Mai has three daughters – eldest Priscilla (who’s very rich and a programmer), middle child Thuy (a dermatologist to the stars – including John Cho, as Mai often brags), and youngest Thảo, who returned to Vietnam and is an executive at a fashion company. It’s Kim and her daughters who have inherited Ly’s coveted Santa Ana house and all four live on top of one another. But their other sister Kim has returned to the fold along with her own two daughters in tow, and she resumes her place as Ly’s favorite daughter. All three women are estranged from their mother, Ly, who has lost both her first husband and her eldest daughter. Minh is the put-upon middle child who clings to her only daughter, and Khuyen is an entrepreneur who may or may not be a figure from the criminal underworld in Orange County’s Little Saigon (not a pimp, she insists violently whenever her sisters suggest she is). Mai is a hypochondriac, bitterly divorced from a man who sucked her dry financially and equally bitterly estranged from her sisters. Mai Nguyen, Minh Pham and Khuyen Lam are the second most recent generation of the Duong dynasty. Oanh left her marriage for love, a witch provided the curse, and now every time a Duong embarks upon a love affair it is destined to end poorly.
But the curse has held true for generations.
Per Vietnamese culture, that traps the spirits of the Duongs’ ancestors in purgatory forever. Thousands of years ago, a jealous ex-mother-in-law cursed her former daughter-in-law to forever bear daughters and never know love or happiness in life, and the Duong family has been suffering ever since. The Fortunes of Jaded Women is a funny, fast-paced book that’s only slightly marred by the fact that it has nine PoV characters, sometimes making the incredibly winding tale overly complex.
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