The Fortunes (Davies)

The Fortunes 
Peter Ho Davies, 2016
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544263703


Summary
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.(From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 30, 1966
• Where—Coventry, England, UK
• Education—B.A. Cambridge University; M.A. Boston University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Peter Ho Davies is an author and professor of creative writing. He was born in Coventry, England, to a Welsh father and Chinese mother. He has lived more than half his life in the United States. He is perhaps best known for his novels, The Welsh Girl (2007) and The Fortunes (2016), although his two earlier collections of short fiction are highly regarded.

Davies started out studying physics at Manchester University but later switched to English at Cambridge University. In 1992 he moved to the US to study in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University, where he received his M.A. Since then he has taught at the University of Oregon, Emory University, and is currently a Professor in the graduate program for Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Works and awards
His debut collection, The Ugliest House in the World (1997), won the John Llewellyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan awards in Britain. His second collection, Equal Love (2000), was hailed by the New York Times Book Review for its “stories as deep and clear as myth.” The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a New York Times Notable Book.

Davies is also a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a winner of the PEN/Malamud Award.

In 2003 Davies was named among the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta. The Welsh Girl, his first novel, was published in 2007 and his second, The Fortunes, in 2016. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2016.)

Book Reviews
Emily Dickinson’s dictum, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” the opening epigraph in The Fortunes, could easily serve as its title. The characters in this astute, beautifully written, and often funny novel are searching for truth—of who they are and where they belong. But truth comes at them sideways, never straight on. The novel is actually four novellas, linked only by the fact that the main characters are Chinese or Chinese-Americans living in the U.S. Each section is set in a different era, which together span some 150 years, beginning with construction of the transcontinental railroad and ending in the present time.  READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers


[A] rewarding, unorthodox novel.
Wall Street Journal


Vividly detailed novellas whose rich language and engaging characters not only bring history alive but also address contemporary issues of race and belonging with heartache, fire and empathy.... The Fortunes is an important novel that attempts to give voice to Chinese-American characters who have been silenced in the past. Ho Davies' perspective is a welcome addition in the ongoing discussion of race in American society.
Dallas Morning News


The book is more than the sum of its parts, and Davies (the son of Welsh and Chinese parents) achieves an extraordinary novelistic intimacy against backdrops of historical vibrancy. Moreover, he considers what it means to be identified with, but not now belong to, an ancestral culture one can’t escape or fully embrace—in an immigrant society that promises but doesn’t deliver full racial inclusion.
Seattle Times


Davies writes with a rare emotional resonance and a deft sense of structure; it's hard not to be in awe of the way he's composed this complex, beautiful novel. The Fortunes is a stunning look at what it means to be Chinese, what it means to be American, and what it means to be a person navigating the strands of identity, the things that made us who we are, whoever that is.
NPR


Davies distills 150 years of Chinese-American history in his timely and eloquent new novel. In Gold, the first of its four sections, Ah Ling, 14, the son of a Hong Kong prostitute, seeks his fortune in California. He works as valet to Charles Crocker, who hires thousands of Chinese to expand his transcontinental railroad. Silver portrays the 30-year career of the LA-born actress Anna May Wong, who co-stars with Douglas Fairbanks at 19.  Davies also writes of Vincent Chin, beaten to death in Detroit in 1982 by two auto workers who mistake him for Japanese, and of a half-Chinese writer visiting China to adopt a baby daughter, thinking of how to prepare her to answer the question he’s heard all his life: where are you from?
BBC.com


Davies, a master storyteller, blends fact with fiction in this saga of immigration, acclimation, and Chinese culture, which he tells through the experiences of Chinese-Americans at different points in history.
Entertainment Weekly


The Fortunes crafts four tales that speak of the broader history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, from the hardworking valet who serves a white railroad mogul to Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star. Through these elegant, deeply embodied stories, Davies portrays the uneasy relationship between these people and their new country.
Elle


The Fortunes is the kind of book that raises far more questions than it resolves. Not only does it present a vast swathe of often-ignored history, in deftly fictionalized form, it’s an empathetic book, not just to its protagonists but to its secondary and tertiary characters and even, often, to its villains. It questions motivations, feelings, intentions, rarely certain despite the author’s fictional imperative. Sometimes I found myself wondering―why is Vincent Chin’s friend curious at all about the kind of father-stepson relationship Chin’s killers had? Why should I care?  But The Fortunes isn’t out to convince you that you should care about that, or anything in particular. Instead, it’s doing what a great novel should do: revealing what there is to care about and to think about. Even better, it’s revealing those questions about a slice of history that America needs to be dealing with.  The Bottom Line: In a thought-provoking, sharply written, four-part novelistic chronicle of Chinese-American life, The Fortunes proves uneven at times but the powerful prose and themes shine through.
Huffington Post


