The Moys of New York and Shanghai
One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
The most extraordinary family you’ve never heard of.
Born to Chinese immigrant parents, the Moy siblings grew up in an America that questioned their citizenship and denied their equality. Sophisticated and self-consciously modern, they challenged limitations and stereotypes in the United States and sought new opportunities in China’s tumultuous republic. Sometimes the risks they took paid off, but their occasional recklessness also led to infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, and worse. Those in China faced pressure to collaborate with Japanese occupiers, making choices that had serious consequences for their siblings in the United States.
Charlotte Brooks’s gripping tale follows the family back and forth across the Pacific and through two world wars, China’s Nationalist and Communist revolutions, and the Cold War—events that the siblings and their spouses helped shape. The Moys’ incredible story offers a kaleidoscopic view of an entire generation’s struggle for acceptance and belonging.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sprawling family saga, historian Brooks (American Exodus) follows the lives of six siblings born to Chinese immigrant parents in Manhattan around the turn of the 20th century. The Moys siblings, Brooks writes, were ardently American, but pervasive anti-Chinese discrimination prompted several of them to move to China in the 1930s in search of greater opportunity—inadvertently landing them in the path of the coming Japanese invasion. The siblings include Kay, who married a wealthy restaurateur and raised a large family in New Jersey, only to lose everything during the Depression; Alice, who went to China with her husband, divorced him and remarried a well-heeled Shanghai businessman, only to lose it all when the Communists seized power in 1949; and, most dramatically, Herbert, a ne'er-do-well who finally found success and fame as an Axis propaganda mouthpiece at a Shanghai radio station, only to die by suicide when Japan lost the war. While the narrative drags in places where the Moys navigate more mundane happenstance, Brooks uses the siblings' story to deftly explore, in often lively and novelistic prose, much larger themes: the fraught search for belonging in two starkly different cultures, the break with tradition that comes with the forging of modern lives focused on personal autonomy. The result is a rich and resonant exploration of the Chinese diaspora experience.
