A young Chinese man sold by his uncle to work in a San Francisco laundry. The film star Anna May Wong, who could never achieve the stardom she coveted. A young Chinese American man murdered by two drunken White men, mistaken for the Japanese who had “stolen” American jobs in the 1980s. And a biracial man who travels with his wife to China to adopt a Chinese baby. These are the four loosely-connected stories in Peter Ho Davies’s remarkable novel about being Chinese in America, The Fortunes. As Michael Straub remarks so poignantly in the closing words of his review for NPR, “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.”
When Chinese Americans became Asian Americans
Today people whose roots lie in China, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, or any one of the several other nations of Eastern and Southeast Asia tend to identify as Asian Americans. (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and others from the Subcontinent often refer to themselves as South Asians instead.) But that was not always so.
As Peter Ho Davies observes, the realization among this diverse group of new Americans that they were all “Asian” was sparked by the murder of Vincent Chin in Michigan on June 23, 1982. The men who beat him to death with a baseball bat mistook him for Japanese. They blamed Japan for the loss of jobs in the auto industry at a time when Toyota, Honda, and other Japanese automakers were shaming Detroit with small, durable cars that people actually wanted to buy. But it was the shockingly light sentence the trial judge imposed on the two men that startled people of Asian descent into acknowledging that to so many Whites, they all “looked the same.”
The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies (2016) 288 pages ★★★★☆
The first wave of Asian immigration
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the population of the United States was almost exclusively of European, African, Native, or Latino descent. The US Census of 1850 reveals that only 1,135 of the 2.2 million immigrants in the country hailed from Asia. (Larger numbers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino people had come to Hawaii as contract laborers beginning a quarter-century earlier. But the US didn’t annex Hawaii until 1893. Nor did Hawaii become a state until 1959.)
However, that picture began to change dramatically in the early 1850s following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1849. There were fewer than 400 Chinese immigrants in America in 1848 but 25,000 by 1852 and 105,000 in 1880. Most went to work in California as laborers in gold mines, factories, and on the Transcontinental Railroad. A smaller number of merchants migrated, too, founding communities that came to be known as Chinatowns in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere.
Racist populism and the Chinese Exclusion Act
Japanese, Korean, and South Asians began migrating in significant numbers to the United States late in the nineteenth century, largely to fill the incessant demand for labor in the country’s fast-growing economy. However, despite the need for unskilled labor, the rise of nativist populism had long since made Asian immigrants decidedly unwelcome. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 enshrined those sentiments in law (and it was not repealed until 1943, midway through World War II when China was a US ally). And many had come to America only to “get rich” and return home. Thus, the 1920 Census counted only 43,600 foreign-born Chinese, 81,500 Japanese, 4,900 Indians, and 5,200 “other Asians” from Eastern, Southeastern, and Southern Asia. That, in a population that had grown to 106,000,000. Then Congress acted to cap even those small numbers.
The Immigration Acts of 1924 and 1965
Congress, in response to the flood of Italian, Jewish, and Eastern European immigrants from 1880 to 1920, passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which virtually limited immigration to Northern and Western Europe. For four decades thereafter the diversity of the American population diminished steadily, which of course was the intention of the bill’s authors. Then came the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which turned the rules upside down. A flood of immigrants began to arrive, principally from Mexico and Central and South America and from East and South Asia. The result is today’s remarkably diverse population, as detailed in the 2020 US Census:
| Country of Origin | Number Counted |
| China | 5.21M |
| India | 4.77M |
| Philippines | 4.44M |
| Vietnam | 2.29M |
| Korea | 1.99M |
| Japan | 1.59M |
These numbers totaling about twenty million individually represented small percentages of the total US population of 331,000,000, as counted in 2020. And together they counted for only six percent of the total population. But they represent explosive growth from the small base predetermined by the 1924 Immigration Act. And we are much the richer for it.
The four episodes in The Fortunes tell the story of what it is like to be Chinese in America far more poignantly than any recitation of the bare facts of history, as I’ve traced them above.
About the author
“Born in Britain [in 1966] to Welsh and Chinese parents, [Peter Ho Davies] now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon, Northwestern and Emory University, and is currently on faculty at the University of Michigan.” Davies studied physics at Manchester University and then English at Cambridge University. He is the author of three novels, two short story collections, and one work of nonfiction. Davies has won several literary awards for his work.
For related reading
I’ve reviewed several other novels about being Chinese in America, including:
- Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (The Chinese immigrant experience in 19th-century America)
- Straw Dogs of the Universe by Ye Chun (A deeply moving immigrant story set in the 19th century)
- Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung (How one family survived the Chinese Revolution)
You might also wish to check out the 10 best historical novels set in America and 20 most enlightening historical novels.
And these posts might also be of interest:
- Asian American Histories of the United States by Catherine Ceniza Choy (An Asian American history book focused on the present)
- 30 insightful books about China
- Top 20 popular books for understanding American history
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.
