From Publishers Weekly
This lengthy novel moves between complex characterizations, illuminating insights into China's history and minute, occasionally trivial details about upper-class family life. It tells the story of Zhu Jingchen, a man of humble origins who gravitates to Shanghai and becomes the president of a leading bank before the Japanese invasion and occupation of 1937-1945. When war breaks out, Jingchen uses his business savvy to avert a bank failure. Naishan also chronicles the lives of Jingchen's five pampered children and the influential people with whom the family associates. Naishan's strengths lie in her forthright characterizations--she contrasts the aggressive banker who detests "milktoasts . . . unwilling to accept even the slightest risk" with his dreamy son, whom he dismisses as "weak-kneed, softhearted and wishy-washy." In this first novel of a projected trilogy, Naishan ( The Piano Tuner ) skillfully depicts cosmopolitan Shanghai and portrays Zhu Jingchen as the embodiment of the traditional ethos of the wealthy classes, while intimating that the war will change things for his privileged children.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This debut novel is the first in a projected trilogy covering in fictionalized form three generations of the author's family in China. The book deals with Shanghai during the Japanese invasion. It opens, fittingly enough, on April Fool's Day 1937 when, at the McTyeire School for Girls, the daughters of banker Zhu Jingchen take their security for granted. Zhu himself knows better, which is why he caters to foreign interest at his privately run Cathay Republic Bank. When the Japanese crush China, Zhu carries on under them; at war's end, the Nationalists briefly put him under house arrest as an "appeaser." His married daughters, worn by hardships, quarrel ominously among themselves, presaging the Chinese civil war. This solid, competently done work should give readers a sense of life in China during that fraught era; it includes a 1940 map of Shanghai. Recommended for literary collections.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L.,
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L.,
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
