Janet Song

Forced to leave Shanghai when their father sells them to California suitors, sisters May and Pearl struggle to adapt to life in 1930s Los Angeles while still bound to old customs, as they face discrimination and confront a life-altering secret.

Pearl must confront her past and the challenges of the present when she sets out to save her nineteen-year-old daughter Joy, who has run away to Shanghai to find her birth father, artist Z.G. Li, and become caught up in the New Society of Red China in 1957.

Set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, the novel features two sisters--Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they've met before, a burly female "love hotel" manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman....

A story of friendship set in nineteenth-century China follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.

Traces the author's experiences as an English teacher to the sons of North Korea's elite during the last six months of Kim Jong Il's reign, an effort complicated by oppressive regime enforcers, propaganda, and evangelical missionaries.