STARRED Book Review: The Moon Goddess’s Smile

Reviewed by Erica Ball

Secrets, scars, and stories—a fascinating historical novel of cultural & personal significance

Mei feels the weight of her family’s long legacy on her shoulders. Growing up hearing her beloved grandfather’s stories—a mix of family lore and traditional Chinese tales—she has come to realize she may be last person who remembers them the way he told them. This burden is hard to bear, especially as her half-Chinese, half-Italian children are dismissive of her attempts to draw them into their parents’ cultures.  

When Mei is called home to Nanjing on urgent family business, she hopes it’s a chance to introduce her skeptical teens to the sprawling Hong family and show them first-hand the deep traditions they are now bearers of.  

Traveling ahead of them, she is immediately faced with a complex family situation. Her journey to Nanjing evokes an overwhelming rush of long-repressed memories, and she is pulled into a torrent of emotions and forced to process them with the new information she has gathered with age. The family has been keeping some extremely large secrets from her, and they all to come to light now that she is there in person.

Under both the pressure to preserve her family and to reconcile her own memories and secrets, Mei must prepare for the arrival of her husband and kids too. But her texts and phone calls go unanswered and unreturned—first for one day, then more, spiking anxieties of a totally different kind. By the time she finally gets an answer, it’s clear that something is up.

Mei is a scientist with keen insight and dry humor. She recounts her memories and stories with a loving tone, though she becomes melancholy when the subject turns to people who have passed or to ways in which she is feeling inadequate, especially as her generation’s keeper of the family’s stories. 

The author does a stellar job of bringing Shanghai and Nanjing (as well as the landscape between those two cities) to life. The smells, sights, and sounds of these places are evocatively related and trigger her flood of memories with sense associations. The novel not only has a terrific sense of place, but it deftly interweaves ancient legend, myth, and folktale with the real historical events that shaped China (and the Hong family) throughout the twentieth century. It’s a fascinating way to learn or revisit historical events like the Japanese invasion of Nanjing or the massacre at Tiananmen square, especially as it is told from the viewpoint of a person or people we have gotten to know.

It’s a timely read as well. The historical upheavals include protests and revolutions of different kinds and with different promises, and rarely, if ever, do they deliver on those promises.  

The Moon Goddess’s Smile is a remarkable story that encompasses generations and carries thousands of years of tradition. There is a complex interplay of culture and identity at many levels here: from the household to the extended family, to the town or city, then country and effects of a government’s ideology. What happens when a beloved home country becomes something unrecognizable? This book is a meditation on the role of country and culture—of one family’s traditions, secrets, and fate.

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