China Dolls by Lisa See (2014)

My Posts on Four Prior Novels by Lisa See

China Dolls is the fifth novel by Lisa See I have read.  Obviously if I did not really enjoy reading her historical novels I would not have read so many.  I have read Shangai Girls, Peony in Love, Snow Flower and The Secret Fan and Dreams of Joy.  See has had numerous books on The New York Times Best Seller List and I will be surprised if China Dolls does not also become a best seller.  

China Dolls begins in 1938 in a small town in Ohio. American is just coming out of a ten year economic depression.    Like all her work I have read, the central characters are mostly Chinese women emigrants to the USA and their children.  The story is told from three different points of view.  

Grace is a small town girl from Ohio, born in America.  Her father, he runs a laundry, has beaten and verbally abused her for years.  At eighteen she gets up the courage to leave and buys a bus ticket to San Francisco.  She had seen a notice in the newspaper about thousands of jobs available at an international exposition there and she hoped her talent as a dancer would help her find employment.   She meets two other young women, Helen and Ruby.  Both are harboring secrets.  Helen is a child from a well off very traditional family.  Her father got her a job as a telephone company operator.  Ruby's past is a bit shady and she is the most worldly of the three.  After meeting they all get jobs working as performers in a Chinese nightclub in San Francisco.  The pay is good compared to other jobs.    Causasian men were fascinated by Asian women and there all sorts of such establishments in the city.  See has obviously done a lot of research on the Chinese night club and I learned a lot about this new to me area from the novel.  The women have their career ups and downs and their romances, good, bad and in between.    

When World War Two starts with the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor.  The social changes brought on by this transform California and the women's lives.  In one small touch I  liked a lot, we see the sister in laws of Helen, up until now very home bound traditional wives, go to work in defense factories.  San Francisco is full of soldiers and sailors on leave who can't wait to spend their money on China Dolls (that was the name a nightclub owner gave to the girls act).  A paranoia against Japanese living in the US permeates society and we do learn a lot about this.  We see the racism the women are subject to and their own prejuduces against non-Chinese. 

The girls do make it pretty big time in show business.  I won't tell any more of the plot because it is so much fun to see what happens.  We do end up flashing forward to when the China Dolls are their seventies and that was such a great way to close the novel.

One of the best aspects of China Dolls was learning about the nature of the entertainment business in the Chinese Community nationwide in America.  

China Dolls is an emotional roller coaster with lots of fast rises and falls.  The women seem very real and I liked the alternative first person narration structure of the novel.

I think most fans of well crafted historical fiction will enjoy this book.  

Mel u

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See  (2011, 354 pages)

I enjoy well researched historical novels set in Asia.     Lisa See has written three very well done exciting novels based in China (and the USA), Peony in Love,  Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Shanghai Girls.   I liked and enjoyed reading all three of these books.    


Dreams of Joy is a sequel to Shanghai Girls.   Shanghai Girls is the story of two sisters raised in post WWII Shanghai who are forced due to circumstances brought on by the gambling debts of their father to immigrate to the USA.   They and their mother experience terrible hardships and brutality.   I got to know the two sisters pretty well along with various members of their families.   Shanghai Girls ended on a cliff hanger.   The teenage daughter of  one of the sisters has decided (it is 1957) to follow a boyfriend and go to China to look for her biological father and participate in Mao's Great Leap Forward.


Joy has been raised in in American comfort.   She seems very spoiled and pays little attention to her elders.   She is also very naive.    I was shocked when she surrendered her passport to Chinese authorities knowing they would not return it to her.   


Joy ends up joining a collective farm.   In spite of all the claims to the contrary, bribes go a long way in Mao's China and Joy is able to get to acquire the paperwork she needs.    She ends up easily, really too easily I thought, finding her real father (a poster artist) and joins him in the countryside teaching the people to make posters glorying China, Mao, and the hero workers.   Her mother Pearl also pretty easily finds her daughter and even her own father.    There are a lot of plot twists and turns.   Joy marries against her mother's advise.    (The plot is complicated by old deceptions developed in Shanghai Girls about who the real father and mother of Joy are.)


See does a very good job bringing bringing this era to life for( around 1957 to 1961) us.    There is a lot of interesting details about life on collective farms.  


I think you should probably read Shanghai Girls before you read Dreams of Joy, otherwise you will have a hard time getting interested in the main characters.   

Dreams of Joy does not end on a cliff hanger.   The weakest part of the novel is the some of the character development.   I thought the father should have been brought more to life, for example.


I am glad I read this book.   I think you should first read Shanghai Girls and  if you like it a lot then I would endorse Dreams of Joy to you.   


