The Concubine's Daughter

The Concubine's Daughter is part history, part romance, part drama, part legend, part martial arts, part tragedy, and part poem. Pai Kit Fai leans on his background as martial artist and traditional Chinese medicine to craft the story of Li-Xia ("The Beautiful One") and her daughter Siu-Sing ("Little Star").

Li-Xia is born the daughter of a concubine on a spice farm in early 1906. An unwanted child, her father tried to rid himself of her but was thwarted twice by a fox fairy. In the attempt, her mother tragically dies. And so Li-Xia grows, is sold off the farm to a silk farmer, and learns to gather silk cocoons, spin silk thread and makes friends. All the while, she years to be a scholar, as her mother saw herself a scholar. She treasures her mother's diary, filled with poems and "pieces of gold." Li-Xia eventually finds her path to gold, and bears a daughter. At the birth of her daughter, they are parted.

Siu-Sing is raised far from the place where her mother found her peace and stillness. She is raised in the art of The White Crane by a learned sifu and faces a deadly nemesis her entire journey. Along the way, she has to fight her way out of being sold into slavery, being sold into an opium den and surviving with her bare wits. She has to face her mortal enemy, her past, and find love.

What I enjoyed most about this novel was the attention to detail. Bowls of seasoned congee for breakfast. Learning about the sung-tip contracts for girls. The corruption of Shanghai and Kowloon and Macau power triads. The gentle play of history over the forward motion of the story. The social classes and disdain for interracial marraige. The gritty feel of absolute slavery. The lavishness of riches and power.

If you enjoyed "Memoirs of a Geisha" or "Shanghai Girls" or "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," you will doubtless dive headfirst into this novel too. Enjoy it, as I did!

I found this novel difficult to read. In fact after 300+ pages I stopped reading. This is something I NEVER do. I struggled with whether to go on for the sake of completing it, but my desire to read something more pleasurable won out. I simply did not enjoy the novel and after 300 pages I simply was not invested in the story line. It was too wordy - desperately in need of an editor. But the main reason was a plot twist that removed the title character (the concubine's daughter) from the story.

The Concubine's Daughter tells a tale of shocking brutality mixed with some sappiness. It begins with a yeoman farmer named Yuk Minn acquiring a 15 year old concubine Pai Ling, who is educated, spirited, and incompatible with life as a man's property. Early in the novel, the concubine commits suicide because she believes that Li Xia, her daughter with the yeoman, was buried alive because she was born a girl. Li Xia was saved by a "fox fairy" and managed to survive childhood (despite her father's second attempt to kill her) until she was sold into slavery on a silk farm. Li Xia was initially happy, but as she reached maturity, she was tortured and left for dead because she refused to conform to the expectations of her patriarchal society. Happily, Li Xia was rescued near-death from the river by a half-European, half-Chinese wealthy businessman. Once rescued by Ben Devereaux, the novel degenerated into a sappy Cinderella story replete with evil, jealous servants. However, once Li Xia seemed destined for happiness as the beloved wife of Ben Devereaux and is about to become a mother, the author pulled the rug out from under Li Xia. At this point the novel shifted to Li Xia and Ben's daughter. But I ran out of patience. I could not tolerate the idea of wading through 200+ more wordy pages to get to the end. I simply could not care about what happened and I gave up. I rated the novel 2 stars. There were some decent portions of the story line and I learned a lot about the silk farms and slave women in China. I'm sure this would be a great novel for some people, but once Li Xia was no longer the center of the novel, I stopped caring. I tried to go on, but I really could not see myself devoting more time to this book. I loved Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but The Concubine's Daughter was missing the poignancy of that novel.

This book covered the years from about 1900 to the World War II era in Macau, Hong Kong, and mainland China.

The first woman was a young mixed race (part Chinese part Russian) girl named Pai-Ling, who only wanted to be a scholar. Instead she was sold off by her bankrupt family to a much older farmer to be a his sex slave. Needless to say, her story is a depressing one.

Her daughter by that farmer is the next generation - Li-Xia, who was only allowed to live due to superstition. She spent much of her childhood locked in a shed - how she even learned how to properly talk and interact with others is a mystery, much less how she could long to become a scholar at such a ridiculously young age (wouldn't she worry more about food than scrolls while under the age of ten and kept locked up in a shed most of the time?). She is eventually sold off as a slave to a silk farm, where she makes lifetime friends and enemies before some extremely unlikely twists of fate make her a woman of wealth. Her story never really worked for me - the twists of fate are just too out there. It read more like a bad historical romance than historical fiction.

