The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

Q- Your last novel, The Welsh Girl, was set in Britain during World War II. Your new one, The Fortunes, covers more than a century of Chinese-American experience. That seems like quite a departure, what spurred it?

A- As my name suggests I’m mixed-raced, my father is Welsh and my mother Chinese (just to complicate things further, I grew up in England, but have now lived half my life in the US). I wrote The Welsh Girl in part to try to understand that half of my heritage better and The Fortunes started from the same sense of curiosity about the Chinese side of my identity. In the end, though, I think the book is less about Chineseness than it is about Chinese-Americanness, an identity that to me is neither Chinese nor American, but a third thing. In a sense I’m writing about the 'hyphen' in hyphenated American identities.

Building the Transcontinental Railroad

Q- The Fortunes is an unconventionally structured novel, made up of four sections set in different periods. What made you decide on this form?

A- Funnily enough, in my own mind the form is fairly traditional— it’s the form of a multi- generational novel, basically— but in this case applied to a community, the Chinese in America, for whom the generational line of descent has often been broken. The earliest influx of Chinese— from the Gold Rush though the Transcontinental Railroad era— was largely male, forming a bachelor society, without wives or children. More recently, of course, we’ve seen the arrival of tens of thousands of orphaned Chinese girls adopted by Americans. In between, anti- immigration legislation like the Exclusion Acts limited the establishment of Chinese families here, while anti-miscegenation laws barred Chinese relations with whites. The history of the Chinese in America, by those lights, is a history of men without women, women without husbands, the disowned and the orphaned. I wanted to try to imagine what a multigenerational novel might look like for them.

California Gold Rush

Q- Beyond the shared Chinese-American connection, what drew you to specific episodes in the book— the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, the career of Anna May Wong in Golden Age Hollywood, or the hate crime against Vincent Chin in 80s Detroit?

A- My interest in the Transcontinental Railroad goes back to a trip I took across the US by train shortly after I arrived here. Coming from Britain, I remember the sheer vastness of the US as a revelation. And alongside my wonder at the scale of the railroad came a curiosity about the human beings who’d built it. My fascination with movies runs through several of my works, and may go back to a short stint as an extra in TV commercials in Singapore in my 20’s. Ironically, while The Fortunes is focused on the dubious practice of white actors donning 'yellowface' to portray Asians, one of the commercials I was in required a neoclassical street in Singapore to stand in for a Paris neighborhood.

As for the Vincent Chin case, I live near Detroit now which provides a connection. But I can recall when I first heard of the attack when I was still living in England. It struck a nerve even then, because I was growing up in one of the great auto manufacturing cities there, a city like Detroit entering recession and feeling the threat of foreign imports. I grew up there amid some of the same economic anxieties that fueled the anti-Asian sentiment in the 80’s (and which sadly still stoke it to this day).

The final section of the book about the adoption of a baby girl from China is inspired by, though not based on, the adoption of my god-daughter.

Paramount Pictures Publicity Photo, 1935

Q- That brings up the fact that several of the figures here— Anna May Wong, Vincent Chin —

are historical figures. How did you approach writing them?

A- Some were easier than others. The character Ah Ling, who ends up working on the Transcontinental, is based on a real person, who worked for Charles Crocker, one of the railroad barons. But he only appears as a footnote in biographies of Crocker, so there was great latitude to invent him. Anna May Wong on the other hand is much better documented – she gave hundreds of interviews in her career – but once I realized that what she said in those interviews needn’t be considered gospel truth, any more than the celebrity puff pieces we read today, it was possible to read between the lines a little. Ultimately, though, I’m at least as interested in the iconic status of these figures (Vincent Chin the martyr) as their historical reality (Vincent Chin the man). What unites these disparate characters is that each finds him or herself wittingly or unwittingly serving as a representative of Chineseness, and each has to grapple with that burden.

Gold Bullion

Q- Why not simply fictionalize the historical figures, though, keep some of their circumstances perhaps but change their names?

A- I considered that, but some of these figure seemed so iconic that to write of them— indirectly— would have seemed coy to the point of disingenuousness. Anna May Wong, say, is notable because of her singularity— the only Chinese-American movie star of her era— so to invent someone similar with another name would have felt like a pretty thin fiction.

Beyond that, though, I think these depictions pose a question— is this fact or fiction? — that’s analogous to a question that these characters themselves face —are they Chinese or American? Such questions suggest an either/or, a binary, but once again I’m interested in a third option. The depictions are factual and fictional, the characters are neither Chinese nor American, but both.

The fact or fiction question is an essential one in these characters’ lives because they’re grappling with questions of authenticity. In their various ways they feel themselves to be insufficiently Chinese or insufficiently American. That’s a tragedy if you think the choice is either/or. But I’d argue there’s a third alternative, that’s equally authentic, and that all my characters are feeling their way towards.