(Starred review.) The book’s scope is impressive, but what’s even more staggering is the utter intimacy and honesty of each character’s introspection. More extraordinary still is the depth and the texture created by the juxtaposition of different eras.... Davies has created a brilliant, absorbing masterpiece.
Publishers Weekly


The absence of a contiguous story line may initially alarm, but patient readers will discover how cleverly Davies interweaves fact and fiction to pull the novel together and show how far Chinese Americans have progressed—and how great the journey ahead is. A thought-provoking literary work. —Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Intertwining fact with fictional license and creative finesse, Davies charts the conflicted, complicated journey of being a minority American through multiple generations. Rich rewards await readers searching for superbly illuminating historical fiction; think Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’sCrossing (2011) or Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy.
Booklist


With the whole country talking about identity politics, racism, and cultural awareness, Peter Ho Davies’ provocative new novel could not be more timely... The scope and research of The Fortunes is impressive, but what makes the novel memorable is the honesty of each narrative voice.... A masterful, perceptive and very modern look at identity, migration and the intertwined histories of the United Stated and China
BookPage


A four-part suite of astute, lyrical, and often poignant stories poses incisive questions about what changes—and what does not—when people from another culture become Americans.... Davies' nuanced contemplation of how America has affected the Chinese (and vice versa) forces the reader to confront...cross-cultural transactions.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Fortunes...then take off on your own:

Gold
1. What does the oft repeated phrase "to see the elephant" mean? How is it used by the various characters? What is the elephant—as a metaphor, what does it represent?

2. SPOILER ALERT: why does Ling decide to quit his comfortable position with Charles Crocker in order to join the railroad workers?

3. Why does he choose to work as a bone collector? What satisfactions does it provide him?

4. How does he finally come to see himself and his place in America?

Silver
5. What are the many indignities Anna Mae Wong faces as the first Asian-American actress in Hollywood?

6. Follow-up to Questions 5: How does Anna Mae respond to the rejections, even from her own father?

7. Describe her feelings when she visits China. Does she find peace, a sense of belonging, or more exclusion and an even greater sense of alienation?

8. How does Anna Mae finally come to see herself and her place in America?

Jade
9. In what ways does the narrator of this section cast doubt on the events of Vincent Chin's murder? What difference does the uncertainty make, if any, in the final out come?

10. Follow-up to Question 9: When listening to members of the America Citizens for Justice refer to Vince's murder, the narrator thinks:

"[A] brutal slaying" wasn't the way you'd talk about it if you were there. That wasn't how I remembered it (p. 190).

What does he mean? Why was his remembrance of the beating different from their imagining? How reliable or faulty is memory? Are we, the reader, to doubt the version of the events that were made public?

11. The narrator questions himself continually: "Vincent was my friend. So how could I leave him?" How blameworthy is he, how at fault? What do you think most of us would do in the same situation? Do you have any idea how you might react?

12. At the end of this story, the narrator visits a strip club. He asks the stripper whether she is Chinese or Japanese (why does he ask her that?), and she retorts, "All-American, Baby. We're all American here." His final thoughts are:

It felt like something to cover ourselves in, that word, its warm anonymity. And I nodded, sank back on my stool, bought her that drink (p. 204).

What does his observation suggest? What emotional response is he expressing? Has he come to some resolution? If so, what?

Pearl
13. It is now the 21st Century. In what way does John feel marginalized by his Chinese heritage: "Growing up he felt burdened." Once he arrives in China, how does he feel?

14. How do the three previous stories come together with John's story in China?

15. Why do John and his wife decide to accept the baby offered them as a replacement for the baby who died? What was going through their minds? What might you have done?

16. In a final reflection on the way home, while thinking of the famous Terra Cotta army figures and the laborers who built them, John wonders,

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 makes us ourselves (p. 264)

Discuss that statement. Is he correct? Are most of us, especially perhaps immigrants, made of contradictions? How would that belief help John and his new daughter navigate life in America?

General
17. Which story of the four do you find most absorbing and why?

18. Consider the frequent jokes the characters tell, usually directed at themselves. How did you respond when first reading them? Did you laugh? Were you put off? Angered? Why do you think the characters tell such disparaging jokes at their own expense?

19. To what extent is America, hopefully, a more welcoming place than it was when the first two stories took place? Consider, also, that the (very real) events of the third section took place only three decades ago. Also consider the references in two of the stories about Asians taking jobs from Americans. Isn't that issue with us today?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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