Well, I finished Shanghai Girls, and I must say it was a touching, highly informative novel. Not sure if it’s because of my own experiences in and love for China, but her plot, storytelling, and especially characters resounded with passion and depth. Of the three novels by Lisa See I have read so far, this one moved me most profoundly. I recommend it.  Among other things the book has inspired me to study is the so-called "Confession Program" in America in 1959 which pardoned undocumented Chinese immigrants, including the so-called "paper sons," whose personal histories in the United States were difficult to trace and verify. Talk about witch hunts – this was not one of America’s greatest moments.

Here is a piece novelist Lisa See wrote for Amazon.com….  Judging from her photo, it’s hard to glean from her face very much Chinese ancestry, right?   I guess it is what she means when she calls herself a “mutt (below).” ~Richard

Amazon Exclusive: Lisa See on Shanghai Girls
I’m writing this on a plane to Shanghai. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about all the things I want to see and do on this research trip: look deeper into the Art Deco movement in Shanghai, visit a 17th-century house in a village of 300 people to observe the Sweeping the Graves Festival, and check out some old theaters in Beijing. But as I sit on the plane, I’m not thinking of the adventures that are ahead but of the people and places I’ve left behind. I’ve been gone from home only a few hours and already I’m homesick!

This puts me in mind of Pearl and May, the characters in Shanghai Girls. This feeling--longing for home and missing the people left behind--is at the heart of the novel. We live in a nation of immigrants. We all have someone in our families who was brave enough, scared enough, or crazy enough to leave the home country to come to America. I’m a real mutt in terms of ancestry, but I know that the Chinese side of my family left China because they were fleeing war, famine, and poverty. They were lured to America in hopes of a better life, but leaving China also meant saying goodbye to the homes they’d been born in, to their parents, brothers, and sisters, and to everything and everyone they knew. This experience is the blood and tears of American experience.

Pearl and May are lucky, because they come to America together. They’re sisters and they have each other. I’ve always wanted to write about sisters and I finally got my chance with Shanghai Girls. You could say that either I’m an only child or that I’m one of four sisters, because I have a former step-sister I’ve known for over 50 years and two half-sisters from different halves who I’ve known since they were born. Is Shanghai Girls autobiographical? Not really, but my sister Katharine and I once had a fight that was like the flour fight that May and Pearl got into when they were girls. And there was an ice cream incident that I used in the novel that sent my sister Clara right down memory lane when she read the manuscript. I’m also the eldest, and we all know what that means. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the bossy know-it-all. (But if that’s true, then why are they the ones who are always right?) What I know is that we’re very different from each other and our life experiences couldn’t be more varied, and yet we have a deep emotional connection that goes way beyond friendship. My sisters knew me when I was a shy little kid, helped me survive my first broken heart, share the memories of bad family car trips, and were at my side for the happiest moments in my life. More recently, we’ve begun to share things like the loss of our childhood homes, the changing of the neighborhoods we grew up in, and the frailties and illnesses of our myriad parents.

My emotions and experiences are deeply entwined with the stories I write. So as I fly over the Pacific, of course I’m thinking about May and Pearl, the people and places they left behind, the hopes and dreams that kept them moving forward, and the strength and solace they found in each other, but I’m thinking about myself too. As soon as I get to the hotel, I’m going to call my husband and sons to tell them I arrived safely, and then I’m going to send some e-mails to my sisters.--Lisa See

(Photo © Patricia Williams)

From Publishers Weekly
See (Peony in Love) explores tradition, the ravages of war and the importance of family in her excellent latest. Pearl and her younger sister, May, enjoy an upper-crust life in 1930s Shanghai, until their father reveals that his gambling habit has decimated the family's finances and to make good on his debts, he has sold both girls to a wealthy Chinese-American as wives for his sons. Pearl and May have no intention of leaving home, but after Japanese bombs and soldiers ravage their city and both their parents disappear, the sisters head for California, where their husbands-to-be live and where it soon becomes apparent that one of them is hiding a secret that will alter each of their fates. As they adjust to marriage with strangers and the challenges of living in a foreign land, Pearl and May learn that long-established customs can provide comfort in unbearable times. See's skillful plotting and richly drawn characters immediately draw in the reader, covering 20 years of love, loss, heartbreak and joy while delivering a sobering history lesson. While the ending is ambiguous, this is an accomplished and absorbing novel. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Here is a brief plot summary From the Jacket

In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters wave off authority and tradition, they couldn’t be more different: Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid. Both are beautiful, modern, and carefree . . . until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from California to find Chinese brides.

As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the Chinese countryside, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the shores of America. In Los Angeles they begin a fresh chapter, trying to find love with the strangers they have married, brushing against the seduction of Hollywood, and striving to embrace American life even as they fight against discrimination, brave Communist witch hunts, and find themselves hemmed in by Chinatown’s old ways and rules.

