The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution

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. (Mar.)