“Shanghailanders” by Juli Min

Juli Min (photo: Mengxi Cheng)

The term “Shanghailander”, coined over a hundred years ago, referred to foreigners who lived in Shanghai’s French Concession or International Settlement. In her debut novel, Shanghailanders, Juli Min has reclaimed this term for contemporary use to include a wider spectrum of expatriates and to indicate, somewhat contrary to current narratives,  that Shanghai remains—and will remain in the decades to come—an international city. Min herself was born in South Korea, grew up in the United States, and now calls Shanghai home. Although most of her novel takes place in the near future, apart from a few high-tech gadgets that one could imagine fifteen years from now, it’s the story of a multicultural family navigating life in Shanghai, but also in Boston and Paris. Shanghai is their home base and the city in which Leo and Eko Yang raised their three daughters.

The story begins in 2040 on the maglev from Pudong airport back to the Shanghai city center as Leo thinks back on the years he and his Japanese-French wife Eko have raised their daughters in Shanghai. Leo and Eko met in France in the 2010s and when Leo wanted to return to his home city of Shanghai for a few years, Eko didn’t see much harm in that. But it turned out to be much longer and it was difficult for her to adjust at first. As Leo returns home after the airport send-off, he wonders if staying in Shanghai all that time has been worth it.

 

Shanghailanders, Juli Min (Spiegel & Grau, Dialogue Books, May 2024)
Shanghailanders, Juli Min (Spiegel & Grau, Dialogue Books, May 2024)

Min crafts her story in reverse chronological order, so Leo’s questions are answered in the chapters that follow, spanning the previous three decades. Each of Leo and Eko’s daughters is introduced and their characters fleshed out in these chapters. Yumi is the oldest, followed by Yoko—both of whom study in Boston when the book opens in 2040—and the youngest is Kiko, short for Yukiko, who attends an international school in Shanghai.

As the story moves back in time, Shanghai reverts from a high-tech metropolis to a city on the rise, at least in Eko’s eyes. She doesn’t know any Chinese and from her childhood and teenage years in Paris she speaks French as her mother tongue. (Her mother still lives in France, but in a retirement center in Nice.) Eko barely recognizes Japanese kanji from her earliest years in Kyoto and has a difficult time communicating with neighbors in their modest lane house area.

It’s in the last couple of chapters that Eko’s struggles to fit in are amplified, which can also represent Shanghai’s growth as an international city, starting in the 1990s and rising again after the Covid lockdowns. By the end of the novel, Eko’s departure with her two older daughters at the start of the book makes more sense and it’s up to the reader to figure out where the story will continue from 2040.

At the beginning of her novel, Min includes a couple of quotations from the legendary Shanghai novelist Eileen Chang. Her book has been marketed as evoking Chang’s work, and while there are some similarities—mothers who leave Asia for France and of course complicated family stories set in Shanghai—Min’s novel is perhaps better grouped with Janice YK Lee’s The Expatriates and Aube Rey Lescure’s River East River West, among others, novels by contemporary ethnic Asian expats which foreground the cities—Hong Kong and Shanghai in these cases—in which they are set. Her structure, realistic characters, and the Shanghai setting all make for an impressive debut.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.