Book: China Dolls

It might be easy to mistake China Dolls, the latest novel by Lisa See, for kitsch. The book's cover – of a Chinese woman posing in a luxurious white fur stole with the Golden Gate Bridge as backdrop – harks back to the archetypal advertising posters from 1930s Shanghai. It is the same kind of image that See has used for some of her other eight novels (Dreams of Joy, Peony in Love). The story, too, about Chinese-American nightclubs and performers in their heyday from the 1930s to the 1960s, inhabits a rather chintzy world: chorus girls dancing the Chinaconga and acts named the "Slant-Eye Scandals," where top performers with stage names like the Merry Mahjongs, Chinese Dancing Sweethearts and Princess Tai headline the Forbidden City nightclub with its "coolie-hat lamps," or travel the road on the Chop Suey Circuit, with everyone living, entertaining and struggling in a time when it was not about Asian and whites, but Orientals and Occidentals.