To the outside world, Leo and Eko Yang and their three charming daughters seem to have it all—wealth, beauty, and brains to match. They live in the privileged world of international Shanghai while jet-setting to their secondary homes in France, Japan, and the United States.  

But Leo and Eko are at a crossroads. Their daughters are almost grown. Leo is nearing the end of a wildly successful career in Shanghai real estate, while Eko’s reach as an artist is only growing. After twenty-five years, what are the bonds keeping them together? What are the foundations of a family?

Beginning in the year 2040 and moving backward through the present to 2014, Shanghailanders takes readers into the world of each of the Yangs, as well as the people in their orbit—a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. Along the way, Juli Min shows how a family makes and remakes itself over the years: what unites us and slowly drives us apart.

Gorgeously written and brilliantly constructed, Shanghailanders is the introduction of a major new literary talent. 

PRODUCT DETAILS

ISBN: 9781954118607
Price: $28.00
On-sale date: 5/7/2024
Weight: 1.05 lbs.

A True Shanghai Man

January 2040

Leo stepped onto the platform for the magnetic levitation train. The maglev was making its 2,025,659th trip into Shanghai. Back and forth, to and fro, airport to city center, city center to airport. Eight minutes for each one-way trip, every day of the year. Leo did the quick calculation after a confirming glance at the train’s schedule and hours of operation. He liked to update the number every time he rode. More often since 2036, when his middle daughter, Yoko, had begun attending boarding school in Boston—followed soon after by her older sister, Yumi, for college—flying halfway around the world and back twice a year.

He was occupied with thoughts of his wife and their daughters, whom he’d left behind at security. They’d be arriving about now (he checked his watch) at the lounge, registering their boarding passes for gate 26B, PVG–BOS. As soon as the girls set down their matching silver suitcases, Yumi would go shopping. Yoko would head to the buffet. When she was nervous, she ate. His wife, Eko, would be fussing with her phone, low on battery, always close to dying. He imagined the three of them, quietly, separately doing their necessary tasks. A map of the terminal, with its gates, shops, and moving walkways, crystallized in his mind.

The maglev pulled into the station and waited, humming. It would be one more minute, Leo knew, before the doors beeped and opened. Just inside, a young but not too young train attendant stood facing Leo. She was, however, not looking at him. She was thinking about her not-so-youngness, her not-so-thinness, as she pulled down her too-tight vest. And he was not looking at her. He was thinking about how he had not wanted Eko to accompany the girls. He had picked the fight, he knew. But his wife had escalated it. Her fault, then his, then hers. An old, boring story.

“The girls can do it alone,” he’d said. They’d done it so many times. Yumi and Yoko, they didn’t need their mother to fly them to school. They didn’t need her to make their extra-long twin beds. He expected better than that. Were they really so unextraordinary? So childish? At their age, Leo had already been on his own for years, for nearly a decade.

Eko, though, inexplicably, stubbornly, had insisted on it, on leaving him home alone with Baby Kiko. She even insisted that he say his goodbyes to them at the airport. She had pushed on this, said that if he didn’t take them to the last possible point of separation, the girls would feel his lack of love, his lack of effort, his lack of care. She went on and on, speaking on their behalf like that, making him feel guilty. About what? Not going with them every step of the way? Maybe it was Eko herself who wanted to be accompanied, who wanted her hand held to the end. Her Japanese side—it required gesture. Unnecessary, irrational gesture. But she had said the words, made the accusation. And once it was said, out in the world, he had to go, hadn’t he? Because if it was even just a little bit true, how could he live with that?

As Leo found a spot on the train, he imagined Yumi and Yoko settling into their seats, both window seats, the first and second rows of the plane, the ones he always reserved. They would watch Shanghai melt away. They would see the city below, its expanse, its rivers, the water that had been seeping across its land borders slowly for the past two hundred years, then quickly for the past sixteen.

The city’s verticality, its three-dimensional landscape. It was only growing higher. Into the clouds. Water everywhere, like melted iron, snaking through the clusters of buildings. His people, his ancestors had built this city of swampland. His blood was in the soil.

