The Fortunes
By Peter Ho Davies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pages, $27
Peter Ho Davies’ examination of the US in transition spans 150 years from the 1860s to the present. A challenging work, the novel uses multiple eras to riff on questions of race and belonging: how to be American in a non-white skin? How to be Chinese, American, neither or both? Is it possible to acknowledge these questions while answering a further one: how, finally, to live?
Four lives are recounted, three of which are reworkings of Chinese-American historical figures: Ah Ling, a laundryman and, eventually, railway worker; the film star Anna May Wong, forbidden to kiss her male leads on camera as a result of America’s anti-miscegenation laws; a childhood friend of Vincent Chin, the young man beaten to death by two auto workers in a hate crime in Detroit in 1982; and finally, a writer, John Smith, awaiting the arrival of his adopted daughter in China.
In the first story, we meet Ah Ling, born in southern China and sold across the Pacific as an indentured labourer, who becomes manservant to real-life American tycoon Charles Crocker. Davies presents us with a cascade of details of Ah Ling’s American life — the new attire of a western suit and hat, the loss of his long braid — while keeping the man just beyond our grasp. According to historical sources, Crocker, impressed by the “docile servitude” of the Chinese, chose Chinese labour for the construction of his Central Pacific Railroad.
In “The Fortunes”, Ah Ling is given the lead role, but he seems detached, even ghostly, from himself. His observations are filtered through period language, so an attacker is described as “a liverish redhead in a fustian jacket”. Details of his Chinese life, meanwhile — his thousand-layer shoes and games of heaven-and-nine — are set off in quote marks, as if foreign even to his own mind. The depths of both his Chinese and American selves seem to actively resist the narrative language.
Throughout the book, Davies’ handling of genre and form, moving from historical romance to fragmented narrative to a final section that presents earlier chapters as the unfinished work of the writer John Smith, is both purposefully distancing and multilayered, creating another history out of alternate puzzle pieces.
“You dream your railroad will annihilate distance,” Ah Ling thinks, knowing the vast psychic distances within the US will not be bridged by technology. The railway has left a trail of buried bodies — deceased workers who will be repatriated back to China, “each foot and hand bagged in its own pouch and nestled in a box among other bones”.
Ah Ling, “aware of his whole life as an invention of others”, is an orphan in multiple ways, disconnected from his family, land of birth and even the biographical fiction in which he finds himself.
We then leap from the railroad to Hollywood, where the life of Anna May Wong shutters past like stills from a film. Cast as temptress, exotic flower and/or fragile butterfly, she is rejected for the roles she covets most, including the Chinese lead in an adaptation of Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth”, which goes to a non-Asian actor. In response to shattering disappointment, she responds with an airy, “It’s of no consequence”, in one of the most understated, moving moments of the novel.
Footnotes of these lives are almost all that survives, Davies seems to say, as we arrive at 1982, the year Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old resident of Detroit, was beaten to death a week before his wedding. His killers, who blamed Japan for the downturn in the US car industry, allegedly mistook Chin for Japanese. “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” one of the judges explained, in reference to the murderer and his co-defendant (who held Chin down in a parking lot as he was beaten with a baseball bat until his skull cracked). The assailants “got off with probation and fines of $3,000 each”.
Chin’s story is narrated by a childhood friend, an unnamed man who, 30 years after the murder, cannot forgive himself for running away. Unable to square his identity as a Chinese-American, as a man and as a friend, he distracts himself with a staggering compendium of self-belittling racist jokes. Humour abounds, even when it hurts. The society around him remains stubbornly prejudiced, caught between what Ah Ling calls earlier “the devil of violence and the devil of greed”.
“The Fortunes”, moving from the frontier to the contemporary, is driven by its political questions. Many of the characters have a wary anger, or tired resentment, that has diluted to disappointment and, finally, irony. Of the US’s adventures overseas, from the Philippines to Japan to Vietnam, one character jokes: “They fought with us or against all of us in the past 50 years and they still can’t tell us apart. And they wonder why they lost some of those wars ...”
In the last chapter, set in China but in no way a homecoming, the mirroring worlds of all four stories meet, as names or small details from the lives of Ah Ling, Anna May Wong and Vincent Chin resurface. In almost all the stories, children are adopted, women turn to the sex trade for survival, the railway appears and disappears, Hollywood beckons, laundry is refolded. Perhaps most provocatively, Asian-American citizens remain perpetual foreigners not only in their country but to themselves.
The narrator, knowing that he is American to the core, asks: “Aren’t all our desires racist in one way or another?” No one dares answer his question, or perhaps it goes unheard. Time rolls on, another generation is born, and people must live.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
Madeleine Thien’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” is published by Granta.
