Valley of Amazement

A painting called the "Valley of Amazement" is passed along through three generations of women of the same family. Despite vast differences in their upbringing, culture and circumstances, each of the women are drawn to discover the meaning of the painting and the unknown histories of their mothers. The story begins in San Francisco in the 1880s when Lucia Hoggs meets a young Chinese painter. She follows him to Shanghai but parts ways with him, and, out of necessity, becomes a courtesan.
A decade later, Daisy, Lucia's twelve-year-old daughter by the painter, is separated from her mother who has boarded a boat sailing to San Francisco, and is sold into a brothel as a virgin courtesan. She rises to become one the "Ten Beauties of Shanghai". After her career declines, she marries and leaves Shanghai. But when a fire devastates the village and kills her husband seven years later, she is blamed, and banished to an alpine valley in Heaven Mountain, a once-holy place now said to be cursed.
Fourteen years later and Daisy's daughter, Rose, has been adopted by a couple from the Hudson Valley in New York, and is now an American journalist. An old woman comes to her while she is staying Shanghai, claiming she was her mother Daisy's maid, and that she has safeguarded her mother's possessions and now wants to sell them to Rose. One item is a painting of the Valley of Amazement landscape. There is a second painting, that of an American woman. On the back is an inscription in English, "For Miss Hoggs from Pei Lu Shing. Dark with excessive bright." Ultimately, Rose will confront the truth that ties these three generations of women to each other...