Juli Min's novel 'Shanghailanders' unfolds in reverse

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

At the start of Juli Min's debut novel, it's 2040 in Shanghai, and a wealthy real estate developer is parting ways with his wife and adult daughters at the airport. But as the story progresses, Shanghailanders moves back in time, slowly unraveling the dreams, decisions and mistakes of the members of this family all the way back to 2014. In today's episode, Min speaks with NPR's Ailsa Chang about why she decided to write the events of the book in this order, and how the city of Shanghai is a character all on its own.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Julie Min's debut novel is titled
0:06.6	Shanghai Landers. And the thing about it that everyone is talking about is how it's told backwards.
0:11.9	It starts in 2040 and ends in 2014. And at different hands, this could be kind of a sticky
0:17.9	storytelling technique, you know, showing off for the sake of showing off. But in this interview with NPR's Elsa Chang, Julie Min talks about her writing decisions
0:25.9	and how she wanted to make a specific point about how the past stays with all of us,
0:31.6	even if we're not privy to it at the start of the book. That's coming up.
0:36.2	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:40.9	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
0:45.4	On our new show, Sources and Methods.
0:47.5	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,
0:51.2	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
0:54.8	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:00.2	Do you ever meet someone new and find yourself wondering what happened to them to make them the way they are now?
1:08.0	Like where is this sadness from or this anger or this tension in
1:13.0	the marriage? How did the past shape who they are now? Well, a new novel by Julie Min presents
1:19.8	these questions by introducing us to a family in the future, the year 2040. And then it slowly
1:26.0	fills out who these individuals are by telling their stories in
1:30.7	reverse. A wealthy Shanghaiese man, his beautiful Japanese French wife, their privileged, complicated
1:37.1	daughters. Each narrator takes turns on spooling the past, leaving us at the end with a better
1:43.5	understanding of the beginning.
1:45.8	Julie Min joins us now. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, well, thank you for being with us.
1:50.8	So I loved how this book flips around what we think of as the beginning, the middle, and end of a story.
	...

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