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.
As the narrative travels backward, we move from the usual readerly mind-set of attempting to predict future events to a calmer, more observational approach. We are content to simply see and understand. Instead of finding out what will happen next for these characters, we discover why their present is the way it is. The reader is forced to pay close attention; we are like Leo, who is “looking for the reasons he was who he was, looking for his own history, his lineage, his past, which would determine his future and everything that could be.”
Having knowledge of these characters’ futures before we know about their past makes stumbling on their bygone days all the more touching. A scene later in the book showing when Leo first falls in love with Eko (and where he tells her she is the “loveliest, most reckless person” he knows), for instance, feels all the more poignant because we know that eventually their feelings for each other will change.
Thus, we do not have an omniscient narrator in “Shanghailanders” but rather an omniscient reader. The novel creates an experience like Leo’s, when, “hovering above life, he could see everything as if it were a model that he could zoom out of and freeze, zoom into and inspect from various angles.” My answer to my original question of whether this unusual storytelling structure is worthwhile would be a resounding yes. Like Leo, we understand that this is “love, feeling time unfurl from a moment.”
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