China Dolls by Lisa See
It might be easy to mistake China Dolls, the latest novel by Lisa See, for kitsch. The book’s cover—of a Chinese woman posing in a luxurious white fur stole with the Golden Gate Bridge as backdrop—harks back to the archetypal advertising posters from 1930s Shanghai. It is the same kind of image that See has used for some of her other eight novels (Dreams of Joy, Peony in Love). The story, too, about Chinese-American nightclubs and performers in their heyday from the 1930s to the 1960s, inhabits a rather chintzy world: chorus girls dancing the Chinaconga and acts named the “Slant-Eye Scandals”, where top performers with stage names like the Merry Mahjongs, Chinese Dancing Sweethearts and Princess Tai headline the Forbidden City nightclub with its “coolie-hat lamps”, or travel the road on the Chop Suey Circuit, with everyone living, entertaining and struggling in a time when it was not about Asian and whites, but Orientals and Occidentals.
However, this gimcrack world—which is brilliantly well-painted and researched by See—merely sets the scene for an intricate story of three Asian girls who first find themselves together in 1938 San Francisco, while auditioning to be “ponies” in a new nightclub. Central to See’s books—in which she tackles themes of immigration and identity, love and war—are women and friendship. China Dolls is no exception.
Of the three protagonists Grace, Ruby and Helen, Grace is the most talented dancer. Her “gams are good [and] contours and promontories are in the right places [with] a face that could crush a lily”, but as an American-born Chinese runaway from (the aptly named) Plain City, Ohio, she is also “as American as pink lemonade at a Kansas fair.” Grace has big dreams of stardom and fame, much like her counterpart Ruby, a sassy Japanese girl who “didn’t have a lot of talent, but [had] plenty of ba-zing” and who has only three simple desires: to “float above the noise of the world, live in my body and be seen as anything other than Japanese.”
Helen, the final member in the trio, is the only daughter in a very traditional and powerful Chinatown family. She undergoes perhaps the biggest transformation of the three; she “used to be so shy, and talked like [she’d] been raised in a moon-viewing pavilion overlooking a lake,” and by one-third in, is likened to a Chinese Ginger Rogers, with her duo act reviewed in the L.A. Times. Inextricably linked through a shared loneliness, Grace, Ruby and Helen instantly bond despite their dissimilarities—wearing gardenias in their hair (“so we match... showing everyone we were true friends”).
From Chinatown to Hollywood, the Chop Suey Circuit to Miami, through the waxing and waning of fame and fortune over a 50 year span—along with Pearl Harbour, Japanese internment camps and the Hiroshima atomic bomb—See takes us through the girls’ journey, all the while revisiting the themes she has deftly covered in her other books. Identity and the desire for individuality, for example, this time shines through in a performer’s dreams, such as when Eddie, a Chinese male entertainer, laments:
I don’t want to be a copy of someone else… I don’t want to be the Chinese Fred Astaire [or] the Chinese Bill Robinson ….I want to be recognised for who I am, for what I do…I was hired to play a Hawaiian, an Indian, and a Japanese. They never wanted me to play a Chinese, because they said I didn’t look Chinese enough. I didn’t look right to play a waiter, houseboy, or hatchet man. I can’t win.
Grace has similar regrets. Longing to be in Hollywood (“movies are life, and movies are greater than life”), when she finally gets her big break in the film Aloha, Boys!, she is disappointed to learn that her claim to fame is not as the new Eleanor Powell like she imagined, but of “an Oriental mishmash” of Siamese, Hawaiian and everything in between.
War also brings issues of belonging to the fore—and for Asian-Americans in particular, a sense of confused patriotism. When Ruby is interned in a Japanese camp, her brother tells her to never forget that Japan is their country. However, Ruby can only think: “I loved the United States. It was my home, but inside I was so angry.” And in 1943, when the Chinese could become naturalized citizens, Helen’s relatives, including her mother, who has bound feet, refuse the offer. “We don’t want to lose our rights to return to the home village… we don’t want to go home and be called barbarians or foreign devils.”
At the same time, the war allows the Chinese to finally embrace respected professions—jobs that in today’s age are taken for granted as those held by Asians: Helen’s brother, for example, can forgo his chauffeur job and become the dentist he had trained to be, and her once-obedient and “hidden” sister-in-laws can be found joining the war effort in steel factories.
Interestingly, China Dolls turns out to be, in fact, not about friendship at all, but about the secrets that each girl keeps from the other. The book climaxes in a shocking betrayal, and this—along with the rich, interconnected stories of Grace, Ruby and Helen—stays with the reader long after the initial kitsch and surface sentimentality has faded.