55 pages • 1 hour read
The Fortunes
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Themes
The Impact of History on Individual Lives
The Fortunes is a work of historical fiction, and part of the reason that the author chose to explore Chinese immigration to the United States in the form of four semi-linked stories is that this format allowed him a broader scope: Rather than tracing only one or two characters throughout their lifetimes, he examines four different Chinese American communities and ultimately creates a multi-generational work that spans several historical periods and geographical spaces. Through these different stories, the author illustrates the way that events like the construction of the early US railway system, the very gradual acceptance of Asian American actors in Hollywood, the tension between American and foreign industries, and China’s one-child policy shaped the experiences of Chinese Americans in the United States.
The protagonist of “Celestial Railroad” works first in a Chinese-owned laundry, but ultimately ends up as part of the vast, predominantly Chinese workforce tasked with the construction of American railroads. His work both in the laundry and on the railroad is representative of broad trends in immigration and labor that shaped early Chinese American communities and dictated what kind of lives Chinese American workers would live in the United States. The first wave of emigration from China was almost entirely made up of male railroad workers like Ling, and for those who were able to amass enough earnings to go into business for themselves, laundries and restaurants were among their only options. This meant that early communities of Chinese Americans in the West, particularly in California, were male-dominated and clustered in and around the various hubs of railway construction. Ling’s character is thus a literary embodiment of this first wave of immigration and the communities to which it gave rise, and he grounds The Fortunes within the very beginnings of the history of Chinese American immigration.
In the second story, Anna May Wong, who was a real-life actress and the first Asian American woman to achieve stardom in Hollywood, experiences prejudice and setbacks despite her success. The primary cultural phenomenon that impacts Anna and shapes her identity as an actress is the practice of “yellowface,” or the casting of white actors and actresses in Asian roles. This was common in Hollywood both because of prevailing racism and because of official government policies like the Hays Code, which limited the depiction of interracial relationships on screen. In reflecting on her career, Anna remembers:
Even earlier in her career, before the code, when the rules against the depiction miscegenation were not absolute and she could have white lovers onscreen, prevailing attitudes, particularly of audiences in the southern states, meant that her romantic roles were constrained (118).
Public perception around Asian identity and a reluctance to socially sanction interracial relationships shaped Anna’s career, but also impacted Asian Americans in the United States more broadly. Interracial relationships were seen as taboo, Asian Americans were stigmatized for their racial identities, and a racial hierarchy was in place that privileged white Americans. In this way, Anna’s story speaks not only to the experience of Asian Americans in Hollywood but also to that of non-famous Asian Americans living in the United States at the time.
The third story tells the real-life tragedy of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man beaten to death by white auto workers because they mistook him for Japanese during a time when there was widespread fear that, because of the success of Japanese auto makers, American auto workers were going to be left without jobs. This is not the first instance in which American workers were fearful that Asian Americans were going to steal their jobs. During the tail end of the railroad boom, legislation was passed limiting further Chinese immigration in an effort to safeguard jobs for American-born workers. During both of these cultural moments of anxiety about the safety of American jobs, racism became more rampant, and Chinese American communities were subject to increased prejudice and violence.
The fourth story showcases the impact of China’s one-child policy on adoptions and demonstrates how the adoption boom itself became a new wave of “immigration.” Because China adopted this policy and families so preferred male offspring, many Chinese girls were sent to orphanages or worse. Countless babies ended up being adopted out of the country, many of whom went to American families. Couples like John and Nola are thus representative of real-life individuals who brought Chinese children to the United States as Chinese state policy aimed to limit birth rates.
Anti-Chinese Racism
Anti-Chinese Racism is this book’s most important and overt theme. All of the Chinese and Chinese American characters experience racism and prejudice, and the narrative depicts many acts of racism both large and small. In the first story, Ling encounters prejudice on the street from white workers who fear that their jobs are at risk because of Chinese immigrants. Eventually, this racism would even inspire public policy in the form of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Anna May Wong, too, experiences racism during her years in Hollywood, often losing roles to white actresses in “yellowface.” Vincent Chin dies as the result of racist violence. In the book’s final story, John Ling recalls the way that small acts of racist prejudice shaped his adolescence, illustrating the adverse impact of stereotypes and other microaggressions.
