I should say upfront that if I were reviewing this book for my normal circle of friends, I should give it 1-star, as it contains little of personal interest; however, I am willing to believe that there are other people who probably would enjoy this book, and for that speculative audience it is probably quite well done. I picked this book (I already count too many "I"s in this review, but in this case I really need to distinguish between my own preferences and that of the author, for they differ) because the cover blurb promised a spirited dive into the interface between Chinese and English languages, a thought-provoking jaunt into the subtle mechanisms by which language can influence culture and thought.

Perhaps this could take a long historical view on how the silkily sibilant languages of the orient indirectly led to those cultures' uniquely non-dualogical viewpoint. Or it could have been an intensely personal experience of the ontological shift between ideogrammatic and alphabetical written tongues, of the dichotomy between word-as-image of the thing itself, the referent behind the name, and word-as-abstraction, an occasionally unique permutation of arbitrary and increasingly dehumanitized character bytes. Or best of all, it could have painted an entirely new and unexpected perspective on the many different ways in which East meets West in philosophy, paternal obligation, self-image, notions of achievement, and love.

But this was none of these, not really. This was a romance, and a depressingly tragic one at that. In the end, everyone ends up unhappy. Everyone makes poor decisions throughout, which bring predictable grief and trauma to their loved ones. Maybe this is real life, but I don't need to read a book to find tales of misery -- I can get that on any page of the Metro I find crumpled in the trash-bins of workaday city life.

I will not go so far as to say there is no room in literature for tragedy: for instance, I admit a fondness for King Lear, especially Kurosawa's oriental adaptation Ran. But this novel did not engage me in any sense of universal suffering, other than reaffirming the tired aphorisms that men are insensitive, workaholic, violent, selfish pigs; women are downtrodden, self-sacrificing, unappreciated martyrs; and white women, even ones with PhD's, are closet succubi who use their unwholesome curves to bewitch and corrupt Asian men proud and true. I've heard that before, and didn't really need to hear it again.

So: two stars, for an admittedly well-written and evocative story of romance, tragedy, and betrayal set amidst the hospitals, tea rooms, and boardrooms of bustling, ancient Shanghai; if you're into that sort of thing. Nothing higher, because while I'm far from expert in this type of novel, I didn't see anything that struck me as exceptional (unless the bar for this genre is even lower than I'd guessed).