It’s nearly a decade since Peter Ho Davies published his first novel, “The Welsh Girl”, but a quarter of a century since he left Britain for the US. Half his life, he remarks, given that he celebrated his 50th birthday this August. “My wife and I are jokingly calling it 50 years of hurt,” he laughs, “but it’s not really.” In fact, that’s just a play on his mother’s memories of carrying him when England won the World Cup. “It has been a very good 50 years.” His second novel, “The Fortunes”, published by Sceptre, is a pretty good way to mark the milestone. A quartet of linked stories that alight on paradigmatic periods and figures in the history of Chinese America, it is not only an absorbing, thrillingly serious read, but also draws together many of Davies’s preoccupations, fictional, intellectual, political and personal.
Chief among them is the slippery question of identity, which we fall to discussing as we wander through the cobbled streets and 1960s shopping precincts of his hometown, Coventry, towards the city’s bombed-out St Michael’s Cathedral. It is a city that has become a byword for devastation — in German, the verb “Koventrieren” means to devastate — and for renewal. It is also where Davies’s parents — his Welsh father, an engineer, and Malaysian Chinese mother, a dentist — settled and still live, hence the visit home. Davies grew up here, and points out the WH Smith where he used to buy books and the square where fans gathered when Coventry City won the FA Cup in 1987. But, he wonders, “Could I have become a writer if I’d stayed in Britain? It was helpful to go to somewhere else and reinvent myself and not see the friends who knew me as a physics undergraduate, or the parents who knew me as their son.”
I ask Davies whether, given how long he has lived in the US, he feels as if he has become an American writer. He replies, half-humorously, that it all depends how well the book does there. But, he continues, “there’s not an identity that I can lay claim to that I don’t also feel ambiguous or ambivalent about, whether that’s Chineseness, or Welshness, or Britishness. Do I have some hesitation to claim Americanness? Yes. But I feel the same hesitancy to claim any of those identities.”
The characters in “The Fortunes” experience that same ambivalence, manifested in strikingly different fashion. In the first part, set in Sacramento and the Sierra Nevada of the 1860s, Ling, a young Hong Kong Chinese man, works his way from laundryman to become the personal servant of a railroad entrepreneur. His employer, Charles Crocker, is so impressed by his efficiency and commitment that he expands his use of Chinese labour in building the tracks. Ling gives way to a vividly sketched dash through the life of Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American film star, who was nonetheless overlooked for the leading role in the film of Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth” in favour of Luise Rainer. And then we are well into the 20th century, and the harrowing account of Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death in Detroit in 1982, mistaken for a Japanese man by two men who believed that Japan had devastated the American car industry.
Each of these protagonists was a real person, with the possible exception of Ling, who appears almost as a footnote in biographies of Crocker and, concedes Davies, might even be apocryphal. But that was precisely what fascinated him. “The historical record looks at him but has no interest in him,” he explains, adding: “I used to joke about him being Asian Zero”, a “threshold figure” who ushered in a generation of Chinese workers determined to stay in the US rather than return home.
Ling is part of what Davies refers to as “the subaltern history” he is trying to write, but Wong and Chin, whose murder prompted a protest movement and a discussion of civil rights in the Asian-American community, are more prominent figures. Why draw on history rather than invent? “There would have been something disingenuous or even coy about that,” he replies. “To create a Chinese-American movie star who is not Wong but to call her the first? It felt like a very thin disguise.”
But there is perhaps more to it than that. As we talk, the depth of Davies’s interest in authenticity and the construction of identity becomes increasingly apparent. In the final part of “The Fortunes”, we meet John Smith, a writer of Chinese descent whose work includes explorations of the transcontinental railroad, Wong and Chin. Smith’s confidence has never quite recovered from a reading at which a Chinese student lengthily corrects his use of language.
