SHANGHAILANDERS, by Juli Min
When I first realized that “Shanghailanders,” Juli Min’s remarkable debut novel, was told in reverse, moving backward from 2040 to 2014, the main question on my mind was, why? There is a reason we usually tell stories in chronological order, although as a novelist myself, I understand that authors are always playing with two timelines: the true progression of a story’s events and the order we decide to reveal them. I wondered, are the rewards of Min’s unusual structure worth the increased intellectual effort it requires of the reader?
“Shanghailanders” begins in 2040, when Leo Yang, a wealthy, handsome real estate investor, is on the train after seeing off his wife, Eko, and their two eldest daughters, Yumi and Yoko, at the airport. Right away, I was struck by Min’s careful use of small, human details to illuminate characters. Eko is a woman known to have a phone “low on battery, always close to dying.” Just as deftly, the author sketches the parameters of Leo and Eko’s marriage. After a fight (that he admits he picked), Leo thinks: “But his wife had escalated it. Her fault, then his, then hers. An old, boring story.”
As the years unspool back to 2014, we explore the complex lives of each family member. The story spirals from the family’s perspectives to those of people incidentally orbiting them: a train attendant, a driver, a nanny, a fellow passenger. Yet Min brings each narrator, no matter how brief, to vivid life, like the young woman on the train whose “desire to leave had existed forever. It had been born in her, as intrinsic and as extraordinary as her beauty.” These kaleidoscopic narratives cast light upon the members of the Yang family from different angles until they are fully fleshed out in our eyes.
Though the novel shares an imagined future, “Shanghailanders” is not a work of science fiction. The differences between our current reality and the book’s world are minor. If anything, the story’s timeline is there to give us distance from our present day, providing us with perspective on events like the pandemic.