The DNA test he did ten years back with Eko and the girls revealed barely any other origins; his ancestors were all speckled pink dots concentrated around Shanghai on the world map. It was anticlimactic, really. The only thing revealed was his male-pattern baldness type—halo—and his high probability for memory loss late in life. Eko had for the most part Japanese in her, some Chinese, some Korean, Siberian. She would remember everything, forever. Except how to keep her cell phone charged.

Their girls, pan-Asian, their results from the DNA test predictable, along the spectrum between his and Eko’s. Leo corrected himself: not girls, young women. He knew the term infantilized them. Especially since he was the one pushing for them to grow up.

“They have their freedom, their independence,” Eko had said.

“Ah, but those are two different things,” Leo said. “Precision of language, please. They do what they want, but you treat them like children.”

“They are still young, Leo,” she said. “Not everyone has to grow up as fast as you did. And did you ever think that maybe I want to be with them too?”

And then she’d had the nerve to tell him that he was the one who needed to let go. All he had been doing his whole life was letting go.

SHANA WAS THE oldest attendant on the maglev. And maybe she was the fattest as well. Her former boss had let her back on after she explained her situation to him. Her husband dead, her child sent to his grandparents in the countryside. It had been a kind of relief to come back. For as long as she had dreamed of married life, of raising a baby, it had all proved so difficult. Her husband, who’d grown up in France, who was smart, who had been a child prodigy—he had never managed to give her the life they’d imagined.

She’d met him on the high-speed between Shanghai and Beijing. Back then, ten years ago, she was twenty-two and beautiful. She walked the aisles of the train, handing out hot towels to the passengers, and she’d receive stares, compliments on her hair, thick and long and pitch-black. Men would actually turn around to watch her go after she walked past. She’d see them from the corner of her eye as she delivered cloth after steaming cloth down the line.

“What’s your name?”

“How long have you been working on the train?”

“Where are you from?”

Shana. Four years. Kunshan. Nelson, so much older but playful, flirtatious, had kept peppering her with questions beyond the standard ones she got from time to time from solo male passengers. And then he lingered on the train when they reached Beijing. He said that he never wanted to get off as long as she was on it. He’d leave only if she came with him. He made a big scene, holding on to his seat’s armrest while his friend pulled him away. She met him later that night, and he convinced her to leave her job and move in with him. Within six months they were married. They waited the requisite two years before trying for a baby, to rid her body of any potential radiation poisoning from working on the train. Michael came to them right away.

Her boss was unhappy when she contacted him a few months ago, looking to get back on the train. There were no more spots left on the Shanghai–Beijing first-class, he replied. “And the slow-speed?” she asked. After a long pause, he finally said, “There’s a spot on the Pudong Airport maglev.” The airport mag- lev was not a premier job. It was a fast trip, just back and forth to the city center. It wasn’t flashy like the Shanghai–Beijing maglev or the Shanghai–Hong Kong maglev, the recently built two-hour rides. It was the old version of the technology; it felt archaic now. It was a useless train, really—a tourist trap, a test case. Everyone was laden with big suitcases, confused as to what to do.

Shana was heavier now. There were beautiful girls working every car. Their vests sat lightly on their minuscule waists. Hers was tight and short and kept scrunching up into her midsection. She missed her life before Nelson; she missed some of her life with Nelson. Now she was back to work again. Now she was a train girl again. She adjusted her blue hat and pulled down her vest as travelers filed past her, boarding the car.

WHAT WAS THE REAL REASON Eko had to go? In the end, she had agreed that their daughters were no longer children. They flew all the time—to Kyoto, to Tokyo, to Paris; they were seasoned travelers. What was she hiding, then, the true motivation for going away? Leo asked her once, twice, thrice. He knew with each ask that the likelihood of a straight answer was decreasing. She dug her heels in like that. But so did he. She was always dancing around the truth, yet Leo would fish it out, dig it up from deep below.

The idea dawned on him as he sat on the maglev: a sliver of an idea that was mean and ugly but that he would face head on, without fear. She was not really going to help their daughters. She was going to get away from him. Maybe to find something new. Maybe even something, or someone, that was not so new.