Su Sing is the third generation. Her story mixes learning martial arts with learning how to be a highly trained prostitute (yet somehow remaining a virgin while working in brothels and bars). It was a strange combination - the martial arts with the sex stuff. She spends most of her storyline trying to find her vanished father (when she is not being held captive in the sex trade, that is). Her story never really gelled for me - if it had stuck with either her becoming a martial arts master or with becoming a master sex trade worker, it might have been better than in trying to have both elements.

In addition, it bothered me that both of the main heroes in the story were either full or half European, with a more European outlook and orientation towards the world. Surely even in a society as sexist as that portrayed in the book, there would have been individual men who would have loved and protected their wives and daughters? Why not have any Asian heroes in a book set in Asia?

I loved the first 200 pages of this book. Yes, it's brutal and misogynistic, and yes the characters can be a bit flat, but I loved the view of Chinese culture and society at this exciting time in history. I think the author writes his female characters with strength and dignity. However, once the main Li-Xia met her husband-to-be, the story went totally cold. And once the story shifted to their daughter, Siu-Sing, I really started to long for the ending (so I could read something else!). The author would have been far better served had he simply focused on Pi-Ling and Li-Xia, and forgotten about the third generation (or maybe for a sequel?). I wanted to learn more about foot binding, more about the silk farming, more about the Boxer Rebellion. These things are all mentioned in passing, but without any background or supporting material. I found the love stories fairly hopeless, with a sense of desperate romanticism that was totally unrealistic and clashed with the harshness exhibited by characters in the rest of the book.
I would not recommned this book. It would be better to read a well developed story that is 300 pages shorter than a long, drawn out, badly designed novel with limited characterizations.

I am once again in the minority, but this novel didn't work for me. The beginning was excellent, had me hooked. I enjoyed the look at early 20th century China and life on the farm. I felt horrible for the young child, Li Xia (the concubine's daughter), and longed to see her overcome and blossom despite the cruelties she endures at the hands of her own father and his wives. However, once Li Xia leaves and goes to work on the silk farm, I started seeing a pattern that I came to recognize throughout the entire book. Everybody is either really super duper nice or really super duper evil. There is no realistic "in between".. Li Xia never has a bad thought. She aims to please everyone and even when the evil people treat her horribly, she feels no hate or desire for revenge. Only kind words ever leave her mouth. I didn't realize we were reading about the Virgin Mary here. When the man she is to marry enters the picture, again, he is nothing but sugar and spice. The man is a saint, rescuing her, educating her, buying her jewels and clothes, and when they get married, even waits patiently for 5 nights before consummating the marriage... Come on!

As far as Li's story goes, there was one other thing that really bothered me. She makes a friend on the silk farm named Pebble. How old is Pebble? We know that Pebble has gray in her hair and is bowlegged and has been around the block a few times, so obviously a much older lady than 8 year old Li. Yet they have mature conversations and share secrets like little girls.

Due to strong differences of opinion between Li and the master of the silk farm, Li is put to death. A passing ship merchant, Ben, rescues her. After she becomes educated and wealthy, Li goes back to rescue all her friends and not long after, her part of the story ends in tragedy... Now we begin the story of her daughter, Su Sing.

Su Sing's story is somewhat a quest.. a quest to find her father that she has been separated from. Along her quest, she learns that not all is what it appears to be. She runs into some bad people (actually, super duper evil people) and ends up in prostitution house. Until this point, Su Sing's story was enjoyable to me, tho a bit dull at times (too many lengthy descriptions about birds and trees). At this point, I was greatly repulsed by thirteen year old Su Sing's sexual dalliances with a much older woman. The age of the woman is never revealed, but we know that she has lines around her eyes and has had a baby and I estimated her to be around 30. I could be wrong, but nevertheless, I would have been a lot less repulsed, had the age difference not been so drastic. A 13 year old and a woman old enough to be her mother having relations was a bit of an unpleasant surprise to me.

From here on, Su Sing continues to look for her father and the possibility of happiness.

I did enjoy the details about life on the silk farm. I think good insight was also offered into "mixed race" marriages in early China and how the "daring" couples were treated. I found it sad that two people very much in love had to deal with so much prejudice and even worse, the hate of the people being transferred to the offspring. Also of note is the details regarding foot binding.