I just finished reading the English translation of a work by the great modern Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, entitled THE BAD GIRL.  I was completely taken by Llosa's ability to depict with a mixture of sympathy and sadistic admiration the essence of a truly evil female as she indulges her way through foreign cultures in search of money and self-satisfaction, despite her jilted and often exploited lover's obsession with her.  Here is a partial review of the novel by Kathryn Harrison in THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl. He treated her with tenderness; she repaid him with cruelty. The bad girl mocked the good boy’s devotion, criticized his lack of ambition, exploited his generosity when it was useful to her and abandoned him when it was not. No matter how often the bad girl betrayed the good boy, he welcomed her back, and thus she forsook him many times. So it went until one of them died.

Do you recognize the story? It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of “Madame Bovary” in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23...  Vargas Llosa, too, is a master. Long one of the pre-eminent voices of postmodernism, he has transformed a revolutionary work of Western literature into a vibrant, contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s — and ’70s and ’80s — just as “Madame Bovary” did the provincial life of the 1830s. In each case, the author revisits the time and geography of his own youth in a work poised, minutely balanced, between the psychic and corporeal lives of its characters.

Creatures of appetite — for sex, money, excitement, life — bad girls serve their hunger first, and last. They are terrible and they are enviable, because they won’t settle for less than everything they want. Because, in the end, they accept not only their essential nature, but also the consequences of their choice to fulfill rather than deny it.

In short, a very powerful and satisfying read,

Not feeling very well again today, I decided not to take my morning walk... I finished Philip Roth's The Human Stain this afternoon.  A really fascinating novel, and so impressive for the way Roth so adroitly chronicles key themes of the American 20th Century through fictional characters and plots -- in this case, the human ravages of the post-Vietnam War period, Clinton's impeachment, and the savage sanctimoniousness that accompanies political correctness, just to name a few...  With the use of several long, extended soliloquies (some going on for pages at a time), Roth is a master of defining his characters by having them tell their own story.  Occasionally, Roth pauses in the narrative to reflect in almost poetic terms on the natural beauty these tragically flawed characters find themselves in...

"... There was hardly any snow left on the ground, only patches of it cobwebbing the stubble of the open field, no trail to follow, so I started bang across to the other side, where there was a thin wall of trees, and through the trees I could see another field, so I kept going until I reached the second field, and I crossed that, and through an­other, a deeper wall of trees, thick with high evergreens, and there at the other side was the shining eye of a frozen lake, oval and pointed at either end, with snow-freckled brownish hills rising all around it and the mountains, caressable-looking, curving away in the distance. Having walked some five hundred yards from the road, I'd intruded upon -- no, trespassed upon; it was almost an unlawful sense that I had ... I'd trespassed upon a setting as pristine, I would think, as unviolated, as serenely unspoiled, as envelops any inland body of water in New England. It gave you an idea, as such places do -- as they're cherished for doing -- of what the world was like be­fore the advent of man. The power of nature is sometimes very calming, and this was a calming place, calling a halt to your trivial thinking without, at the same time, overawing you with reminders of the nothingness of a life span and the vastness of extinction. It was all on a scale safely this side of the sublime. A man could absorb the beauty into his being without feeling belittled or permeated by fear... "

This expresses so beautifully much of what I feel on my morning walks in the gorgeous woods...  Tonight I will return to Zhang Ailing, if my health holds up...

Finally into my reading of the fictional writing of Zheng Ailing, having begun Love in a Fallen City last night.  Already discovering why her prose is so widely praised... it is crisp and alive!  Here is a sampling from the novella Aloeswood Incense (translation by Karen S. Kingsbury):

                                  _______________

"Now that the situation in Shanghai is improving, my parents are thinking about going back. My own idea, though, is that since my studies here are going well, I can graduate next summer. If I go back to Shanghai and start at a new school, I'll lose a year. But if I stay in Hong Kong by my­self, it will be hard to pay my living expenses, not to mention the school fees. I've been thinking this through on my own, without saying anything to my parents, because what would be the point, it would only make them worry. I thought about it for a long time, and finally decided to see if Aunt could help."

One of Madame Liang's delicate hands held the banana-leaf fan by the stem. As she twirled it around, thin rays of light shone through the slits in the leaf, spinning across her face. "Miss," she said, "it seems you've thought of everything except my own position in this matter. Even if I wanted to help you, I couldn't. If your father finds out, he'll say I've seduced a girl from a good family and stolen her away. What am I to your family? A willful degenerate who ruined the family honor, ­refused the man chosen by my brothers, went to Liang as his concubine instead, lost face for a family that was already on the way down. Bah! These declining old families, they're like out­house bricks, pure petrified stink. You were born too late-you missed all the fuss, and didn't get to hear what your father said to me then!"