The panic and the anger rushed through him like a current, and he closed his eyes and counted to ten, focusing on his breath, as his new therapist, Dr. Zhu, had told him to. And so what? Another question he’d learned how to ask. How would life be so different? And what evidence did he have? What proof?

So what? So what?

Take a pause and focus on the present, something happy.

The maglev, its faded blue seats, would go back and forth, back and forth. For all time? Until it was decommissioned, put to rest. Leo thought of his old horse, Py, who would soon need to be put down too. The stallion was living at the hotel next to the house on the land, the farm they’d bought back in 2032, when he was at the height of—what had Dr. Wen liked to call it?—yes, the height of his “manic paranoia.”

He had no regrets, though. The farm, the house in the mountains of Vancouver, the boat docked off the shore of Changxing Island, the village house in Zhejiang with its cellar full of water and bars of gold, the ponies, the vineyard in France—he still felt, in the back of his mind, that the world was going to shit, any day now. All the structures holding up life as they knew it would completely and suddenly collapse.

He, and they—the girls, Eko—they would have to survive. They were too important. “To whom?” Dr. Wen had asked. To himself, of course. And who knew? Maybe to the world, to the future of mankind.

The maglev was filling up, and a young woman walked in and down the aisle to the seat across from Leo. Her hands were fidgeting with a red hat that matched her red coat and—as Leo could sense rather than see through a quick glimpse—her red lipstick. She was nervous.

IT WAS MARY’S FIRST TIME on the maglev, and her first time in Shanghai. In fact, this was her first time away from home at all. She was on her way to meet a man—someone she’d first connected with over WeChat a year ago. He had sent money for her plane ticket, and for the ride on the maglev. As if it were some kind of treat, to take this fast train from the airport into the city, where he was to pick her up. She didn’t care about the maglev; she’d rather he had sent over some spending money. And wouldn’t it have been nicer for him to meet her directly at the airport? Already she had a sinking feeling. She glanced around her. A handsome man in an expensive-looking cashmere coat sat on the other side of the aisle. Thick wavy hair speckled very lightly at the temples with white. A true Shanghai man!

The maglev doors beeped, then closed, and the train began to move, its acceleration smooth and quiet and displayed on a screen at the front of the car in digital numbers that ran up quickly from 1 to 400km/hr. Despite her anxiety about the entire trip, she couldn’t help but feel impressed by the speed.

Shanghai zoomed by outside the window. It went by so fast it was just a blur of colors. Mary could not see much. She was waiting for the tall buildings, the rush of cars, the fancy people holding hands along the Bund.

But they were still in the outer regions of Pudong. Mary saw a familiar landscape—the houses, the plots of farmland, the tiny anonymous farmers walking in the distance. It was the same as in her hometown, where her parents tended cabbages to go to market, some traveling as far as Shanghai. She had often had the thought, while packing the cabbages in their little boxes: Even these cabbages are going to see Shanghai before I do.

Mary was going to see the tallest building in the world. She was going to take photos on the Bund. She was going to ride the floating bubble down the Tranquility Tower. She was going to put on a mermaid suit and swim with the turtles in the aquarium. All the things she’d paid tokens to see and feel and do on the screen—they would be real very soon.

Her desire to leave had existed forever. It had been born in her, as intrinsic and as extraordinary as her beauty. And she had cultivated both. When they’d gotten their home screen from the government five years ago, things had just gotten worse. Since then, she’d spent hours with it each day, walking along simulation Shanghai streets, sipping virtual coffee, chatting with strangers over drinks at bars along the Bund. In Shanghai no one would care that she was twenty-five. She heard that in the city, women even got married at forty. Fifteen years—she could live another entire lifetime in fifteen years.

Mary had left a voice note to her parents on their family screen. Her parents had never learned how to read; they barely knew how to use the screen. They would see its flashing green light, though, and know to press the button. Mary’s voice would spill out, unemotional, strong. Ma, Ba, I’m going to Shanghai. Don’t look for me. I’ll send money home. She packed a small bag full of her prettiest clothes.

