![]() She establishes the first courtesan house in Shanghai to cater to both Chinese and Western men, and has great success facilitating business deals between her native and foreign customers. After Lu Shing steals their second child, the first-born son of the next generation of the Lu family, Lucia eventually falls into the profession of madam. ![]() ![]() Her lover, Lu Shing, an aspiring artist who copies Western landscapes, has warned that her hopes are impossible, but Lucia is headstrong and believes that love will conquer all. Pregnant when she arrives in Shanghai from San Francisco, Lucia (the name she goes by at that time) Minturn hopes that the oldest son of a Chinese foreign minister will marry her. This is just one of the many instances where the reader is asked to suspend disbelief, or else willfully ignore history. Plausible, perhaps, only the year is 1897, a time when anti-Chinese racism ran high and the mingling of white and yellow in America was extremely rare. ![]() Immediately, the reader is ushered into the rarefied world of a “first-class courtesan house” run by Lulu Minturn, an American woman who crosses the Pacific Ocean for the love of a Chinese man. You can practically hear the brass gong resound when you crack open Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement, a sweeping epic that spans two continents and three generations of women. ![]()
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