– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on 06 Sept 2016
Goodreads | Amazon
Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.
Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood.
Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories—three inspired by real historical characters—to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.
I chose this book because…
Chinese American, period. We severely lack representation, so when I come across anything that brings attention to Chinese Americans, whether it’s a Chinese American author or a Chinese American protagonist, you can be sure that I’m all for it. American history is largely written by white men, so I am so interested in seeing it “recast[ed]… through the lives of Chinese Americans.” It’s like that dream of where you take all these Hollywood movies with white male leads and recast them with women of colour.
Upon reading it…
This was not a book I sped through, which does not mean that it did not keep me captivated, but that it required me to pause every so often and check in with myself to evaluate how I was feeling. I’ve been trying to explore my identity through books, finding words that articulate vague thoughts and feelings that I have but can’t put together.
Luckily for me, I did not face much overt discrimination as an Asian American growing up, but with the current political climate in the States, I’ve become more aware of it and am trying to open my eyes even further. When I was reading this book, the whole Ryan Lochte debacle was going on, and videos were resurfacing of a terrible, racist interview his sister gave a few years back, and that made the discrimination and pain and struggle experienced by these four characters in the book hit closer to home.
My favourite of the four stories was definitely the first one, which I didn’t expect, because I thought I’d more easily relate to the latter stories, the ones that were closer to present day, but the first story was so rich and proved to transcend time. I agree with other Goodreads reviews of this book that I would have liked if the whole book only focused on and developed upon this one story because the last three did not measure up to the intricacies of the first, or even better, instead of taking away the last three stories, rather, add to them and make them as compelling as the first story. The transition between the four stories was abrupt, and I kept looking for connections between them, perhaps like the sort of connection I found in Cloud Atlas, but I don’t think I found it.
While this book was not perfect, I do think that more stories like these need to be shared, and I am thankful for this one.
★★★★☆
If you like this, you might like…
The Collective by Don Lee
**quotes have not been checked against a finished copy of the book**
“Don’t let them provoke you,” Ng advised, waving a hand before his face. “They’re only flies.”
Which makes us dung, Ling thought, getting a whiff of his burden.
Men love gold, don’t they? But gold can’t love them back. Only a damned asshole thinks that.
First of your kind, eh? The real trick is to be one of a kind.
The possibility yawned vertiginously: his whole life an invention of others.
What good was the silver screen if it didn’t reflect you?
Engagement rings were handcuffs, marriage was a line.
How can she be herself and represent millions, both at once? And who does she represent them to? To themselves or others?
I’m still a star, if a little tarnished.
Spurned by a man, spurned by a country. She’s not about to kill herself for either.
I just tell myself I can get through it for another few seconds. And I do. That’s how I bear it. One take at a time. You can always make it to the end of the scene.
That’s acting, darling. That’s art. It’s why what’s unbearable in life —loss, heartbreak, despair —is bearable on the screen: because we know the picture will end.
No, I think, it was something else. I wasn’t as cool as him, you might say, and I wasn’t, but really any Chinese is less cool alongside another. Maybe we lose our exoticism. More likely it’s that alone, we can define ourselves; with another, we invite all the stereotypes. Alone, or especially with Jerry or Mike, he was Vince. Next to me he was Vincent, Asian.
Martyrs and saints, you see, they have to be brave. Otherwise they’re just victims.
This is the form his insomnia takes, words chasing around his head.
They fought with or against all of us in the past fifty years and they still can’t tell us apart. And they wonder why they lost some of those wars. Shit, they can tell our restaurants apart more easily than us.
John’s list of things you couldn’t do if you were Asian American: play ping-pong, play piano, wear glasses (he had saved up for Lasik the summer of his junior year), wear a camera round your neck, ride a bike, drive an import, grow a mustache (or, if female, streak your hair), wear a sweatband, drink beer, ace tests, sing karaoke (though deep down he’d always dreamed of singing the old Johnny Rivers number “Secret Agent Man” as “Secret Asian Man,” but then, wasn’t that every Asian American’s dream, to sing karaoke and somehow still look cool?).
The character spoke to him, and it infuriated John to have to be ashamed of that, to have his white friends question his authenticity. Whatever I am is authentically me, isn’t it? he wanted to shout.
Some things are too good to be true, unless something bad happens to make them real.
What else can we represent if not ourselves, however uncertain or contradictory those selves might be? After all, aren’t those very contradictions and uncertainties what make us ourselves?