Mary was just a girl from Anhui, but she knew she was striking. She was short, but her face was nearly perfect, as long as she fixed her eyes. She only had to cut thin strips of clear, dissolvable tape and attach them to her mono lids, and her eyes would fold and grow double in size. Over the years she’d perfected the angle and placement of the tape, to create the right shape—she liked a squarish, rather than a round, eye. Mary looked out the window in glances, noting the train’s fluid motions. Oh, now they were making a turn, and she could feel the train lifting to her left, angling into the turn. She felt she might almost fall over into the aisle. Would the handsome man help her back into her seat?

Mary looked at herself in her compact mirror. Her eyes were good today. She had good eye days and bad eye days. Every night before bed, she washed off the sticky remnants of her eye tape, her thick skin slowly pushing the foreign creases out of her lids.

Mary had read about cases where years of tape had effectively trained a person’s lids to stay creased forever, but by morning she always peered out at herself from her own small, hooded eyes, their natural expression fittingly unamused, dull.

Mary hated mornings, in part because of how she looked, her original self. She was too frequently late to her job at the hotel, but she always made time for her tape. In her small bathroom, the mirror, surrounded by a ring of light, was festooned with little pieces of tape that hadn’t made the cut. When turned on, it looked like a sun with many rays. Or a lion with a thick mane. Or a peach, being burrowed into by an army of worms.

When she arrived in Shanghai and finally met Xin, it would be a while before they spent the night together. She’d decided to get her eyes done at the Ninth People’s Hospital, famous for plastic surgery. No more tape—freedom from tape! The idea thrilled her, even more than the thought of meeting Xin. She glanced over at the man next to her. She could even shoot higher.

When she next looked out the window, the landscape had changed. They were now rushing by tall blocks of apartment buildings, some of them still under construction. Cranes lifted their metal necks into the sky.

SHANA RECOGNIZED THE MAN in seat 14C and hung back. In all her years working the trains, there had been the occasional friendly regular, but no one she knew from her personal life. She pulled her vest down and smoothed the wrinkles that cut into her skin. The man’s face was familiar, but his name evaded her. Then, suddenly, she remembered how she’d met him. He was a friend of Nelson’s, from university. They had set off from the same

starting line, but Nelson had fallen off the track, and then he’d gone and died. She watched the man as she made her way down the aisle. He was older, but still handsome. As she passed him, she quietly turned her face away, wanting to remain hidden. She remembered Nelson talking about this man. Leo. Yes. Now it came back to her, the name, everything. Leo had lucked out as an early investor in real estate. He had bought several apartments when Shanghai was still cheap. His Japanese French wife, aloof and pretty, always speaking French, their three little girls. The whole family had come over once for dinner—to the house on Anfu Lu, the handsome stone and brick house that Nelson had rented when they’d been granted the seed money for Café Je t’aime. It was their house and also the office. The home had been shady and secretive, someone always coming out of a room, turning a corner, finishing a meeting, lounging on the patio. It smelled at all times of freshly brewed coffee. Grinds were packed into every crevice of every table, every desk, between cracks in the computer keyboards.

Leo and Eko had brought their girls over for dinner. What Shana remembered noticing that night was the hand-holding. Husband’s and wife’s hands were always in contact, fingers rubbing against one another. But it hadn’t been grotesque; it had been lovely. Because the wife’s hands were lovely: elegant and long and prettily manicured. And Leo’s hands were lovely, too, large and square. She could imagine their embrace—warm, dry, soft. The girls were charming, with precociously beautiful faces atop the bodies of children. They traveled as an entourage. Their presence radiated wealth.

Already at that point, two businesses down for Nelson, Shana was starting to get a sense of her own man’s limitations. At the end of the night, after they’d all said goodbye, Shana was on her way out to throw away the trash. That was when she heard them, Leo and Eko, and saw them standing under a streetlamp a few buildings away. Leo was yelling. Eko was glaring at him. Their faces were clear, illuminated by the light. Where were their children? Shana remembered those faces, remembered her concern for the girls, saw it all now in her mind’s eye.