In the interests of full disclosure, I was sent a review copy of this book by 
Random House.   


Please share your experience with Lisa See with us-


Mel u

"Peony in Love" by Lisa See

Peony in Love by Lisa See (2007, 284 pages)

Peony in Love is the third historical novel by Lisa See that I have read in the last six weeks.   The first was Shanghai Girls, a very well done and cliff hanging story of the immigration of two sisters from Shanghai in the 1930s to their adjustment to life in California  through the mid 1960s.     I learned a lot about the Chinese immigration to the USA experience from this book and it was exciting if grim in its movement from one disaster to the next.     A couple of weeks after I finished Shanghai Girls  I lucked on her Peony in Love and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan in hardback for sale at nearly ninety percent off the list price.    Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is set in mid 19th century China and is the story of the lives and relationships of two life long friends.    Just as in Shanghai Girls, we see the importance of foot binding in Chinese culture ad we see just how terrible a thing it was to do to adolescent females.   The descriptions of the process are hard to read.  

Peony in Love is set in 17th Century China.     Peony, who we meet at age sixteen shortly before her arranged wedding is to take place, loves reading and books with a special passion for opera.   An opera is going to be preformed by a traveling troupe of players.   Unmarried women of the gentry are not supposed to go to such performances but Peony begs her father to be allowed to go and her indulgent father sets it up so she can see the opera and be hidden behind a screen.    Peony is soon to be married to a man she has never met.   Her mother and her aunt have been educating her on the proper role of a wife in a noble family.   Peony is very worried about her future.   She knows there is little love in her parents marriage and she knows the shame her mother hides when she deals with the concubines her father has taken.    There is a really brilliant scene in the book where Peony's maid,  also 16, is helping Peony dress.   Peony thinks she and the maid (who was sold to the family a few years back as more or less a slave) are friends.    She is shocked to learn the maid hopes Peony's father will take her as a concubine and is even more shocked to see that under the mask of servility the maid deeply resents the  privileged status of Peony and may even hate her.   At the opera Peony sees a beautifully attired and very handsome man and it is love at first sight for her.    Peony has three days of contact with the man and falls deeply in love.    As I have come to expect in the novels of Lisa See, there will be many turns of the plot.   Just as her wedding day approaches Peony learns some very wonderful almost unbelievably good news.   Then something horrible happens.   Peony enters the afterlife prior to her wedding (this is not a spoiler it is on the book jacket) wedding.    We are given a very detailed and fascinating look at the Chinese concept of the underworld.   We see the various torments the deceased must go through depending on how they have lived.   Peony is able to watch her families lives go on without her.  (For better or worse this part of the book reminded me in its point of view of Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold though the afterlife in Lovely Bones is just set out in a bare bones way.)   Peony watches her family go on without her.   She wanders as a ghost for a long time.    She bonds after a period of hatred with the woman her beloved does eventually marry.    There are a lot of very good details in Peony in Love and we learn a lot about how marriages among the nobility worked out.    We learn of politics in the period and we she her shock when her father goes to work for the Manchu dynasty even though he had sworn life long loyalty to the emperor the Manchus overthrow.    We experience the carnage of warfare on the civilian population in 17th century China.   We get a detailed look at daily life and come to understand class structure.  We see what people eat.    Any lover of books will cringe in horror when they see what her mother does to Peony's beloved books at the advise of a doctor.   We also learn a lot about women writers in 17th century China.

I think I may have "overdosed" a bit on Lisa See in reading three of her three historical novels back to back.   The novels can be described as grim.   Of course the times were hard and women were valued only as they could bear sons and serve men.   I do endorse the reading of all three of her historical novels for anyone who enjoys novels set in Asia (as I do).   I think you should read first novel set in the period that interests you most, Shanghai Girls from 1935 to 1965, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan set in mid-19th century and Peony in Love in the 17th century.   If I did not dislike the ending of Shanghai Girls I would say it is my favorite one.    Peony in Love is being made into a movie.  

"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" by Lisa See

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (2005, 258 pages)

Please leave a Comment if you have seen the Movie

how does it live up to your expectations?

Last month I read and really enjoyed Lisa See's most recent book, Shanghai Girls.  Shanghai Girls is a historical novel set in Shanghai and California, starting in the 1930s and ending in the 1950s.   As soon as I finished Shanghai Girls I added Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (set in China in the 19th century) and Peony in Love  (set in the 17th century) to my to be read list.   I was really happy when I saw hardback editions of both of these books for sale for 85 percent off the list price.    I decided I would read them in the order Lisa See wrote them.

