It was with dread I read the opening chapters. The Japanese attack on Shanghai was pending. The girls have no knowledge of politics and war. Pearl and May are concerned about fashion.
Their dreams of love end abruptly. Their father, Baba, is a gambler. The choices they see before them are gone. Baba has lost his business and their investments. He arranges marriages of the girls to a pair of American Chinese men.
The Japanese are disdainfully referred to as the “monkey people”. The consequences of the Japanese onslaught are as brutal as I feared. The Chinese call the attacking Japanese soldiers “dwarf bandits”.
The girls and Mama flee Shanghai.
Gravely injured during their flight, Mama whispers to Pearl that she is Pearl Dragon having been born in the year of the Dragon and “that only a Dragon can tame the fates”. She extracts a promise from Pearl that she will take care of May.
With little money and no prospects in China they leave for America. The girls have become survivors living for the present. They will deal with the future when it arrives.
They are held at the Angel Island Immigration Station, the immigration point for the Western United States. It is a prison. America does not want Chinese immigrants and the girls are rigorously questioned.
Pearl and May and a daughter, Joy, join their husbands, Sam and Vern, of the arranged marriages in Los Angeles. The combined Louie family live in a small apartment and work daily in small family businesses at China City.
Life is a hard grind. Prejudice is severe. Restaurants refuse to serve Chinese people and movie theatres force them into the balcony. The girls despair that there will never be a better future.
After persistent entreaties May is allowed to work in Hollywood where she can earn $5.00 per day.
When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor on December 7 and America joins WW II circumstances change.
Discrimination yields to war needs. Chinese men and women can go to work in armament factories such as Lockheed earning $34 a week when they are making $20 a month in the restaurant. Pearl remains a waitress at the family restaurant.
At the end of the war Sam buys a used car.
At 10 Joy is a natural salesperson. On weekends from 6 pm to midnight she sells gardenias, fifteen cents for one and twenty-five cents for a double. Tourists love the pretty little Chinese girl speaking and singing naturally in English.
Good news and bad news occur in tandem.
Fear never eases for the Chinese of California. When Mao Tse-Tung takes control of mainland China, the intense fear in America of Communists leads to the suspension of habeas corpus and arrests and some deportations of Chinese. Reading the wrong newspaper is cause for suspicion.
After a lifetime around the Methodist Church as a “rice Christian” Pearl becomes a “one-Goder” and a true believer. Her conversion is also useful in asserting she is not a Godless Communist.
The U.S. introduces a Confession Program that allows illegally entered Chinese to confess their deceit and, if they implicate another, get American citizenship.
FBI agents press Sam and Pearl trying to get them to confess to the truth which is they entered the U.S. illegally. They are resolute and deflect inquiries and admit no wrongdoing.
Unfortunately, Joy believes Red China is a worker’s paradise. May confesses that she informed on Sam to the FBI in a misguided effort to ensure they will be able to stay in America.
In an incredibly dramatic scene Pearl and May hurl accusations at the other going back to their days as girls in Shanghai.
The ending is unconventional. I have mixed emotions about the conclusion.
The harsh lives of the girls from the late 1930’s into the 1940’s reminded me that millions of people across the world endured suffering and loss that can barely be understood in the Western World of the 2st Century.
I found Shanghai Girls a hard book as I was a brother in life not a sister. The strength of the book is the relationship between Pearl and May. The plot has neither a happy beginning nor a happy middle nor a happy ending. I was moved by the spirit of the sisters who experience desperate circumstances and a discriminatory America. I doubt either could have survived without the other. Their bond is strained by circumstance and their emotions and decisions but they are sustained by their love for each other. Pearl reflects:
The last thing May says to me is “When our hair is white, we’ll still have our sister love.”