LEO LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW; they were passing over a bridge. Leo was going back to an empty home, and he hated an empty home. For so many years, business trips had ended with bursts of energy and brightness—him spilling through the front door and his daughters running, colliding into his open arms, the squeals of delight when he pulled small presents from his coat pockets. His wife’s warm kiss on his cheek, despite the inevitable days’ growth of beard.

But he knew what awaited him now. The older girls away and Yukiko out with her friends or simply too cool to stay up for him, a plate of cut fruit left wrapped in plastic on the dining table by their housekeeper and a cold Pepsi in the fridge. The sugary cola, his one nightly indulgence, his welcome-home party.

Better, then, to be out, walking among the people, solving problems in his head. Work issues, management issues, his least favorite—then math issues, his reprieve, his solace. Though it was just a hobby now, he still spent quite a lot of time on math. Several years ago he had begun revising the foundation of his intellectual framework. He had become convinced: the rise of intuitionism, the nondeterministic nature of the universe, our inability to conceptualize infinitude, the inevitable collapse of relativism . . . the past could no more predict the future than the future could fortell the past.

He had Yoko to thank, or maybe to blame. She, his middle daughter, had been the only one interested in numbers, in theories. When he gifted her A Brief History of Time for her tenth birthday, she had inhaled it, just as he had when he was young. Yoko was cut from the same cloth. She had reignited in him a long-forgotten passion for all those fundamental questions. The arrow of time, the limits of our understanding, the question of infinity. He had worked with her just last summer on parsing through Euclid’s Elements.

He had been considering, recently, reframing his own specialty, in engineering and physics, through an intuitionist lens. Because it was becoming clearer that classical mechanics did not represent the truth of the world, the universe. Everything he’d believed about infinite precision needed to be rethought. Then, he might understand how information is created rather than revealed, and how to predict, or even how to give up on predicting, change. When Yoko was younger, she worked on her middle-grade problems in his office, while he tackled his own. When the others walked in on them, sitting silently side by side, they joked, “Dad and Yoko, forever thinking about infinity.”

Now she was back to school, where she was studying with masters, on her own. He felt the pang of loss. His Yoko, she was something special. They all were, sure. But she—maybe she would figure it all out.

Who was staring at him? Leo felt too old for these games. And yet. The fatigue slipped from his mind. He couldn’t help but look at the plump red lip, the lined eye, the lean legs, uncovered, that extended out from under the short skirt and red coat. Women. So many women in this world. They made eye contact, then both looked away. Outside his window, a landscape of steel, iron, sky, and clouds. He flexed his palms and clenched his jaws. The old animal in him—he enjoyed being watched, appreciated. He was still attractive in his late middle years. To a certain type of girl. Not a young girl; a woman still youthful. A woman with ideas about herself. A worldly girl.

Leo turned his gaze back toward the aisle. But the red girl was not watching him. She was looking out her own window. In a flash, another maglev passed on her side. Their train jostled in response. She startled, looked around in panic.

Her eyes met his again, fear across her face, a question: Is this right? Is this the way things should be? So it was her first time on the train. He smiled, a calm, reassuring smile.

The maglev was fast and soon they would be packing up, shuffling onto the platform, balancing bags down escalators and elevators. In movement, the river of people, the electricity in the air would dissipate.

But then, unexpectedly, the train was slowing down. Leo watched as the number on the monitor decreased. It dropped and dropped until it was in the single digits, and finally it came to a rest at zero. The passengers looked around at one another. This was not right. Leo stood up to peer down the aisle. Others, too, were looking around and through, out the windows. A murmur began to crescendo. “What’s going on?” The thought crossed Leo’s mind that this was it, the war that was going to bring every country to its knees. The start of apocalypse. The end times. But he pushed the thought away. The end times had never arrived, and he’d decided years ago to put them out of his mind.

Leo had the urge to snap a photo of the scene. He wanted to document this moment, the way he’d liked to do in the past. He wanted to show and tell his wife about it. He wanted to talk. He always wanted to talk. The problem was that Eko no longer listened. He had been talking past her for years. Eventually, he’d stopped talking to her nearly altogether. It wasn’t that he was punishing her. She had lost interest, and he had lost interest in return.