"Father's got that stuffy old bookish way of thinking, and he won't change for anyone. He doesn't know how to moderate his speech-no wonder Aunt is angry. But it's been so many years, and you're a generous, fair-minded person-would you bear this grudge even against the younger generation?"

"Yes, I would! I like to chew on this rotten little memory! I won't forget what he said to me then!" She waved the fan, and the yellow rays of sunlight filtered through it onto her face, like tiger whiskers quivering around her mouth.

"There's no remaking reality.  Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes."

                     ~Philip Roth, from Everyman, a novel I just finished reading and greatly enjoyed.

This, from Emily Hussbaum's New York Times book review...

"Roth’s primary concern here is not sex but death—death as the event that blots out individuality more than any orgasm ever could. In Everyman’s memories, life itself narrows to a series of near escapes. As a 9-year-old about to be operated on for a hernia, Everyman sees the surgeon for the first time 'wearing a surgical gown and a white mask that changed everything about him—he might not even have been Dr. Smith' but rather 'someone who had just wandered into the operating room and picked up a knife.' At his father’s funeral, the dirt hitting the coffin makes 'the sound that is absorbed into one’s being like no other.' Watching family and friends tilt one by one toward the grave, he is forced to confront the horrible truth: 'Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.'

"And, step by step, his own body begins to come apart. His appendix bursts; he has one heart operation, then another. He suffers through a terrifying procedure without general anesthesia: 'It was a mistake, a barely endurable mistake, because the operation lasted two hours and his head was claustrophobically draped with a cloth, and the cutting and scraping took place so close to his ear, he could hear every move their instruments made as though he were inside an echo chamber.' With bitter precision, Roth captures the way such catastrophes reduce us all to the dependence of childhood: the search for good news in a doctor’s voice, the struggle to learn medical jargon like a new language.

"There’s no God here, no afterlife. Instead, our protagonist tries to craft meaning from his own history—and while others seek solace in art and in family, for him, these props drop away. Physical sensation is all that remains. 'Should he ever write an autobiography,' Everyman muses at one point, 'he’d call it ‘The Life and Death of a Male Body.’ ' He clings to surges of desire, ogling girls on the beach with a neediness that even he finds pathetic.

"Finally, though, it is not young women’s bodies that obsess him. It is his own. In some of Roth’s best passages, Everyman is consumed with a nearly autoerotic nostalgia for the pleasure with which he once consumed the world—narcissism turned outward, magnifying the joys of life. 'Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore. Oh, the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea . . .'

"Roth’s vision is a bleak one, but at moments like these, there’s beauty in it, too. Everyman may have drowned in sin, yes, but at least he enjoyed the swim on the way out. "

So.... how good is Philip Roth?  and this novel?  Here are a few opinions...

"The upside, of course, is that Roth is the best fiction writer America has ever produced. And Everyman is fiction as calligraphy, a ribbon of memory spun from a single stroke across a couple hundred pages, encircling, and entombing, a life." Scott Raab, Esquire

"Let's use a noun I've never used before: masterpiece. Whereas Roth's prize-laden recent fictions are a tad manipulative, in Everyman there is never any sense of a novelist trying to write a novel. Every sentence is urgent, essential, almost nonfictional....Everyman is therefore that rarest of literary achievements: a novel that disappears as it progresses, leaving in one's hands only the matters of life and death it describes." Joseph O'Neill, The Atlantic Monthly

"Philip Roth's 27th novel is a marvel of brevity, admirable for its elegant style and composition (no surprise), but remarkable above all for its audacity and ambition. It seizes unflinchingly on one of the least agreeable subjects in the domain of the novel — the natural deterioration of the body." Washington Post Book Review

"One of the literary lessons of The Great Gatsby is that in the right hands, a short novel can have deep impact. Everyman...is no instant classic, but it dives similarly deep and makes an indelible impression." Cleveland Plain Dealer

In Sunday's review of three recent books about China in this week's Washington Post book section, Susan L. Shirk opens with the following...

"Just three decades ago, China was a remote and mysterious land far removed from daily life in the United States, much like North Korea today. Children were told that if they dug a deep hole in the sand they might reach China. Their parents held vague and frightening images of a nation of ant-like workers, a massive population garbed in baggy blue uniforms and brainwashed into hatred of America. When in 1972 President Nixon visited China and Americans got their first glimpse of the actual country, the televised event excited almost as much attention as the first landing on the moon.

"Fast forward to 2007. China has become an inescapable presence in American life. A drop in Shanghai stock prices triggers a sell-off on the New York Stock Exchange. NASA moves one of its satellites to avoid debris from a Chinese weapons test. Californians wipe Chinese soot off their cars. And it is now practically impossible for an ordinary American family to go 12 months without buying something from China, as Sara Bongiorni chronicles in A Year Without "Made in China."

