Chinese female writers in the front

I personally enjoy Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, Fan Wu’s Beautiful as Yesterday, and Bich Minh Nguyen’s Short Girls.
They work quite well in terms of their content, focusing essentially on the relationship between two similar characters. The girls of See’s novel are actially males - Pearl and May, beautiful and rather successful young men in 1930s Shanghai. Living in a family with liberal values, they thrive a cosmopolitan lifestyle and are able even to earn nice money for their escapades, which includes nights out on the town with foreign students. In this respect, See’s work immediately places a modernist cast on these "girls", but when misfortune befalls their family due to the financial improprieties of their father, Pearl and May are forced into challenging positions.
Of course, like Janice Y.K. Lee’s recent novel, The Piano Teacher, we know we are in dangerous territory if we are anywhere on the Chinese mainland area during the 1930s with Japanese imperial aggression just around the corner. When Pearl and May must find a way to escape China, given all if its turmoil, and enter into arranged marriages they thought they had escaped. The harrowing journey finally leaves them in a limbo space while at Angel Island, which has of course been the site of an Asian American Studies renaissance. In this respect, the novel treads essential historical territory and the questions that both sisters endure are particularly instructive of the inane immigration policies that the United States engaged in the period of the “yellow peril.”
Since See’s first publication, she hasn’t really set much of her work in the United States, so Shanghai Girls is quite anomalous in that respect. Once the women settle into their new lives with their “arranged” husbands, they make due with what they can, May, finding herself caught up in Hollywood glamour, while Pearl struggles to raise a family that she cannot claim wholly or even biologically her own. The novel concludes with a cliffhanger and it wasn’t with much surprise that I discovered that See is working on a sequel. The concluding arc of the novel contemplates questions of assimilation and alternative kinships that were quite refreshing to see and offer much to problematize the notion of Asian American nuclear families. The focus though is always on Pearl and May and their unbreakable friendship. While May seems to be the more vivacious and passionate of the pair, Pearl is more traditional and toned down. In this regard, I find it interesting this move to explore horizontal kinship models rather than the mother-daughter trope that was more dominant in the 90s. See is a gifted storyteller and it is clear there was much research done to recreate what the historical accuracies of the mid-century, so although the plot does not necessarily always rely upon earth-shattering developments, the readers are carried through in sure form.