The author claims his background in martial arts and traditional Chinese medicine gave him enough information to write a book on Chinese history. Frankly, this is like saying anyone who runs a dojo can write a book on Japanese history. The result of Pai's sloppy historical research is a novel littered with errors. For example, in the novel he claims that Macao was ceded to Portugal because the Portuguese defeated the pirate Koxinga, but Koxinga died in 1662 and Macao was ceded in 1887. Is this a major error that affects the plot? No, but it's a pretty blatant one, and it's one that few if any Chinese people would make, especially if they're from the southern provinces. It's like saying Washington and Lincoln fought each other in the Civil War.
Pai also refers to one character in 1924 as a "barefoot doctor," but this term was unknown prior to the establishment of the PRC in 1949. He refers to the Buddhist goddess of mercy alternately as "Kwan-yin" and "Kwan-yun" (in Cantonese it would be "Kwun-Yum"). There are also several occasions where Chinese characters are called using half of their first names; for example, Ben calls the main character "Li Devereaux" instead of "Li-Xia Devereaux." I don't know if this is the case in Hong Kong, but in other parts of China this is a strange way to refer to people. None of these errors affect the plot, true, but they undermine the reader's confidence in the novel as a whole. By the time I got halfway through the novel I was basically skimming it, waiting for the next error to show up. And these are just the ones that I found. I'm not Chinese and I have no formal research background in Chinese history, but I do know how to look something up if it looks suspicious or doesn't seem right given my own experiences living in China. I can't even imagine what someone with a formal background in Chinese history would find here.
Secondly, Pai clearly relies on his own outsider impressions of China as a basis for the novel, so it's loaded with Western biases. In the appendix he refers to the area where the novel takes place with words like "the Far East," "Oriental," "wild," "wicked," and other terms better suited to a travel brochure than to a work of historical fiction. I doubt the Chinese refer to their own country using those words. I admit I didn't bother Googling the author before I bought the book, so based on the name I assumed it was a Chinese author, but three pages into the novel my first thought was, "This book was written by a Westerner." Even in childhood, Li-xia has a preoccupation with personal freedom and individual rights that is ludicrous given the time period the novel takes place in and the culture she is raised in from birth. Also, Pai repeatedly harps on the theme "Footbinding is bad!" without ever going beyond this. Yes, footbinding is agonizing and has an extremely high fatality rate, and one assumes the Chinese realize this after having practiced it for a thousand years or so. So why do it? Because the advantages of a good marriage and a secure future that footbinding brought were valuable enough to be worth the risk. See Lisa See's "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" for an excellent, unbiased analysis of footbinding in a work of Chinese historical fiction. Pai, on the other hand, by not going beyond "Footbinding is bad! Also sexist and oppressive!" to explore the cultural context and address the reasons why a Chinese family might pursue such a dangerous operation, leaves the reader with the impression that the Chinese are basically sadistic jerks.
The storyline is exciting and the author incorporates a lot of sensual detail, which makes this an entertaining work of fiction. BUT - it is not historical fiction. In the appendix there is no list of the author's sources and no mention of his research process - compare this with the years of research and personal interviews Golden undertook in writing "Memoirs of a Geisha." As a result of Pai's sloppy factchecking, "The Concubine's Daughter" has all the historical accuracy of a Wikipedia entry. Some of the information might be true, but since the author doesn't verify his own research nothing in here should be taken as fact.

The concubine's daughter is mostly about two women, the third woman Pi-Ling is an `absent' character that travel's with Li-Xia on her entire journey, but we never really get to know Pi-Ling as a person. The first part of the story focuses on Li's childhood and it was a little brutal. I am still fuming over the way daughters were killed, raped and told not to cry out. Li some how gets saved and ends up becoming a great scholar and marrying Ben (a rich foreigner), the man who saved her.

The second part of the story is about Su Sing, Li's daughter, who was saved by her mother and her mother's trusted friend the Fish. Sing grows up in a protective bubble that pops at 13 years of age with the deaths of her aunt and Si Fu. From here her story reads somewhat like her mothers with the brutal reality of women in rural China. It's as though her mother and grandmother gave their lives and wisdom to pave the way for Sing, all their hopes and dreams rest on Sing's small shoulders.

