The Los Angeles of 1870 had five thousand inhabitants, one hundred and ten saloons, six policemen, and no laws on the books about drunkenness or sex work. Into this dust-blown pueblo arrive three Chinese women, none of whom chose to come. Out of that historical pressure cooker, Lisa See builds her newest novel, Daughters of the Sun and Moon, a book that sits closer in temperament to her earlier project of family history than to her recent run of village-set Chinese fiction.
Three Women, One Dust-Choked Calle
Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See follows Dove, Petal, and Moon across roughly eighteen months in early Los Angeles. Dove is seventeen, beautiful, bound-footed, and sent across the Pacific as a second wife to a merchant she has never met. Petal, called Worthless Girl by her own parents in southern China, is sold by her father for forty Mexican dollars and shipped into the trafficking network the tongs ran along the Calle de los Negros. Moon is the educated wife of a Chinese herbalist; her botched footbinding as a child left her with a limp, but she speaks four languages and reads the English-language papers every morning.
Their lives are not destined to braid together, and See refuses the easy ribbon. The women cross paths because they live within the same dilapidated adobe block, because Doctor Tong treats women the others cannot afford to treat themselves, and because the world they inhabit pushes them toward each other. The friendship grows slowly, by accidents and small mercies.
Voices, Tenses, and the Architecture of Memory
The most ambitious craft choice in the book is its three-tiered narration. Moon speaks in first person past tense from 1926, looking back across fifty-five years with the candor and irritation of a woman in her eighties. Petal tells her story in first person present tense, raw and immediate. Dove appears in third person present, observed almost as an object, which is precisely how the society around her treats her. See is making a point with grammar itself, and it works. The reader learns to feel Dove’s confinement in the very tense she is rendered in.
The Lao Tzu epigraphs that head each of the five parts (“Watch your thoughts; they become your words… Watch your words; they become your actions…”) give the structure an almost sutra-like inevitability. By Part Five, the proverb has done its work; the reader feels the chain of consequence even before the events arrive.
Eating Bitterness, Finding Voice
The phrase that recurs throughout Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See is eat bitterness, the Cantonese expression for swallowing hardship without complaint. See does not use it as ornament. Each woman eats her own variety of it:
- Dove eats the bitterness of obedience, of being valued for a beauty she did not ask for and a wife-rank she cannot escape.
- Petal eats the bitterness of her own father’s signature on a contract she could not read.
- Moon eats the bitterness of being the most competent person in any room and the one expected to keep her opinions inside her teeth.
What See does well, and has done since Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, is refuse to flatten this into uplift. The women do not save each other in any tidy sense. They keep each other alive, which is a smaller and truer kind of solidarity.
History Sitting Alongside the Story
The novel builds toward the Chinese Massacre of October 24, 1871, an event in which a mob estimated at five hundred to three thousand attacked the Calle de los Negros and killed nineteen Chinese residents, including Doctor Tong. It remains one of the largest mass lynchings in American history, and one of the least taught. See has been carrying this story for thirty years; she first wrote about it in On Gold Mountain, her 1995 family memoir, and her own great-grandparents moved to Los Angeles partly because of it.
That history is the bone structure here. The Coronel Block, the Beaudry Block, Justice of the Peace Gray, Judge Widney, the tongs and their hatchet men, all of it is drawn from court records, newspapers, and contemporary accounts. The author’s note at the back is essential reading and is honest about what See compressed and combined. The novel earns the word historical in a way that fewer books in the category bother to.
Where the Writing Tightens, Where It Loosens
Honest critique requires saying that Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See is sometimes weighed down by the very thoroughness that gives it authority. The middle stretch, particularly through Part III, occasionally reads more like research than story. Newspaper extracts open each part, which is a clever frame, but they also force See to recap context the reader has already absorbed. A small number of secondary characters, especially among the tong members, blur together. Three-Finger Lee is sharply drawn; Headman Yo and Headman Sam are less distinct from each other than they need to be.
Dove’s third-person sections, brilliantly conceived, also have the side effect of keeping the reader at arm’s length from her interiority right when curiosity peaks. Some readers will love this. Others will wish for more of her inner weather.
The aphorisms are constant and beautiful, but their density occasionally tips into ornament. A reader newer to See’s work might find them more delight than burden; longtime readers may notice the slight ration of breath between them.
Where This Sits on Lisa See’s Shelf
For readers tracking See’s career, this book is a return to American soil after the China-set Lady Tan’s Circle of Women and the Korea-set The Island of Sea Women. It rhymes most closely with China Dolls (1930s San Francisco) and Shanghai Girls (immigrant women in Los Angeles), and it functions as a companion piece to On Gold Mountain without requiring you to have read it. If you first met See through The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane or Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, this one is a different texture: more violent in subject matter, more documentary in temperament.
Books to Pick Up Next
If Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See lands for you, the natural next reads include:
- Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, for multigenerational women navigating ethnic discrimination
- The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, for formal experimentation around immigrant women’s voices
- On Gold Mountain by Lisa See, the nonfiction family history that birthed this novel
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, for braided lives across decades of historical violence
- The Last Rose of Shanghai by Weina Dai Randel, for diaspora love and survival under crisis
- The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi, for women carving independence within rigid social codes
- The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, for hidden histories of race in America
Who This One Will Land With
Readers who love historical fiction grounded in archival rigor, who appreciate friendship novels where the friendship is hard-won, and who want their Asian American history complicated rather than smoothed, will find a great deal to hold here. Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See is not always graceful, but it is honest, and it does the work of bringing a buried piece of California’s record back into the daylight.
The palest ink, Moon tells us in the first chapter, is better than the best memory. This book is that ink.