The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre, £14.99)
Driven by a scalding sense of injustice, this sensitive but uneven historical novel unfolds as four tales of Chinese experience in the United States.
The first three draw on real-life figures. In gold-rush California we follow Ah Ling, a young laundryman who lands on his feet when he’s hired by a railway tycoon; his female peers aren’t so lucky. The focus then falls on early Hollywood star Anna May Wong, overlooked for Chinese roles in favour of white actresses wearing make-up.
After these detailed but dutiful period snapshots, the book snaps to life by retelling the racist murder of Vincent Chin in 1980s Michigan (where Ho Davies, the son of Welsh and Chinese parents, lives). Switching to the first person to write in the voice of a friend who escaped the attack, Ho Davies examines the contradictory feelings of pride and shame that accompany the narrator’s experience of growing up as the child of a migrant.
In the painful final episode, a half-Chinese novelist visits China to adopt an orphan; the sense that he’s a foreigner in his mother’s birthplace reminds him of his embarrassment eating at a Chinese restaurant “with colleagues who wanted him to tell them ‘what’s good.’” We’re also told of his hopes to write about the very people we’ve just read about—an elegant if unsatisfying way to unite what ultimately feels like four separate stabs at a book Ho Davies needed to get out of his system.
Driven by a scalding sense of injustice, this sensitive but uneven historical novel unfolds as four tales of Chinese experience in the United States.
The first three draw on real-life figures. In gold-rush California we follow Ah Ling, a young laundryman who lands on his feet when he’s hired by a railway tycoon; his female peers aren’t so lucky. The focus then falls on early Hollywood star Anna May Wong, overlooked for Chinese roles in favour of white actresses wearing make-up.
After these detailed but dutiful period snapshots, the book snaps to life by retelling the racist murder of Vincent Chin in 1980s Michigan (where Ho Davies, the son of Welsh and Chinese parents, lives). Switching to the first person to write in the voice of a friend who escaped the attack, Ho Davies examines the contradictory feelings of pride and shame that accompany the narrator’s experience of growing up as the child of a migrant.
In the painful final episode, a half-Chinese novelist visits China to adopt an orphan; the sense that he’s a foreigner in his mother’s birthplace reminds him of his embarrassment eating at a Chinese restaurant “with colleagues who wanted him to tell them ‘what’s good.’” We’re also told of his hopes to write about the very people we’ve just read about—an elegant if unsatisfying way to unite what ultimately feels like four separate stabs at a book Ho Davies needed to get out of his system.
