tani reviewed on
This is a first novel. According to the back cover, the narrator grows up in Shanghai in the 30s and 40s and has a special bond with her father, who is a smuggler and millionaire. (His parents, however, were missionaries.) The family flees to Los Angeles in the face of the Japanese occupation, but the father remains in Shanghai, "believing his connections and luck will keep him safe. He's wrong." He does survive, but still choses Shanghai over his family during WWII. The daughter connects with him again, late in his life, but she can't really understand him until she reads his journals.
