China Dolls: A Novel by Lisa See
(Random House, 2014)

Lisa See is becoming one of my favorite authors. Shanghai Girls: A Novel,  published in 2009, introduced me to this Asian American writer. China Dolls is See’s ninth and latest novel. I particularly like this book because it is set totally in America and centers on three Chinese American girls in San Francisco in the late 1930s and 1940s, an intriguing time period in American history. The novel begins in 1938 and narrates the lives of three every different young Asian American girls whose lives intertwine as they are all seek employment in San Francisco. Grace Lee grew up in Plain City, Ohio, theirs the only Chinese American family in the small, midwestern town. Raised to be totally “American,”she knows nothing about her Chinese language, culture, or heritage, but she has become an exceptional dancer. However, she flees from her physically abusive father to try to find work at the upcoming world’s fair. Helen Fong, on the other hand, has been raised in a traditional way by her wealthy, influential father, and her every move is scrutinized and chaperoned. The third young woman in the trio is Ruby Tom, a daring and sometimes reckless Japanese American who is passing for Chinese, so she can dance in the newly opening Forbidden City, a Chinese nightclub. The three girls meet at the audition, and their lives weave together throughout the scramble for work during the Depression, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the subsequent interment of Japanese in American camps.

Many conflicts arise in the story, not only within each of the girls as they strive to fulfill their dreams during the Depression and World War II eras but also as they struggle with each other, their families, their love interests, and the larger political tensions. The plots and subplots are complex, and I will not ruin the suspense by summarizing them. Whereas Jami Ford’s novel about Japanese internment camps, House of the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, centers on a Chinese boy and Japanese girl who remain friends and help each other during these devastating years, China Dolls highlights the discord that often arose between the Chinese and Japanese Americans during this time period, much of it based upon anger over the recent “Rape of Nanjing,” the capital of Nationalist China, by Japan’s Imperial Army in 1937 when hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were brutally killed and tens of thousands of women sexually assaulted. needless to say, China Dolls was hard to put down.

Historical novels are my favorite genre because I learn so much about history, especially when written by masterful researchers such as See, who interviewed performers and historians, viewed documentaries and photograph collections, and read autobiographies and oral histories. In this novel, I discovered a whole new world I did not know existed, Chinese nightclubs and the Chop Suey Circuit of traveling shows, Chinese family compounds, and San Francisco’s Chinatown. Although the main characters are fictional, See includes many historical figures such as Charlie Low, Walton Biggerstaff, Ming and Ling, and Ed Sullivan. I admire her doggedness and desire for authenticity.

The novel is clearly and carefully organized. It is divided into three parts and an epilogue: “The Sun: October 1938-July 1940”; “The Moon: August 1940-September 1945”; “The Truth: December 1945-June 1948”; and “November 1988.” Each chapter told from the point of view of each of the girls and titled with the name of the girl who is telling her story as well as a subtitle that hints at the contents. My only negative comment about this work is that I wish See would have had stronger, separate voices for the three very different women as they related their lives in their separate chapters. She did employ this sporadically in their dialogue, but the same overarching “voice” still permeates each of the girls’ chapters.

I usually read historical novels for pleasure, but Lisa See is becoming a model for me as a writer when one looks at her overall pattern of publishing. She began her career by writing her family history, researching the cultural and historical background of China and America in the process. Her memoir, On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese American Family, which she published in 1995, is on my out of control “to read” list in Goodreads. The narrative centers on her great-grandfather, Fong See, who came to America and became one of the richest men in Los Angeles’s famed Chinatown. This memoir encompasses the histories of both China and America,  focuses on the mistreatment of the Chinese by American railroads, and continues with the difficulties Chinese Americans faced as they struggled through the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, and World War II. Chinese immigrants faced many conflicts, not only with the prejudice of “Americans” but also between their dreams and the realities of immigrant life. Some critics have compared On Gold Mountain to Roots, the epic African American history of Alex Haley, and it inspired an exhibition for which she was a guest curator, On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.in 2001.

After On Gold Mountain, See wrote a series called Red Princess Mysteries: Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), and Dragon Bones (2003). The series features Liu Hulan, an agent for China’s Ministry of Public Security, and David Stark, her American husband, an attorney, as they solve cross-cultural crimes. All three of these mysteries have a generous mix of Chinese history and contemporary issues, and all three of these international thrillers have been on best selling lists.

Lately, See has begun using the background she learned while writing her family history as the impetus for her most recent novels. She has been churning out a best seller every two to three years, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan set in China in the nineteenth century (2004),  Peony in Love again set in China, this time the seventeenth century (2007), Shanghai Girls set in the 1930s in Shanghai and Los Angeles (2009), Dreams of Joy (a sequel to Shanghai Girls) set in China, this time during the 1950s and 1960s during Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward (2011), and China Dolls set in the 1930s and 1940s in San Francisco (2014).

There may be a lesson to learn from the progression of See’s writing career and how she began utilizing her research to write fiction. That will give me something to think about after I finish my family history! My children have always been urging me to write a bestseller! AH, if it were only that easy!