The other two books reviewed are CHINA GHOSTS: My Daughter's Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood by Jeff Gammage (a book I am currently reading) and CHINA ROAD: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford. Other recent books about China this year include THE ELEPHANT AND THE DRAGON: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us by Robyn Meredith, THE DRAGON AND THE FOREIGN DEVILS: China and the World, 1100 B.C. to the Present by Harry G. Gelber, and THE LONG MARCH: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth by Sun Shuyun.

Looks like I will be up late at night reading in the weeks to come. I just finished reading a murder mystery set in the Three Gorges region, Dragon Bones. written by Lisa See. ( "DRAGON BONES is most memorable for its exploration of Chinese history at the distant point where it fades into myth. [What] begins as a mystery ends up with a short course in China, its vastness both in space and in time. [These] switchbacks into the stuff of myth mean that DRAGON BONES stays with you long after the conventional thriller is forgotten." - Washington Post Book World) 

As a mystery story, I give this novel a B- for its contrived implausability; the book's underlying research and almost encyclopedic handling of detail, however, make it a rewarding read for anyone who possesses an avid interest in China past and present.

In the old days, when it was time to get married, your dad would just go over to the next village with a nice-looking cow and a string of puka beads and parade them in front of the family of a nice boy. If the settlement was acceptable to them, you'd become a blushing bride -- no muss, no fuss. You might not like your husband -- you might be lucky if you could even stand the sight of his face -- but at the very least, you knew where you stood. You'd entered a contract. You'd have the babies, cook the food and keep the home nice, and in return, with luck, you'd be well taken care of and possibly not even get beaten. The world fell into place accordingly.

But somewhere along the way, feelings entered the picture. And feelings, as Laura Kipnis will tell you in "Against Love: A Polemic" always muck things up. Because of feelings, people are drawn into those cozily familiar formations known as couples. But also because of feelings -- and because, as Kipnis reminds us, Freud noted that there's a very thin line between disgust and desire -- even the loveliest comforts of coupledom can become stifling, leading first to bad stuff (restlessness, vague feelings of wanting something more) and then, possibly, to really bad stuff: In the worst-case scenarios, formerly contented domestic partners become sex-mad Hester Prynnes, scarlet-lettering all over the place. If they're lucky, they can clean it all up after the fact with a little self-knowledge via marital counseling (all the better, in some cases, to start the cycle all over again); if they're unlucky, they end up in divorce court.

Welcome to the miserable world of modern marriage.

~ Stephanie Zacarek, from her review of "Against Love" by Laura Kipnis (An apparently provocative deconstruction of modern marriage presented with magnificent wit.  This is a book I have ordered, and look forward to reading soon.)

     But wait, I said. Aren't you always talking about expe­riencing life? All the good emotions, all the bad ones?

     "Yes."

     Well, how can you do that if you're detached?

     "Detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That's how you are able to leave it."

     "Take any emotion-love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions -- if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them-you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

     "But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, `All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a mo­ment.' "

by James Patterson

Finally got around to reading this novel, which was written by Patterson earlier to my previously mentioned Sam's Letters to Jennifer.  Here's a quote I found worthy of passing along:

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls— family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.

Interesting take on life's true priorities and how resilient we are when it comes to career changes. I'd love to hear your reaction to the author's postioning.

(NOTE: Thanks to Sylvia and her assiduous job of researching, it appears that Mr. Patterson was not quite original in the above quote.  In 1991, Brian Dyson, then CEO of Coca Cola, addressed the graduating class of Georgia Tech with these same words of advice, with an additonal dozen precepts to live by, which are worth a look here. Thanks, Sylvia!)

Just finished reading James Patterson's novel, Sam's Letters to Jennifer.  Somewhat of a shallow tear-jerker, but nonetheless well-written and enjoyable.  Needless to say, we usually enjoy books that speak to our current condition, and this one rather caught me "where I am," or where I have been recently. Amazing how a skilled author is capable of intertwining two love stories so cleverly that we are able to follow both without a moment's confusion.

The author summarizes the plot as follows: "A woman is summoned back to the town where she grew up. And in the house where she spent her most magical years she finds a series of letters addressed to her. Each of those letters is a piece of a story that will upend completely the world she thought she knew - and throw her into a love more powerful than she ever imagined could be possible. Two extraordinary love stories are entwined here, full of hope and pain and emotions that never die down."

Here's an excerpt from the author's website: http://www.twbookmark.com/features/jamespatterson/chapters/sams_pro.html

Now I have to find and read Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, which most Patterson readers agree is far superior. In the meantime, I must give serious thought to compiling a series of letters of my own, which can be passed onto some hopeless, unsuspecting soul when I am in my final stages.