Review | Book review: a new contender for the Great Chinese-American Novel
With The Fortunes, a novel in four sections, Peter Ho Davies has gathered the threads of Chinese-American identity and woven a brilliant, ambitious and indelible tale
By Peter Ho Davies
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Ask an avid reader to name the Great Chinese-American Novel and they might suggest The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, Donald Duk, by Frank Chin, or The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan.
And that list may soon include The Fortunes, the latest novel by Welsh-Chinese author Peter Ho Davies. In his inventive and transporting book, Davies rewrites history through the lives of Chinese Americans, following characters from different periods of the 150-year-old diaspora.
That Davies should pen the Great Chinese-American Novel is intriguing given that he is neither American nor fully Chinese. The author moved to the United States to teach writing – he is a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s prestigious Master of Fine Arts programme – and this sojourn sparked an exploration of the complex and often fraught lot of the Chinese in America. His books, he says, “are driven in part by my desire to understand [my] different heritages”.
Although his move from Britain to the US was brought about by privileged circumstances, Davies clearly empathises with the immigrant experience. Blending historical fact with fictional artistry, his ambitious, richly textured book drops the reader into four distinct narratives.
