The Shanghailanders

The story of The Shanghailanders, by Juli Min,  starts in 2040, and goes backwards in time, showing how the Yang family got to this point which makes it both a family saga and sort of a time-travel story.

First, I have to explain that there is no plot in this book, no central conflict and no final resolution. This is fine for me — I love reading to discover characters! But you do need to be in the right mood for fiction without any reveals or resolutions. I’ve read thrillers with time jumps for  used for dramatic effect, where the whole thing is leading up to a crucial piece of information.  (Enough thrillers use this device that I roll my eyes now  at an opening chapter set in a police interrogation room, with no character names used.)

Each section of The Shanghailanders reads like a short story, so there are satisfying moments in each one, even if it doesn’t add up to an overall story arc. Each section focuses on a different person at a different time. I have to admit I skipped one section that’s written in second person. I’m not in an MFA workshop today, I don’t have to suffer through any more lit fiction that feels like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story.

The backward structure is the real heart of The Shanghailanders. This reverse format works well to develop character growth in an interesting way, because readers can see the parents and grandmother as young people, making the choices that lead us to the end of the story. I always love seeing relationships change over time in family sagas.

Mother Eko, father Leo, and their three daughters, Yumi, Yoko and Yukiko, make up the Yang family, they live mostly in Shanghai, but travel extensively. Eko is Japanese-French, and we also see her mother’s storyline. I found the grandmother’s story most interesting, because she starts as an old woman in a retirement home, but then more and more of her past is revealed, and I could see her whole life leading up, unstoppably, to the grandmother with the mysterious ailment in the retirement home.

In some ways, the reverse timeline felt annoyingly like a gimmick.  I felt slightly cheated because the opening of the book involves a secret pregnancy, multiple affairs, and a teenage prostitute, and none of these dramatic storylines are ever pursued again. It’s a bit much to drop this drama in the beginning, before readers really care much about the characters, even if the backstory comes out later. It felt like a dramatic trailer for a movie, but we don’t actually see the movie.

I also didn’t think that starting in 2040 really added anything special that starting in 2025 couldn’t do. There are a few references to future tech, but it’s not a wildly different world. Characters travel by plane and train, and use unnamed future social media for familiar actions, but it’s not really a scifi or specfic story. I felt a bit disappointed by this, too, future Shanghai has a lot of interesting setting potential.

Overall, The Shanghailanders is an unusual character-focused story, full of family and personal secrets, in intriguing and beautiful settings, even if scifi-future Shanghai isn’t one of them.