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Memoirs of a Eurasian
For readers of Shanghai Girl, a new novel from Vivian Yang about a distinctively private Eurasian life amidst the turmoil of 20th century Chinese and Russian diasporas, a chapter of which has won a top prize of The WNYC Leonard Lopate Essay Contest. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY's review describes it as "an engaging exploration of a world unknown to most Westerners. Yang navigates Hong Kong and the insular Chinese world of Shanghai with equal ease, convincingly charting the protagonist's life from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. ... Readers will find this fascinating novel very enjoyable and readable."
In Shanghai’s French Concession in 1944, a young Russian fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution from his homeland falls in love with a local teenager. She dies giving birth to a girl without his knowledge, and he is expelled from China along with most other Westerners following the Communist takeover in 1949. The daughter grows up to be a piano instructor and becomes an unwed mother herself in 1962.
Her daughter Mo Mo, whose father remains a mystery to all but her reticent mother, is beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious. But she is a rare Eurasian in a politically radical and culturally homogenous society. We enter her bleak yet fascinating world cloaked to the West where Eurasian appearances are a double-edged sword, cherished and fetishized simultaneously.
As the plot of this evocative novel set in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, with snippets of St. Petersberg, London, and Warsaw twists and turns through the lost glorious days of the old Shanghai, the Sino-Soviet ideological split of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the economic reform that ensued in China, the bubble years in the 1980s Japan, and the 20th century Russian and Chinese immigration, a captivating story of one girl’s courageous journey of overcoming extraordinary racial and socio-political circumstances unfolds …
Themes of beauty, identity, race, romantic love, friendship, culture, language, food and cannibalism are vividly fleshed out in this unique tale of a private life heretofore unfamiliar to the West. Readers are urged to consider how Asian and Western views on eroticism differ.
Memoirs of a Eurasian is a triumphant work of fiction - at once exotic yet universal, erotic but romantic, entertaining and enlightening -- and utterly captivating, seductive, and original.
Editorial Reviews
"This latest novel ("Memoirs") from Yang (Shanghai Girl) is an engaging exploration of a world unknown to most Westerners. Yang navigates Hong Kong and the insular Chinese world of Shanghai with equal ease, convincingly charting (the protagonist)’s life from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. ... Readers will find this fascinating novel very enjoyable and readable." -- Publishers Weekly
The reader experiences 20th-century China -- the Cultural Revolution, the industrialization of the coastal regions and the transformation of Hong Kong -- through (the protagonist)’s struggles and triumphs and the novel progresses competently from episode to episode. This gives Memoirs of a Eurasian a pleasing, consistent tension ... The novel is structured as an Asian woman recounting her life story to a Westerner, and as such brings to mind Arthur Golden’s massively successful Memoirs of a Geisha. Despite these superficial likenesses, the protagonists of the novels are entirely different. While Geisha gave a delicately crafted look at the exotic, Yang's tale is more relatable ... (and) provides a unique perspective on an under-explored era. -- Kirkus Review
"Shanghai Girl" is a delicious tale of cross-cultural adjustment, personal ambition, and self-discovery, peppered with steamy sex, ruthless exploitation, and mysterious murder. -- JADE magazi
