Below is the complete list of Lisa See’s May and Pearl books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of May and Pearl Books
About May and Pearl
Lisa See’s May and Pearl books form a two-novel family saga beginning with Shanghai Girls and continuing in Dreams of Joy. The sequence is also commonly identified by the publisher as the Shanghai Girls series, after its opening novel. Sisters Pearl and May Chin provide the emotional foundation, although the second book expands the story around the next generation through Joy, the young woman they have raised amid complicated family secrets. Together, the novels span Shanghai, wartime China, Los Angeles’s Chinese American community, and Mao-era China while examining sisterhood, migration, motherhood, identity, and the price of survival.
Shanghai Girls opens in 1937, when Pearl and her younger sister May are living a privileged, modern life in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Their father’s financial ruin abruptly destroys that security when he arranges marriages for them to Chinese men from Los Angeles. Before the sisters can fully confront what this means, war reaches Shanghai. Their journey toward America consequently becomes far more than a reluctant marriage arrangement, carrying them through invasion, violence, loss, and immigration before they reach California.
Los Angeles offers safety without uncomplicated freedom. Pearl and May must adapt to husbands they barely know, racial discrimination, immigration restrictions, family obligations, and the expectations of Chinatown. See also places them within the changing Chinese American community surrounding Hollywood and the political suspicion generated by fears of communism. Their relationship remains the novel’s emotional core. The sisters are deeply loyal but not idealized; jealousy, resentment, competition, sacrifice, and secrets exist alongside genuine devotion.
One of those secrets becomes the bridge into Dreams of Joy. The sequel begins in 1957, with nineteen-year-old Joy devastated by revelations about her parentage. She leaves Los Angeles for Shanghai to search for her biological father, artist Z.G. Li, and becomes captivated by the promises of Mao’s new society. Pearl follows her back to China, determined to bring her home.
This changes the balance of the series. Where Shanghai Girls is primarily the story of two sisters surviving together, Dreams of Joy places mother and daughter at the center. Pearl must revisit a country filled with memories she had tried to leave behind, while Joy encounters political reality far removed from the idealistic version she initially embraces. Their experiences unfold during the Great Leap Forward, when collectivization, economic policies, and famine transformed everyday life throughout China. See’s extensive research into people who returned to or left China during this period gives the historical setting particular importance.
May remains essential to the family history even when she is no longer sharing the narrative foreground equally with Pearl. Decisions made by both sisters years earlier determine Joy’s understanding of herself, reinforcing the idea that family secrets rarely belong to only one generation.
See originally conceived Shanghai Girls without planning a sequel, but later returned to Pearl, May, and Joy in response to continuing interest in their unfinished relationships. She has said that Dreams of Joy contains possibilities that could support another book, although she was not working on a third installment.
The two novels ultimately trace one family across political systems and continents rather than functioning as separate historical adventures. Shanghai and Los Angeles represent competing ideas of home, while Pearl, May, and Joy repeatedly discover that nationality and family identity are more complicated than geography. The lasting strength of the sequence lies in those three women and in the secrets, sacrifices, and loyalties connecting their lives across generations.