The Los Angeles of 1870 had five thousand inhabitants, one hundred and ten saloons, six policemen, and no laws on the books about drunkenness or sex work. Into this dust-blown pueblo arrive three Chinese women, none of whom chose to come. Out of that historical pressure cooker, Lisa See builds her newest novel, Daughters of the Sun and Moon, a book that sits closer in temperament to her earlier project of family history than to her recent run of village-set Chinese fiction.<\/p>\n
Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See follows Dove, Petal, and Moon across roughly eighteen months in early Los Angeles. Dove is seventeen, beautiful, bound-footed, and sent across the Pacific as a second wife to a merchant she has never met. Petal, called Worthless Girl by her own parents in southern China, is sold by her father for forty Mexican dollars and shipped into the trafficking network the tongs ran along the Calle de los Negros. Moon is the educated wife of a Chinese herbalist; her botched footbinding as a child left her with a limp, but she speaks four languages and reads the English-language papers every morning.<\/p>\n
Their lives are not destined to braid together, and See refuses the easy ribbon. The women cross paths because they live within the same dilapidated adobe block, because Doctor Tong treats women the others cannot afford to treat themselves, and because the world they inhabit pushes them toward each other. The friendship grows slowly, by accidents and small mercies.<\/p>\n
The most ambitious craft choice in the book is its three-tiered narration. Moon speaks in first person past tense from 1926, looking back across fifty-five years with the candor and irritation of a woman in her eighties. Petal tells her story in first person present tense, raw and immediate. Dove appears in third person present, observed almost as an object, which is precisely how the society around her treats her. See is making a point with grammar itself, and it works. The reader learns to feel Dove\u2019s confinement in the very tense she is rendered in.<\/p>\n
The Lao Tzu epigraphs that head each of the five parts (\u201cWatch your thoughts; they become your words\u2026 Watch your words; they become your actions\u2026\u201d) give the structure an almost sutra-like inevitability. By Part Five, the proverb has done its work; the reader feels the chain of consequence even before the events arrive.<\/p>\n
The phrase that recurs throughout Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See is eat bitterness<\/em>, the Cantonese expression for swallowing hardship without complaint. See does not use it as ornament. Each woman eats her own variety of it:<\/p>\n Dove eats the bitterness of obedience, of being valued for a beauty she did not ask for and a wife-rank she cannot escape. What See does well, and has done since Snow Flower and the Secret Fan<\/em>, is refuse to flatten this into uplift. The women do not save each other in any tidy sense. They keep each other alive, which is a smaller and truer kind of solidarity.<\/p>\n
\nPetal eats the bitterness of her own father\u2019s signature on a contract she could not read.
\nMoon eats the bitterness of being the most competent person in any room and the one expected to keep her opinions inside her teeth.<\/p>\nHistory Sitting Alongside the Story<\/h3>\n