for Shanghai Girls

In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, full of great wealth and glamour, home to millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister May are having the time of their lives, thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business ... 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 Los Angeles to find Chinese brides.

"If you're looking for one of those wonderful "take me someplace exotic" books for summer, you won't do better than Shanghai Girls, the latest from novelist Lisa See, who has carved a rich career chronicling the lives of Chinese women. In Shanghai Girls, she takes readers on a lively journey both tragic and hopeful, from the Shanghai of the 1930s to Los Angeles' Chinatown in the mid-20th Century. She renders both settings with loving, precise strokes that create a world her narrator, Pearl Chin, and her sister May fully in habit along with the reader."
--The Dallas Morning News

"Stunning emotional depth"
--San Diego Union Tribune