Davies’s first book, a collection of short stories entitled “The Ugliest House in the World”, appeared in 1997 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen award; it explored both his Welsh and Malaysian Chinese heritage. Ten years later — “you know, books take me a while” — came the Booker-longlisted “The Welsh Girl”, set in Snowdonia in the Second World War, and featuring another historical figure, Rudolf Hess; and then another story collection, “Equal Love”, set in England and the US. Throughout, he has been coming back to the same concerns: “I’m not sure of my claim to Welshness,” he elaborates, “so I wrote ‘The Welsh Girl’ to explore that, to find out what Welshness meant to me. And the same thing motivated me as I wrote ‘The Fortunes’. I’m half-Chinese by blood, but probably much less than half-Chinese by culture, so what is my relationship to that? I felt some of the same things to Welshness, partly because I don’t speak the language.”
But immediately he qualifies, unwilling to parcel his thoughts up too neatly: “Even as I say that — half-Welsh, half-Chinese — partly it’s coming to terms with halfness, and almost trying to push back on that very conceptualisation, which suggests you have to be this or that.” This situation is problematised in “The Fortunes”, in which Ling is also “half”; his father is a white man he never meets; at various points, he feels the urge to confide in his American employer but can’t, Davies explains, because of his pride in being perceived as an exemplary Chinese man.
It’s an area to which the writer repeatedly feels drawn: “I’m often interested in that disparity between the way we internalise our identity and the way that we represent it outwardly. I can seem and look very Chinese. As a child I was quite self-conscious about that, and growing up in a place that was largely white, maybe made to feel self-conscious about it.” He often feels, when he is in Chinese-American communities, “a kind of envy of people in those communities, because for them, there were a lot of other Chinese people around. When I was in school here, I had two or three friends from southeast Asia, one of them, his mother was Filipino, his father was white or British, and the only other Chinese person in school of my age, his parents were both Chinese from Jamaica. So there is a connection, but there’s also a very distinct cultural space.”
It strikes me that neither of his parents was living in the community of their birth; neither, he adds, had English as a first language. He is moved when he recalls the occasion when he was 12 or 13 and walking into town with his father. They saw a young Sikh man being chased and beaten up by a group, “in my memory, I want to see them as skinheads, I’m not even sure it was as clear-cut as that”. His father rushed to help, and Davies says, “it’s not just the bravery of it, although I think it was, it was the instinctiveness ... Also that he recognised it for what it was, straightaway.”
Years later, he read in front of his parents for the first time, at the Waterstones in Coventry, and chose a passage from “The Welsh Girl” that echoed the incident, which he recounted. It was nice, he says, to say publicly how proud he was of his father. “And the nature of our British, manly relationship was that I couldn’t have said that to him one-to-one, but oddly I could say it in front of an audience. We never talked about it afterwards.” Living in Ann Arbor, and teaching at the University of Michigan, has inevitably concentrated his thinking about race; his students of colour will often ask, “‘Why does my work have to bear all that burden?’ And I think they’re right.” He also agrees with them when they point out that “white writers are writing about race too. To write about whiteness is to write about race.”
We talk about the idea of lived experience, and how being inhibited by the fear of appropriating others’ stories, particularly when they relate to race, can sit at odds with the writer’s mandate to invent and empathise. He tells me what he tells his students, when they ask whether they have the right to tackle such work: “What I say is — that’s a respectful attitude. I understand why they think they shouldn’t do that. But that respect and that hesitancy — I don’t want that to stop you trying. Because that very respect is what’s going to help you make it good. It’s what’s going to help you do it well.”
Over two and half hours, we have talked about the complexity of the relationships between marginalised and oppressed groups in the face of a limited “bandwidth” of sympathy, what Davies calls “almost a rationing mentality on white guilt”; about myriad writers including Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro; about Welsh football; about alien abduction narratives as a stand-in for a submerged discussion about race. He has revealed his desire to write a story about the making of King Kong: “It’s a pop culture phenomenon and it’s also an anti-miscegenation tract, maybe? I’ve also thought it would be great to show it in a double bill with ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’. The exploding of those buried myths, that’s the work the novel can do.”
But, he tells me, what he’d really like to do next is write a comic book for Marvel, having seen, with some envy, writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay venture into comics. What he has in mind involves a rather obscure superhero: “Captain Britain needs a remodel, a reboot, and I think post-Brexit, an Asian Captain Britain would be good. So I’m just waiting for that invitation from Marvel.”
Why doesn’t he ask? “You’re going to help me.” Sure I will. Marvel — come and get him.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
