I was instantly drawn into this story of Alva, a teenager living in Shanghai in 2007 whose American mother Sloan marries a successful Chinese businessman named Lu Fang. For many years Alva and Sloan have lived hand to mouth. They've been less mother/daughter and more a team trying to survive – a relationship emphasized by how Sloan refers to Alva as “partner”. So this marriage prospect finally affords them some stability, but Alva disapproves of Lu Fang. She assumes Sloan is marrying out of convenience and Alva also resents being tied to Asia. She's lived there her whole life and knows nothing of her biological Chinese father as her mother simply describes him as “an unnamed squirt of sperm”, but she aspires to live in America and reveres Western culture. Alva frequently watches illegal dvd copies of American films and scrutinizes the landscape of US neighbourhoods on digital maps. She increasingly rebels against her parents and her public education in her determination to fully inhabit the Western side of her identity.
But that's just half the story. The narrative alternates between Alva's coming of age tale and an account of Lu Fang's troubled life. His story begins in China in the 1980s as he's trying to establish a family and a business amidst the country's economic boom. Though he's haunted by the difficulty of his early life, the horrors of his country's past and those who continue to propagate Mao's propaganda, he reasons “Maybe amnesia was the only way to go on in the new China.” Lu Fang longs for more than the circumstances he's born into and also partially falls for the lure of a Western lifestyle. However, both Alva and Lu Fang discover that cultural imperialism and racial prejudice run deep. An unlikely connection is formed in their joint alienation and the mystery of Sloan's past is gradually revealed. It's moving how this novel depicts each character's transformative journey and the way these conflicted individuals build a new form of family.
