a college-bound daughter, are never quite accepted into mainstream American society. In fact, as the story draws to a close, they’re being interrogated by the FBI for alleged communist ties, with calamitous results.

See, the daughter of novelist Carolyn See, is a Chinese American herself who has devoted much of her work — including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005) and Peony in Love (2007) — to exploring Chinese culture and history. As we follow Pearl and May’s journey in Shanghai Girls, See tells dozens of historical stories that illuminate the struggles of her characters. One of these stories captures the glamor and excitement of prewar, pre-Communist Shanghai, full of smoky cafés, artists, radicals, and beautiful women. There are also incredibly dark stories about the Japanese invasion of China, the fate of immigrants stalled in limbo at California’s notorious Angel Island, the endless striving of immigrant families once they reached these shores, and the endless discrimination that met them here. There’s even a story about the way Hollywood treated Asian characters and actors (not very well, needless to say).

But the sweeping narrative is anchored by the intimacy of the two women. Together throughout all their trials and tribulations, Pearl and May are classic fictional sisters — both unimaginably close and fearfully jealous. “She’s funny; I’m criticized for being too serious. She has an adorable fleshiness to her; I’m tall and thin,” Pearl, the narrator, explains in her staccato, singsong tone.

She’s convinced that she’s the sister everyone thinks is inferior, the sister who has borne the most burdens over time. After their family suffers a horrific wartime trauma on the road out of Shanghai, Pearl’s resentment of her sister simmers beneath the surface for decades, even if she and May continue to stick together and even adore each other. But in the course of several knockdown, drag-out fights between the sisters, See suddenly, like a flash of light, switches to May’s point of view. “You’ve always been jealous and envious of me, but you were the one who was cherished by [our parents],” May shouts to her sister in one of the novel’s final scenes. When she speaks, it’s sure to put a wrinkle or three in Pearl’s version of the truth.

Even though May’s final revelation of a long-kept secret is ultimately predictable, the sisters’ dueling outlooks create tension when the plot slows down, and their ability to reconcile and forge on together provides a ray of hope. “Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life,” Pearl explains.

See — whose copious acknowledgments at the end of the book confirm her considerable research — arrives at an uncomfortable truth about the American past. America, she shows, hasn’t simply laid out its golden-hued dream at the feet hardworking newcomers. Those who work double shifts and play by the rules don’t (and didn’t) necessarily end up in the house with the white picket fence, particularly if they look too different or are plagued by cruel stereotypes. But to her credit, See also infuses Shanghai Girls with a positive message about forgiveness and the way friendship and family can help us pick ourselves back up even after the worst has happened.

Sarah Marian Seltzer