The Women Warrior

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts / Maxine Hong Kingston, 209 pgs.

A powerful story of the author's history and youth. A bit of growing up, dealing with family and being an immigrant with a backdrop of Chinese myths and reality.  The sections of the book kind of all stand alone. Starting with the family history in China and ending in the family business in California - a laundry of course.  There is suffering and some funny parts too.  If you can read this in a sitting or two, it would be best, I think.

Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan, 527 pages

Economics professor Rachel Chu is madly in love with her boyfriend Nick Young, and, after two years of dating, is thrilled when he asks her to accompany him to Singapore for his best friend's wedding. Knowing next to nothing about his homeland and nervous about meeting his family, Rachel gamely agrees to go, not knowing what in the world she's getting herself into. Turns out Nick is rich. Like, beyond filthy rich. Rich to the point of nobody knowing who the Young family is because they've been crazy rich for generations. And as Nick is the heir apparent to the vast fortune, Rachel's arrival in Singapore makes everyone assume that she's a gold-digger who has somehow landed the best catch in Asia. And everyone from Nick's mother and her friends to his ex-girlfriend and her friends is determined to break up the happy couple.

This book was adapted into a wildly popular movie last year, and while I haven't seen it yet, if it's anything like the book, I can see why it got such great reviews. This book offers a view into the type of wealth that nobody reading this will ever experience (if I'm wrong, first, wow, and second, can I catch a ride on your private jet sometime?), exploring both the good and bad. It's touching, it's funny, and the characters are fantastic. I can't wait to read the next one!

Front desk

Front desk / Kelly Yang, 297 pgs.

Mia and her parents have been in the US for a couple of years but they are still trying to find their way.  They end up running a motel close to Disneyland but are working for a horrible boss that constantly rips them off.  Mia is in 5th grade and the hotel is quite a source of education for her.  She works the desk when not in school where she and her bestie Lupe bond over their dislike of Jason.  Mia's mom is pushing her into math but Mia has a way with words and is working on her English.  She is confident and can figure things out.  She is entering an essay contest to WIN a motel so her family can move up a rung on the ladder.  Mia has some 5th grader problems but mostly her issues are bigger.  Her family is poor, her parents work hard but make little.  Her friends at the motel suffer from discrimination.  She starts helping other people when she can.  She writes letters on their behalf.  She has a lot of ideas.  What a fantastic book that covers so many important modern issues.  Highly recommended.

The Leavers

The leavers / Lisa Ko, 338 pgs. Read by Emily Woo Zeller

Eleven year old Deming Guo is living in New York City with his mother, her boyfriend, the boyfriend's sister, Vivian and the sister's child, Michael.  Michael is like a brother to him.  One day, his mother goes to work and never comes home.  No one seems to know what happened to her.  After several months, Deming ends up in foster care and is eventually adopted by a couple of college professors in upstate New York.  Deming becomes Daniel.  After years of feeling like he doesn't fit in, he gets some information that may lead him back to his mother.  I enjoyed the book, Deming/Daniel is trying hard to figure out who he is...so are many other characters in the book.  The audio lagged for me at times but overall it was well read by the narrator.

The girl with ghost eyes

The girl with ghost eyes / M.H. Boroson, 280 p.

Set in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1898, the "girl" of the title is Li-Lin, a young widow whose father is a great exorcist who provides protection for one of the major Tongs. Li-Lin herself has both sorcerous and martial arts training, but her father is a master. One day a man comes to her father's temple and asks her to perform a task in her father's absence, but then he betrays her to set a trap for her father. Once she figures out how to escape from the spirit world, she must protect Chinatown against the planned attack by a sorcerer with a grudge against her father.

I enjoy reading about magic from other traditions, so that appealed to me about this story. Of course, the built-in social assumptions of 1890s immigrant Chinese society greatly differ from what I'm used to, and I appreciate that the author tried to balance explaining taboos, insults, and other assumptions without lecturing, but sometimes it wasn't terribly smooth--I kept thinking about the book's narrative rather than being caught up in it. The author provides some notes at the back about how he condensed various histories and traditions so that he could tell his story.

Nanjing Requiem

Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin  303 pp.

This is a novel based on the horrific Rape of Nanjing when the Japanese invaded China and burned, raped, murdered, and terrorized the Chinese citizens. The story focuses on Minnie Vautrin, an American Missionary and acting president of the Jinling Women's College. She believes her status as an American will allow her to protect the students and staff from the horrors of the Japanese occupation but is pretty much powerless. The college ends up being a refugee camp for ten thousand women and children. When the worst is over, Minnie must then deal with Mrs. Dennison, the college president who has returned from America to return the college to its previous state. The two women butt heads over everything with Minnie trying hard to help the Chinese people while Mrs. Dennison unrealistically wants to make the school the "Wellesley of China." Quite frankly, Mrs. Dennison is an overbearing battle-ax. The story is told from the point of view of Anling, forewoman of Jinling and assistant to Minnie. She is dealing with her own family difficulties as well as the friction at the college. It's an interesting story and adequately portrays the horrors of the Japanese treatment of the Chinese. However, it isn't as good as Ha Jin's novel Waiting.

Dreams of Joy

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See  354 pp.

This book is the sequel to Shanghai Girls and continues the story from where Pearl's daughter, Joy, has run away to join the "glorious revolution" Mao's China. I listened to the audiobook of this and, quite frankly, I couldn't wait for this book to end. Joy has been brainwashed by a group of college friends into thinking that China is going to be so much better than her life in L.A. Pearl, now a widow, drops everything to follow her daughter to China to bring her back and expects to find Shanghai much as it was when she left it. In my review of the previous book I complained about there being too much tragedy, coincidence, heartbreak. etc. In this one I spent a good deal of my time thinking how stupid the main characters were. While the author has done a great job of describing the horrible failures of Mao's regime and the massive starvation and death that resulted from it, things are tied up too neatly at the end. If the author's intent was to elicit strong feelings from her readers, then she succeeded. But I don't think my feelings about this soap opera of a book are what she intended.

Shanghai Girls

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See  314 pp.

This time the author takes on 20th century Chinese women after previously writing of the women in 17th & 19th century (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan & Peony in Love). The author does a masterful job of describing the lives and events of two sisters in Shanghai. Pearl and May are "Beautiful Girls", the supermodels of the era. They pose for artists who paint magazine ads and calendars and live a westernized social life in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai in the 1930s. Things change when their father loses his money gambling and the girls are sold into arranged marriages and will be sent to Los Angeles. Before they make it there Japan attacks China and they endure a tortuous trip by foot to Hong Kong during the time of "The Rape of Nanking."  Upon arriving in Los Angeles they are encarcerated on Angel Island and forced to undergo multiple inquisitions by the U.S. Immigration before eventually being allowed to join their husbands' family. Eventually they discover the truth about their new family's status and the reality of the hard life they will endure in a country where they are looked down on and denied citizenship because of their nationality. By the end of the book Pearl has endured more than most people could bear as a dutiful Chinese wife and mother while May has managed to have a more western and glamorous life as an extra in Hollywood.

The story is well written and has a riveting story but in many ways it is "too much"--too much tragedy, too much coincidence, too much "I love and take care of my sister regardless of what she does", too much stretching the believablity of the reader. To be honest, it is a very depressing book but I still await the sequel which is due out soon.