Charlotte Brooks's "The Moys of New York and Shanghai"

Charlotte Brooks is a historian and author who has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American and Chinese diaspora history. Originally from California, she graduated from Yale and worked in mainland China and Hong Kong before earning a PhD from Northwestern University. She is a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a proud New Yorker.

Brooks applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution describes the lives of the two New York-based Moy siblings, Kay and Helen, during the mid-Depression years. Kay was married to Ming Tai Chin, whose Jazz Age restaurant empire had collapsed in 1932, so the Chins were suddenly struggling to support their seven children. Helen, her husband George, and their young daughter were more fortunate, yet the stress of George’s job as the only Chinese American civil engineer at a white firm was beginning to show.

The Page 99 Test does not really offer a full sense of the book. The Moys of New York and Shanghai is a biography of the six Moy siblings and their spouses, but I center three of the couples—Kay and Ming Tai, Ernest Moy and his wife Ruth Koesun Moy, and Alice Moy Lee and her husband Alfred Lee—and tell most of the story through them. So looking at page 99 gives a reader perhaps a one-third view, mainly of the domestic lives and career struggles of the New York-based siblings. The war and revolution of the title more directly shaped the lives of the other two featured couples, who spent much of this period in China.

What I hope readers see on every page are people who are familiar and relatable. Of course, the Moys’ lives in many ways were extraordinary—family members included a revolutionary, an Axis broadcaster, a wartime Rosie the Riveter, an engineer who helped put the first man on the moon, and two Medal of Freedom winners—yet all of the siblings and their spouses were complex, flawed, and deeply human.

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The Page 99 Test: Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends.

--Marshal Zeringue