By Janet Song
Early Asian American history is a narrative of absence. As Beth Lew-Williams writes in the introduction to her monograph, The Chinese Must Go, early Asian American history—specifically, the history of early Chinese Americans and anti-Chinese violence in the nineteenth century—is “routinely left out of the national narrative.” Much of contemporary Asian American literature, consequently, is a response to this narrative exclusion.
Take, for instance, the works of established Asian American authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men or Frank Chin’s The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. (or, as Julia H. Lee teases in The Racial Railroad, the bulk of Chin’s bibliography). Or, take these twenty-first century examples: C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl, Peter Ho Davies’ The Fortunes, Linda Sue Park’s Prairie Lotus, to name a few. All of these contemporary re-imaginings of nineteenth-century Asian American life are responses to a national archive with scant representation of early Asian Americans. They are, as Lavinia Liang writes in “Writing the ‘Eastern Western,’” part of a collective “project of portraying the humanity of those queued men we see only in 200-year-old photos.” We enter these re-imagined lives either directly—through characters who are railroad workers or gold miners—or indirectly—through contemporary characters who seek out to find themselves in the history they cannot access, a history which renders Asian American bodies visible in nineteenth-century white America.
Kristina McMorris’ The Girls of Good Fortune, then, embraces both approaches. Inspired by two historical incidents of anti-Chinese violence in America—the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885 and the lesser-known Hells Canyon Massacre of 1887, the novel does not immediately begin with its nineteenth-century protagonist, Celia, but instead, Celia’s unnamed granddaughter. It is Celia’s granddaughter who establishes the novel’s themes of historical absence and erasure. “The staunch historians I’ve encountered, much like scientists, often give little or no credence to accounts lacking evidence or documentation,” she states. “[…] Today, I’m reminded yet again that reality typically lies somewhere in between and that the most extraordinary events—especially involving love and betrayals, tragedies and triumphs, sacrifices and regret—too frequently never make it into the textbooks. My family’s history is a prime example.” Here, her granddaughter reminds the reader that Celia’s story is one that has been excluded from America’s narrative of its own history.
The rest of The Girls of Good Fortune is told through Celia, the half-white, half-Chinese daughter of a Chinese gold miner, who finds herself underground in an unknown location, disguised as a man for reasons she cannot immediately discern. The novel chronicles the journey that leads her to these whereabouts. As the former maid of Mayor Bettencourt, the mayor of Portland, and his family, Celia’s life spirals when both her father is killed in the Rock Springs Massacre and the mayor casts her off to a brothel after discovering she bears the child of his son, Stephen. However, it isn’t until another group of Chinese men are murdered in the Hells Canyon Massacre that Celia sets out to seek justice on their behalf, leading her to Portland’s Chinatown, where she is soon “shanghaied”—that is, kidnapped and kept in secret tunnels underneath the enclave. Now, Celia must figure out how to return to Portland, where she can at last reunite with her child and make sure those who killed the Chinese men of Hells Canyon are held accountable for their crimes.
McMorris’ extensive research for her novel is evident throughout. While characters like Celia are obviously fictional, McMorris also includes real individuals involved in the histories she draws from, such as Frank Vaughn, one of the men who confessed to participating in the Hells Canyon Massacre. She is attentive to location and is able to capture the urgency of Celia’s conditions throughout the novel, an urgency that is exacerbated by Celia’s identity as a half-Chinese woman. What The Girls of Good Fortune could benefit from, however, is relinquishing what feels like a distrust towards its audience. It is obvious that McMorris and her novel want to emphasize the importance of these violent histories, which have been glossed over, as well as McMorris’ outrage that none of the white perpetrators of these anti-Chinese massacres received any accountability for their crimes. That is why, it seems, that McMorris ends her novel with Celia finally getting the justice she believes her father and his fellow Chinese laborers deserve when she and Stephen confront Mayor Bettencourt together.
McMorris is able to capture the discriminatory, often violent and racist environment of nineteenth-century Oregon but ruptures this temporal landscape occasionally with explanations of early Chinese American history to her present-day audiences. Celia’s encounter with a Chinese man kicked out of a tavern, for instance, is interrupted with an explanation of how Chinese men in America “were now deemed threats to white men’s jobs.” These breaks take us out of Celia’s world and come off as didactic to readers both familiar and unfamiliar with the history McMorris wants to expose. It is not that the history McMorris writes about is unimportant. Yet The Girls of Good Fortune thrives best when it does not pause to explain this history, but lets us live through it via Celia.
Ultimately, what informs The Girls of Good Fortune is McMorris’ desire for narrative justice. McMorris, like Celia, wants to emphasize to her audience the atrocities committed by white men against Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century. Yet while The Girls of Good Fortune is exciting in its action and compelling in its call for justice, McMorris’ Celia feels more like a vessel for McMorris to preach recognition of the Chinese miners’ humanity and the cruelty of their fates, rather than a complex character who must grapple with her identity and whose endurance, despite the racism and sexism of her time, is more captivating than the message she represents. It is McMorris’ striving for recognition, her advocacy for the humanity of early Chinese immigrants, and her desire to give them the justice they deserve, which hinders The Girls of Good Fortune from its full narrative potential. Still, it succeeds in what other Asian American imaginings of the nineteenth century have also achieved: illuminating a history of Asian/Chinese America that remains underrecognized.
Janet Song hails from Long Island but tells people she’s from New York. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Southern California.