Book Review: Shanghailanders by Juli Min
The review tries to mirror the retrograde structure of the novel.
He had picked the fight, he knew. But his wife had escalated it. Her fault, then his, then hers. An old, boring story.
After finishing the book that unfolds episodically, in reverse, like the Christopher Nolan movie 'Memento,' from the present, which is 2040 in the plot, to a distant past of 2014, the first thing I felt was to imagine the future of the characters. According to the clues that are already strewn in the plot, like the several cyclic repetitions of past events, one could easily imagine what could happen next. Or could one? A crucial aspect that sets the present apart is the upward mobility that the family whose story is depicted has achieved and the immense wealth and social standing that it enjoys. Is it enough to stop the further devolution of the straining strings that hold them together?
The fourteen chapters of the book remain as separate islands with a few bridges that connect each other. They have a stand-alone style like short stories and detail each character of the plot and even some peripheral ones. These two structural decisions that the author makes, that of the narration in retrograde and the refusal of a fluid narrative, provide narrative tension to the plot, which totally lacks it when told plainly. The non-linear style also helps us to understand the family dynamics and the reason for much of their behavior.
The author, who relies on a third-person narrative for most of the book, changes track to the first person in two chapters and curiously to the second person in one. The focal point of both chapters in the first person doesn't align with that of the main plot, though they provide you with a few insights. But these are so good that I wish for two spinoff novels about the characters, the driver and the maid. Few other embellished characters appear in the story, who may seem unrelated plot-wise, but thematically matter. A chapter, where the mother of the family engages in embroidery, is narrated in the second person, which makes it very personal for the character and the reader.
The book deals with the issue of how families tend to implode themselves with time, thanks to the accumulation of tensions with each other and secrets that cannot be revealed. In the first chapter, we witness a wealthy family in Shanghai, consisting of a father, mother, and their three girls in 2040, and glimpses of many disagreements they foster within themselves. The next chapters, each one taking place at a period before the previous, take us back in time to witness the tumultuous relationship they share and how they reached the present state.
The novel centers on the sudden economic boom in China that transformed the lives of people in several cities, especially Shanghai, which became rich and cosmopolitan overnight. This made it possible for people from traditional Chinese families to mingle with people from other cultures and even tie the knot with them. The cultural shock that they, their brides, and the city itself faced is transferred through generations. A recent novel that explored a similar theme is "River East, River West" by Aube Rey Lescure.
"Shanghailanders" is the acclaimed debut novel by Juli Min, who is a Korean-American writer based in Shanghai. The term 'shanghailander' was used to refer to European and American foreigners who lived in Shanghai. The novel uses it as an umbrella term to refer to everyone with foreign roots who lives in Shanghai and ends up getting stuck, like in a limbo between their past and the future. I received a review copy of the book from the publisher, Spiegel & Grau, through NetGalley.