Debut novel transports readers to the root of one family’s fractured relationships
Juli Min’s debut novel, “shanghailanders,” follows an affluent shanghainese family through the years — but backward, starting in 2040 — taking readers on a journey to explore the family’s problems.
Min, a harvard University graduate and the former editor in chief of The shanghai literary Review, says her work in the literary realm helped shape her voice and taste as a writer, reflected in the book’s pages.
The Globe spoke with Min ahead of her appearance at harvard book store on Monday, where she’ll be talking about her new book with author Abue Rey lescure.
How did your lived experiences shape the novel?
i’ve lived in shanghai for about 10 years now, and it’s a city that is incredibly inspiring to me. i moved there from New York and have had a variety of experiences over the course of a decade and met so many kinds of people who live across the whole spectrum of society. … The whole project of the book, at its inception, was to capture something really unique about shanghai — to write the city as a kind of character.
There are a handful of Massachusetts
settings in “Shanghailanders.” what inspired that choice?
i was in the boston and Cambridge areas for both high school and college, and for me, it was a really formative time. personally, that area represents a flourishing of independence and a period of life where i was on my own for the first time, so i wanted to give that to the characters. in the novel, there are three sisters; one of them goes to boarding school in Massachusetts and one of them goes to harvard, so when the book opens, those girls are in their late teens and entering into adulthood. boston, and in particular Cambridge, has a very intellectual, pompous, cosmopolitan slant because of the educational institutions and the culture of those places, and i thought it was quite fitting for this family, which was so wealthy and so well-educated, to have access to that American brand of excellence.
The novel begins in the year 2040 and trends backward in time until 2014. why did you lay the plot out this way?
The backwards movement was a way to play with readers’ expectations. When you meet the family, the mother and the father are essentially at a midpoint, mid-marriage crisis: They’ve been together for almost three decades, and they’re on the brink of collapse as a family. You see them and judge them a certain way, but as you move backwards in time, and you see how their children are and the impacts of their relationship and their family life on others that work for them in their household, i hope the thoughts, impressions, and attitudes of the reader are constantly being revised. i wasn’t so much interested in the disintegration of a marriage as a process, i was much more interested in understanding why and how a marriage and a family gets to that point after decades. i wanted to try to understand and find the original source of love because marriage is hard and those sources of love and romance are essential to a lifelong relationship of any kind.
The perspectives of the characters and the point-of-view of the writing change chapter by chapter. what were you trying to achieve with that?
i really gave myself permission to play and experiment and do whatever i thought was necessary to tell the different stories of the characters. The two first-person narratives are from the perspectives of the family’s private driver and the live-in nanny, and the family perspectives are in the third person. i wanted to create a greater sense of authenticity, poise, and intimacy for those characters who are so much on the outside and excluded. They don’t have recurring themes, they each have their one chunky scene, and i wanted those to have as much resonance and to feel as alive as possible. They inhabit this incredibly wealthy and privileged space, but yet are invisible in so many ways, and the family barely acknowledged them in many situations. The family is a kind of a closed unit, like any family is really, and i wanted to create a sense of that world by connecting those narratives in the third person.
How did you use language and multilingualism as a literary tool in this novel?
language is a kind of access key to a person, a culture, and a way of life, so there are some characters who have more and some who have less of those keys. That mixed linguistic experience is something i feel is very true to shanghai, which is an incredibly international, multilingual city, with particularly entrenched ties with Japan and France, historically. on a thematic level, language can be exclusive and can result in a secret relationship or general ways in which we can be unknowable to another person. people say that in every language you are a different person, so that’s something that i was touching upon through the use of those different languages and the ways in which you might use one language with another person. language is a really powerful thing that represents a person and also shapes the contours of their lived experience.