The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan

This is the tale of the very difficult life of a mother and her daughter in the waning days of the 19th century going into the time of WWII.  The story is mostly set in Shanghai, and the options for women there are severely limited.  Men control money and property.  Women are largely sexual objects to be controlled.  They are either one of several wives or they are courtesans or they are prostitutes, at least in this tale.

Lucia is the daughter of parents who do not love her--she acts out by sleeping around and elopes with a Chinese man from a traditional family who is returning to Shanghai when she gets pregnant.  This is the mistake upon which the rest of the story turns.  Predictably, the young man is unable to convince his family to accept the foreign girl as his wife, not even his second wife.  The first child is a girl, Violet, who they completely ignore, but when the second child is a son they do much worse--they steal him.  How Lucia copes with this loss is the first story.

The second part is the story of Violet, who gets stolen from her mother and sold into a brothel.  Never a good start in life, but she does manage to make the best of it, although it takes a piece of her dignity to do so.  She has some luck--some of it good and some of it bad--and in the end we hope for the best for her, but the story, while not a happy one, is well told.