Should they have gone back to France? Should they have spent more time in Kyoto? Who would have imagined that he—that they—would still be in Shanghai after all these years, would be living out their lives in his home city? For his work, ostensibly, yes. But had he kept them all here to no end? Would they have been a different family in France, in Japan? What kind of family?

SHANA MARCHED DOWN THE AISLE, avoiding the heads that were sticking out along her path. She squeezed into the conductor’s cabin. There were already several attendants crowded in.

“We hit something. We were going too fast to see.”

“Well, what was it? On the tracks?”

“It couldn’t have been a person, right?” Shana asked.

After a pause, the conductor shook his head. “I don’t think so.” “But you didn’t see it.”

“What did it sound like?”

“Like a small pop.”

“Who’s going out to check?”

The conductor got on the phone with the transportation authority. They were on their way. They would have to inspect the train before it could move again.

Shana had never been in an accident on the train before. When she was first working as an attendant, they had regularly practiced for these kinds of situations, but she had participated half- heartedly. She’d never been the most diligent. She’d been young and beautiful instead.

All those trainings seemed like a lifetime ago—before Nelson, before the hard restart of his death. Her heart was racing. She was excited and nervous and also scared. She would be in control of her car, though. She felt the way she did whenever her son ran over the rocks studding a river, crossing to the other side. “Mom!” he’d call out, and she’d hold her breath, forcing herself to jump from rock to rock with a similar confidence. She did not want to teach her son to be afraid of anything.

“Everybody calm down,” she said, coming back into her car. “Everything is fine. We’re going to do a quick system check, and we’ll be up and moving in no time. Thank you for your patience.”

She saw Leo glance up at her, then down at his watch. He had not recognized her. She saw the young girl across the aisle from him nearly shivering with fear as she looked around her, wide-eyed and helpless. Help me, the girl said wordlessly. She was someone who had received help her whole life. The girl was pretty. No, she was beautiful. She looked like a little doll. It exhausted Shana to look at her. She was exhausted all the time now.

WITH THE TRAIN STOPPED, Leo imagined the doors swinging open. He could get out, climb down from the elevated tracks, into the grass. He had not been happy for years. He thought about taking the pretty girl and escaping from the train. He remembered again the old house on the outskirts of the city—farmland, the glass angles reaching up into the sky. The weekends with the animals, the board games, riding the ponies with his girls on the mountain.

Leo imagined running through the fields, settling in. His daughters were practically grown. Eko made her own money now. Those days on the farm had been his happiest, and he could re-create them with someone new. He still had the land, maintained by a local farmer who sent a large box of vegetables to their house in Shanghai every week.

He would hide, out there. How long would it take for them to find him? Would they make a concerted effort? He would raise a kid, a son, of course. Homeschool, everything. He’d do things right this time. He could do it all over again. A new, totally sustainable life.

The young girl rummaged through her bag and pulled out a small mirror. She reapplied her lipstick and used her pinky nail to poke at her eyelids, stretching her skin in strange motions that made her look unnatural, inhuman. Leo saw it all clearly, then: the young girl, the insecurities of youth. How tiring, the first years of partnership, of adjusting and negotiating and ultimately relenting. That was Leo’s problem. He had to do things completely, totally, correctly. It couldn’t be just sex. It would have to be a life, a child, a farm, an entire system unto itself. And he would never be able to forget: who he was, who they were, and how they’d shaped him. With his family, now, the ties were intractable, gravitational. In the end, he loved them, all of them—he was still in love. Eko still drew him, with her secrets, her silences, her unrelenting beauty.

The train began to move. The numbers on the screen climbed slowly, and then quickly. A woman with an infant began to make shooshing sounds; her baby was getting agitated. A young man wearing shorts and sandals stretched his long legs into the aisle. An elderly woman and her even older mother continued chatting; they had never stopped. All the people on the train settled back into their seats, glancing around before returning their attention to their windows. Now they were almost there, almost home.