The narrator of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is Lilly, in her 80s at the time she tells the story.   The second important person in the novel is Snow Flower.   The novel is a beautifully told story of the relationship of these two women.   I knew that marriages were arranged by professional matchmakers in this era but I did not know that matchmakers also arranged what are meant to be life time friendships between women, normally starting about the time of foot binding, about 8 or so.   The two women bound together are called "old sames".   This book is the story of the life long relationship of Lilly and her old same Snow Flower.   

Central to the book's plot and themes is the practice of foot  binding, which begins when a girl is about 8, takes up to six months to complete (all the bones in the toes have to be broken) and in the process killed  ten percent of the girls who under went it. The purpose of foot binding is to make the girls more attractive as marriage partners and as submissive daughter in laws.   Lower class girls (called "big feet girls) do not get their feet bound.   The process is horribly painful and is described in  in a fashion that made  me cringe.   It leaves those who feet are bound near half cripples for the rest of their lives.    The novel lets us see the very degrading way in which women were treated in China in this period.   A woman who gave birth only to female children was considered worthless.   In one very brutal scene the husband of Snow Flower beats her so severely that she miscarries.   He justifies his action after the fact by saying the child would probably have been a girl.   The saddest part of this is that no one including his wife sees any problems with his actions.

Just like in Shanghai Girls a lot of things happen to the central characters, most of them bad.   I learned a lot about life in China in the 19th century.   It made me see how foot binding was a  central element in the life of Chinese women.   This practice continued well into the 20th century.    

Snow Flower and The Secret  Fan is a very good historical novel.   It lets the reader see and feel what it might have been like to live in 19th century China.    It is just a bit predictable that something bad is going to happen soon in the novel but I could not predict what the bad event would be.   Unlike in  Shanghai  Girls there is closure in this book.    This novel and two of her others are currently being made into movies.  

I enjoyed this book a lot.   I was interested in seeing what would happen to the characters,   I learned a good bit about life in China and I am for sure glad my three daughters will not have to have their feet bound!-   I will read another of Lisa See's novels, Peony in Love  soon.    


Mel u

"Shanghai Girls" by Lisa See

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See (2009, 406 pages).

For months now I have been seeing rave reviews for Shanghai Girls.    Everybody seems to love it.    I have a long established rule of not buying hard bound fiction (there are no public libraries here in Manila.   I only bought one hard bound work of fiction in 2009, Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon and I would advise others to wait for the paperback or skip it if you are not a Pynchon fan)   I was so happy when I saw Shanghai Girls in paperback (regular paperback at that) for sale last week.   It also has a beautiful cover.

There are lots of very good blog posts on this book.   (I think the publisher gave away a lot of copies to USA and UK bloggers.)   I will  for this reason  not do a long post on this book.   I will just try to say how I felt about the book and what I liked and did not like about it.

The novel begins in 1937 in Shanghai.   I loved how Lisa See created the atmosphere of Shanghai in the late 1930s.    I understood why it was such a loved city and it was heartbreaking to see it destroyed by the Japanese in World War II.    I loved how the book depicted the family relationships.   The characters were perfectly done.   I really cared what happened to everyone.    I also enjoyed seeing the lead female characters develop and gain from their experiences.   I learned a lot about the horrific process Chinese often had in their immigration to the USA.    I admit I was not fully aware of the tremendous discrimination Chinese Americans faced, especially during the communist scare period of  the 1950s where every Chinese was seen as a potential Maoist spy.    The books covers twenty years in the history of two deeply bonded sisters.   A lot happens in their lives, some very sad things.   We see how an arranged marriage slowly develops into a real relationship.    The atmosphere of China Town in Los Angeles is as well done as the portrayal of Shanghai.   I really liked the the portrayal of Joy, the daughter of one of the sisters.   There are surprise revelations at every turn.    The action is fast moving and a lot happens.   The prose is well done and easy to read.    The only part of the book I did not really like was the ending.   It seems a bit forced but I read Lisa See is working on a sequel.

Lisa See has written two other historical novels, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love.   The first is set in 17th century China and the second in the 19th century.   I hope to read both of these works in 2010.  When   there is a sequel to Shanghai Girls I might have to violate my no hardbound fiction for it.

I am reading this book for these challenges


China Challenge
POC challenge (Lisa See is an American of Chinese Heritage)
New Author Challenge (this means new to the reader)
Global Challenge (North American book)-going for second level now-

I also think this book is very much related to issues of  the Women Unbound Challenge.    It depicts the the literal binding results of  foot binding.   It shows how daughters were viewed as property to be sold in marriage to the most generous bidders.    The suggestion in the Shanghai section  of the novel is that a woman can either be a dutiful wife and mother or prostitute, those were a woman's options in China in the 1930s.

Suko of Suko's Note Book has done an excellent review of Shanghai Girls.