May and Pearl Books in Order

The May and Pearl books—Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy—follow two sisters from glamorous prewar Shanghai to Los Angeles’s Chinatown and then back to Mao‑era China. Together they form a family saga about migration, survival, and the shifting bonds between mothers and daughters.

Shanghai Girls opens in 1937, when Pearl and May Chin earn a living as beautiful girls, posing for advertising paintings in a city that calls itself the Paris of Asia. Their comfortable life collapses when their father’s gambling debts force them into arranged marriages to two brothers from California just as Japanese bombs begin to fall on Shanghai.

The sisters’ journey out of China takes them through war zones, refugee camps, and the immigration station on Angel Island. Once they finally reach Los Angeles, they must learn to live with stranger husbands, difficult in‑laws, and the harsh racism aimed at Chinese immigrants, all while trying to hold on to pieces of the city and selves they left behind.

The heart of the first book is the complicated love between the sisters and their shared care for Joy, the baby born of May’s relationship with the artist Z.G. Li but raised as Pearl’s daughter. Secrets about Joy’s parentage, and the sacrifices each woman makes to protect her, drive a wedge between them that will not fully show until Joy is grown.

Dreams of Joy picks up in 1957, after anti‑communist investigations in the United States tear the family apart. Reeling from what she has learned about her origins, nineteen‑year‑old Joy runs away to Shanghai to find Z.G. and throw herself into building the New China. Enthralled by revolutionary ideals, she moves with him to a rural collective just as the Great Leap Forward begins, only slowly understanding the cost of her choices.

Pearl, terrified for her daughter, follows her back to a country she once fled, navigating suspicion in Shanghai and hunger in the countryside as she searches for a way to bring Joy home.

Across both novels, See threads big historical events—war, immigration laws, political campaigns, famine—through the intimate spaces of kitchens, dorm rooms, and crowded Chinatown streets. The May and Pearl series offers readers richly drawn characters, emotional family drama, and a clear reading path: start with Shanghai Girls and continue straight into Dreams of Joy to see the story all the way through.