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Series

Shanghai Girls

by Lisa See 2 books in this series

The Shanghai Girls sequence follows sisters Pearl and May from cosmopolitan Shanghai in 1937 to immigrant life in Los Angeles and then into the early People’s Republic of China. In Shanghai Girls, family debt, arranged marriage and the Japanese invasion force the sisters across occupied China and through Angel Island before they can establish a new household in Los Angeles Chinatown.

Dreams of Joy shifts the central conflict to Joy, the daughter raised inside the sisters’ protected version of the past. Her journey to Mao’s China takes Pearl back across the Pacific during the Great Leap Forward. Together, the novels connect war, migration, anti-Communist suspicion and famine, showing how concealed decisions made by one generation determine the political and emotional choices of the next.

Reading order

Books in this series (2 books)

Shanghai Girls cover

#1 – Shanghai Girls

Lisa See

Shanghai, 1937. Sisters Pearl and May support their fashionable life as calendar models until their father reveals that gambling debts have destroyed the family’s fortune. He arranges marriages to two Chinese American brothers, but the Japanese attack on Shanghai intervenes before the sisters can leave safely.…

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Dreams of Joy cover

#2 – Dreams of Joy

Lisa See

Los Angeles, 1957. Nineteen-year-old Joy learns that the man she believed to be her father was not her biological parent and that the artist Z. G. Li is connected to the secrets Pearl and May have kept from her. Attracted by the promises of revolutionary China,…

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