Ling first encounters prejudice on the streets of Sacramento. Uncle Ng advises him “Don’t let them provoke you” and “They’re only flies” (17). And yet, it is understood that Ng is aware of the real danger that white men pose to Chinese immigrants: Ling is the one to take over the delivery routes because there is so much anti-Chinese sentiment on the streets that Ng fears for his own safety when outside the laundry. When Ling learns of a meeting to discuss “The Chinese Question,” he believes the information will somehow pertain to him, but what he hears at the meeting is that Chinese workers are: “a plague on us, a blight indeed” (56). It becomes clear that he is not safe in the crowd, and the incident serves as an illustration of the hostile climate for Chinese workers that led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, an official governmental policy that limited Chinese immigration. By showcasing both person-to-person prejudice and the widespread anti-Chinese sentiment that shaped attitudes towards immigrants on the national level, the author shows how great the impact of anti-Chinese prejudice has been on Chinese American communities in the United States dating back to the very first waves of migration.
Anna May Wong and Vincent Chin illustrate 20th-century prejudice and anti-Chinese sentiment. The Hays Code’s prohibition on interracial relationships onscreen limited Anna’s career options and reflected broader public sentiment against interracial relationships in real life. It shows how deeply rooted white supremacy was in the United States at that time. White supremacist attitudes were also responsible for the death of Vincent Chin: That his attackers felt free to victimize him and were initially not properly punished speaks to both their position as white men in a society that privileged whiteness and to the precarity that governed the lives of Chinese Americans (and other Asian Americans) in the United States.
John Ling’s experiences with racism and anti-Chinese prejudice were subtler, but they illustrate the deep damage that microaggressions and stereotypes can cause. John’s father was white and his mother Chinese, and he recalls how fond his father was of racist jokes. Eventually John realizes how inappropriate such comments are, but as a child he was not able to stop them, nor was he encouraged to think critically about them. As an adult, he feels the sting of stereotypes from people who expect him to have retained stronger ties to his mother’s home country and culture, and because of his biracial identity and the stereotypes with which white Americans categorize Asian Americans, he feels neither fully Chinese nor fully American.
Assimilation and Cultural Preservation
The tension between assimilation and cultural preservation is another of The Fortunes’s important themes and each of the book’s four stories in some way addresses this tension. For Ling, it is best embodied by his queue, the traditional hairstyle that often became a marker of Chinese identity during early waves of migration from China. For Anna May Wong, adopting an American-sounding name and conforming to American beauty standards while in Hollywood place her at odds with her traditional father. Vincent Chin and John Ling each, in their own way, exist between cultural worlds and struggle at times to reconcile the two.
When Ling arrives in the United States he, like all other Chinese men, wears the queue, a traditional hairstyle that signaled fealty to the Chinese emperor. Because racism was so rampant in America at the time, men like Ling were easily identifiable as foreign and were thus targeted frequently because of their hair. It is only when Ling loses his queue that his boss, the white Charles Crocker, begins to see him as “civilized.” His response when he sees Ling’s shorn hair for the first time is to exclaim: “Cut your hair I see?” and then “You look like a man at last” (48). Crocker’s response is to buy Ling a new suit, and this suit in combination with a Western hairstyle helps Ling gain acceptance in a broader range of American settings. Ultimately, though, Ling rejects such assimilation, takes a position on the railroad with other Chinese workers, and begins to regrow his queue.
Anna changes her name from Wong Liu Tsong to Anna May Wong in order to better assimilate in Hollywood. Her original name had meant “frosted yellow willow,” and after she changes it, her father asks what Anna means. She replies that Anna means “me” (108). Although she is happy to change her name and happy to pursue a career as an actress, both choices alienate her from her family, and there is a distinct sense throughout Anna’s story that she feels this alienation from her family and culture as a loss. Although in America she is not seen as American, she understands that she is also not fully Chinese. For Anna, giving up a piece of her Chinese identity becomes a source of difficulty and sadness that she never quite loses.
Vincent and the unnamed narrator too struggle with cultural identity. The narrator notes that Vincent has held onto more of his Chinese culture than he has, but the two spend their youths navigating between Chinese and American culture, and the narrator in particular never feels at home in either. John Ling has an even more heightened experience of the tension between assimilating to American culture and preserving his Chinese heritage because he is biracial. He grows up without a true connection to his mother’s background and remembers that “as a young child,” he “had burst into tears the one time his mother had taken him to see a Chinese new year parade” (220). He grew up on a steady diet of Chinese takeout but without having ever had homecooked Chinese dishes, and always feels as though he disappoints his white peers because they expect him to be more Chinese than they find him to be. This depiction frames assimilation as not only a kind of cultural loss but also as the source of a lifelong feeling of alienation.
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