The ladies of ShanghaiLE

The ladies of ShanghaiLESLEY DOWNER

NOV 15 -

When I was 7, I knew exactly who I was.” With these words, Violet, the principal narrator of Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement, begins her story. Yet over the course of the book, Violet’s certainty about her identity—and nearly everything else—will be turned upside down.

An American child, Violet lives in Shanghai in 1905, at the Hidden Jade Path, a first-class courtesan house. It is run by her cool, aloof and seductive mother, who goes by several names, among them Lulu Mimi. A lonely, difficult child, Violet takes solace in playing with her cat and in spying on the courtesans’ lovemaking. She yearns for her mother’s affection—and for any clue about the identity of her father.

Seven years later, in 1912, a suave man called Lu Shing comes to visit. Eavesdropping, Violet is amazed to hear her mother expressing feelings she never thought Lulu had. With a shock of horror, Violet realises that Lu Shing is her father—which means she is half Chinese. She also has an unknown brother back in California. Desperate to see him, Lulu sails for San Francisco. In an unexpected plot twist, Violet is left behind.

This is just the beginning of a long and ultimately heart-wrenching narrative that covers more than four decades and moves from Shanghai in the 1920s and ‘30s to the Hudson River Valley to a mountain village in rural China. The epic history of these times is woven into the complex background of the story of three generations of women, its events seen as they would have seen them. Their private lives and private pain take centre stage.

Sold to a courtesan house by a loathsome yet charming friend of her mother’s, Violet is reunited with one of the women she knew at Hidden Jade Path, a kind soul called Magic Gourd, who teaches her young charge how to survive the tough courtesan world. But when Violet meets a man named Loyalty Fang, all these instructions fly out the window.

Reluctantly, Violet learns to treat her life as the other courtesans do, as a job. Many customers later, an American named Edward Ivory offers “solace, companionship and the careful mending of wounds.” Ivory also has a wife—back in America—so Violet moves in with him and they have a child, a daughter called Flora. But the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and the appearance of the real Mrs Ivory threaten Violet’s new life.

The narrative becomes progressively darker; Magic Gourd and Violet attempt to escape the increasing danger of Shanghai and make the grueling journey to Moon Pond Village, the home of a Chinese poet. It’s only at this point that Tan begins to share Violet’s mother’s story, turning the clock back. And gradually, the pieces of the plot fall into place.

Written in Tan’s characteristically economical and matter-of-fact style, The Valley of Amazement is filled with memorably idiosyncratic characters. Here are strong women struggling to survive all that life has to throw at them, created by a writer skilled at evoking the roil of emotions and mad exploits they experience when they follow their hearts.