I enjoyed the novel, but I honestly thought that the author threw in a little too much `fairy tale' aspect. Twice the white fox spirit saved Li and through out the entire novel she is able to save her virginity until she chooses to give it away. That in itself is unheard of. Virginity is usually given to the highest bidder. It was as if she was always protected against rape, where every other woman wasn't. (Obviously until the end of her story) Sing is also protected in that same magical way and was able to keep her virginity from all the men who want it. That part was just a little to fairy tale for me.

A lot of reviewers are also put off with the age of the two young girls as well as the age difference between Sing and her `friend.' All I can say is that if a Chinese girl is considered `no longer a child' at 10 then obviously there are different ideas of what is wrong and right. Pi- Ling was 15 when she delivered Li-Xia and Li was only... 18, 19 years old when she delivered Sing and died. These women didn't have a childhood and grew up quicker than normal. To me this book was a good 3 to 3 ½ stars, it was an interesting book, but I wouldn't pay hardcover price, and there are too many holes, or times when the plot is stretched a little thin, to be believable.

I don't think I'll be able to gush about this book enough. It is a fantastic and adventurous read. It starts out like any other book set in the late 19th century China, like Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. But that's where the similarities end. Li-Xia spits in the face of authority, literally. She doesn't let anyone take advantage of her. She clings to life until the very end. Every time you think it's over for her, it's not.

The story wanders from rich merchant's compounds to the silk-weaving farms of Canton to the gambling and prostitution dens of Macao, to Hong Kong triads and British society, every location depicted with a level of detail you can taste. The minor characters that appear throughout the story are fascinating and elaborated beyond the 2 dimensions.

Yes, there's a big shocker in the middle of the book, just after being lulled into relaxation, but knowing you have over half the book to go. At first, the reader may be upset, but the story continues with Siu-Sing, Little Star, Li-Xia's daughter. Siu-Star studies to become an expert in Wu-Shu Crane style, and has a powerful enemy who has trained in darker martial arts.

This book depicts a patriarchal society where women are bought and sold, and although our main characters are indeed sold - they are never owned by anyone. The only criticism I could possibly think of is that there were very few positively portrayed male Chinese characters. The female characters varied immensely, but many of the male characters were one-dimensionally despicable. The British males came across positively, in contrast to their Eastern counterparts. I believe this was part of the story and for the Western reader, we do know that women in the West in the same time period did have more rights than women in China. However, it might be one area that people criticize - the one-sided treatment of Chinese men, with the exception of Siu-Sing's "Si-Fu" or master.

"The Concubine's Daughter" pulled me in immediatately and despite its length, held my attention most of the time. The two stories of mother and daughter Li-Xia and Siu-Sing span 1906 to the early 1940s. The author is knowledeable about both the time periods and the geographical locations that are the settings for the novel. I thought it was a little far-fetched that girls so frequently became concubines or were sold into slavery; then I read about "The Painter from Shanghai," a novel based on the life of artist Pan Yuliang, who was sold into prostitution after the death of her parents. The harshness of a Li's life is shocking yet believable. One of the best sections of the books deals with Li's experiences working on a silk farm. Her fellow silk workers are protective and quirky, providing Li with the family she lacks. Siu-Sing's fate is different. She is taken from Macau to Southern China to protect her from enemies of her father. She is cared for by an elderly couple, including a master martial artist who trains Siu-Sing. This is another especially satisfying part of the book. Li-Xia and Siu-Sing survive through friendship, wit, tenacity, and a lot of luck. Many novels require the suspension of disbelief to some extent, but "The Concubine's Daughter" takes this to the extreme. I started out thinking this was a 4-star book, but as the implausible situations piled up, I found my enthusiasm waning. It's hard to articulate why I found the novel less satisfying as it progressed, but I agree with some of the more negative reviewers that the novel has problems with characterization. Both Li and Siu-Sing are interestng to a point but they are ultimately male fantasies: Beautiful, brilliant, caring, chaste, and poised. Teenagers. To which we add that Siu-Sing is also a master martial artist. In the end, it was all too much.

This book was compared to Memoirs of a Geisha, but it is not nearly as good. The poor, but brave Chinese girl is saved by the dashing Euro guy. This happens twice in the story, once with the mother, then with the daughter. I'm not saying this book is without any merit, but it is almost a romance novel, albeit one that is set in China.