The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 6, 2016

The Fortunes is less a novel than a series of four stories with a shared theme. Each story asks what it means to be a Chinese-American at a particular moment in history. The stories are loosely connected by places (the Pearl River), symbols (Charlie Chan), and circumstances (orphans), by references in later stories to characters or events in earlier stories, and by the suggestion that the character who narrates the final story may have written the first three.

While he is still a boy, Ling is sent to California, where he works in a laundry. The first story in The Fortunes, “Gold,” follows Ling as he seeks his fortune. He would like to mine for gold, he would like to win the heart of the prostitute who works in the laundry shop, but he ends up as the manservant for a railroad tycoon. Ling inspires the tycoon to use Chinese immigrants as cheap laborers, a development that eventually causes Ling to second-guess his loyalty to his white master.

Ling’s story is interesting and well-written, but it fizzles out. Replacing it is an episodic biography of Anna May Wong, born Wong Liu Tsong, the first Chinese-American movie star. This story, “Silver,” comes across as the sketch of a biography more than fiction.

The next story, “Jade,” is narrated by a friend of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American who was killed in a bar fight in 1982 (actually a strip club fight) after being mistaken for Japanese by a father and son who blamed the Japanese for the decline of the American auto industry. According to the narrator, the killing (and the sentence of probation imposed on the father and son, who beat Chin to death with a baseball bat) began a movement that united the Asian-American community. This section of the novel is an interesting lesson in sociopolitical history but the friend’s commentary does not make a compelling work of fiction. It would be a fantastic introspective essay on what it means to be a Chinese-American if it were not so scattered (its stream of consciousness style does not serve it well), but writing an essay and calling it fiction does not a novel make.

The last story, “Pearl,” is the best. A Chinese-American writer named John Smith and his white wife travel to China to adopt a baby. John feels incapable of choosing between China and America, wants both, and is at home in neither. Like the third story, “Pearl” is deeply introspective. Perhaps because the story is a pure work of contemporary fiction rather building on historical figures, it is the most personal, and moving, story in the book.

A degree of justifiable rage permeates the book, as the characters confront racism, stereotypes, and unintended insults. The entire novel is interesting in its depiction of an American culture that has impeded Chinese assimilation/acceptance, but the first three stories struck me as outlines or unfinished attempts to write a longer work. Still, the themes that tie the stories together are strong, as are the images of prejudice.

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