The Lost Daughter of Happiness is a memorable and moving novel, but with an unpleasant background -- the widespread prejudice against Chinese immigrants in late 19th-century California.
Yet Yan Geling has nevertheless done something remarkable. She has researched the period in detail, and at the same time written a beautiful and unusual love story.
This was the era of the Californian Gold Rush. Gold had first been discovered in 1848, and in the years that followed people arrived from all over the world to seek their fortunes, either panning for the metal themselves or serving those who'd found it. From the perspective of China, San Francisco was "Gold Mountain," and the city became the entry point for, among others, migrants kidnapped in the Chinese interior by ruthless traders anxious to profit from their sale to agents and gangsters. Many of the women worked as prostitutes, and large numbers of the girls brought into the US in this trade had yet to reach puberty.
A woman called Fusang, aged 20 by the time the novel opens, is one such worker. But the love story she becomes involved in is no raunchy tale of smoldering passion. Rather, through a sequence of delicately written vignettes, we watch her become the object of an obsession by a 12-year old boy.
The boy's family are affluent North German Protestants, tight-lipped and respectable. None of them, for instance, will talk about the young black girl they know the father keeps in his tent when he later goes east to fight in the Civil War. But the boy's liaison with Fusang proves more problematic.
The evocation of the Chinese world of California 140 years ago is done with great adroitness. The author conjures up a people perceived by the rest of the community as occupying a psychological area between delicacy and cruelty, something that perplexes, disturbs and angers them, but which enchants the young boy.
Nineteenth-century San Francisco is presented as having been both cosmopolitan and a rough-and-ready town. There were opium dens, needless to say, but more attention is given to the addictive nature of sex than to drug habits that anticipated those of the hippies in the same city 100 years later.
Interestingly, Jack London is mentioned as having been an immensely popular writer of the time, but someone who, though he had a profound understanding of wolves, had an attitude to Chinese that is better left unexamined.
Among other details, Yan's research has revealed that San Francisco's China Town published in those days a daily list of commodity exchange rates. One day it read: "Rice - $ 2.00 a sack; fresh shrimp $0.10 per pound; salt fish $0.08 per pound; girls $6.00 per pound." It was probably a joke, but one not without a basis in fact.
Some of the famous events of the period are incorporated into the story. The public battle to the death between the "yellow" and "black" Chinese gangs in a San Francisco square, arranged a year beforehand and with tickets sold in advance, is one. Another is the Great Rescue Campaign by female missionaries to save Chinese girls imprisoned in brothels.
There were also street protests against Chinese undercutting labor rates, furious editorials in newspapers, revelations of over-crowded living conditions and gang manipulation, all of which were to culminate in the 1880s in notoriously discriminatory anti-Chinese immigration regulations. It was a harsh time, and millions died very young, simply worn out by disease and over-work. But some fortunes were made, and both voluntary immigration and the traffic in forced migrants continued.
This is an intelligent and sensitive book, and Cathy Silber's translation is a miracle of sensitive style and historical understanding.
The heroine herself is based on a real life San Francisco figure, a prostitute of legendary beauty. The author claims that her scholarly-minded husband found 160 books dealing with the period that mentioned her heroine's name.
Yan has brought off a considerable feat in narrative technique. How to bring yourself into a story you are telling has been a problem solved in many different ways from Chaucer to Proust. Her original solution is essentially to watch herself watching her characters. She addresses her main character with sentences such as: "Your smile makes me suspect that I have never known a thing about you," and "I'm not sure I can guess what's going through your mind right now." Yan's most persistent preoccupation is with the idea that times may have changed dramatically, but for some unfortunates many of the underlying tensions remain much the same. She doesn't mention, though she might have, the 50 would-be migrants from China discovered dead in the back of a refrigerated truck in Dover, UK, only a year ago.
This book begins strongly, indeed poetically, but when this early fragrance is overtaken by the book's concern for plot, the magic tends to die away. Even so, it's a moving and informative tale, and should prove as popular as this author's previous novels have been.
The emotion at the heart of the book is the old one of pure young love remembered, of life having given you less than you'd hoped for, and of a failure to dedicate yourself to the idealism of youth bitterly regretted. Any attempt to go back and make the choice you should have made, of course, inevitably comes too late.
What Yan appears to be struggling toward beneath the surface of this tale is a sense of Chinese difference, a difference she feels she herself shares, and that she tries to read backward into the experiences of earlier generations of immigrants to the US. Time and again her Chinese characters make choices that are not the ones Western-born Americans would have made. This is the most interesting aspect of the book. She doesn't exactly come to any conclusions -- it is, after all, a novel not an exercise in anthropology -- but the implication seems to be that there is an acceptance of things as they are at the heart of many Chinese people that mystifies Westerners, and gives credence to such concepts as "the exoticism of the East." Whether there's any truth in it, of course, is anyone's guess.
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