Melting Pot

Immigration literature is by its very nature sad, for in these stories are all the things that people give up to leave their homeland, the brutal realities of travel and arrival and the heavy price paid to survive in a new country. In the melting pot of America, we have by now seen almost every ethnicity portrayed between dust jackets, while immigrant experiences in other countries have been relatively scarce. In “The Pagoda,” Patricia Powell presents one such story: that of a Chinese woman who stows away on a ship bound for Jamaica, disguises herself as a man named Lowe, lives as a husband to a light-skinned black woman and runs a little shop.

After the 1834 abolition of slavery in the West Indies, indentured laborers from China and India were brought to Jamaica to replace African labor. Conditions on the ships leaving Asia were as bad as on those leaving Africa, and Powell vividly describes the rats, the sour smells of seasickness and human waste, the nasty food and dehydration and the disease and death on board Lowe’s ship. Once in Jamaica, the Chinese join black workers, cutting sugar cane for long hours and low pay. At the end of the day, these men of broken spirits visit Lowe’s shop: “They came with hands twisted and chewed from water pumps, scarred by deep grooves left over from the cane leaves that cut like knives. They came with spit bubbling with blood, asthmatic and tubercular chests from the dust. They came without flesh, with holes in the skin, half-starved from inferior food, lashed and mutilated by overseers. . . .”

Hardly a romantic view of Chinese immigrant life. There are no sweet mothers offering advice or colorful proverbs. Instead we see a people “meeting hell” and living on sufferance. Powell’s Jamaica is a place of “grudge and hate,” where racial issues are superseded only by the greed for land. When Lowe’s shop is burned, he (although a woman, he is always described as a man) dreams of building a pagoda, which will serve as a benevolent society, social club and school for the island’s Chinese children. Along the way he slowly reviews his past--why he left China, how he got pregnant, how he ended up with a fake mustache plastered to his face.

It’s important for writers to write what they know. This is especially true for novels that use history as a backdrop: Readers may not be willing to search out an obscure dissertation, but they are willing to immerse themselves in a story where they can learn something along the way. Unfortunately, “The Pagoda” is a mishmash of inconsistencies, mistakes and bad editing. Powell, a Jamaican emigre to America, writes that the Chinese were kidnapped and brought to Jamaica just as the Africans had been before them. However, though more than 200,000 Chinese were kidnapped and brought as slaves to Cuba and Peru, there is no record of this practice in the English colonies or in the United States and Canada for that matter. Granted, there may have been an undocumented case somewhere, but a historical novel can’t rely on may-haves.

Powell refers to the pagoda as the home for Lowe’s benevolent society, but a pagoda is a temple usually used for storing sacred texts. The character of Lowe is an exceptionally lyrical writer who learned his Chinese calligraphy from his coffin-maker father, but in 19th century China, literacy was a privilege of wealth. These mistakes undercut the terrible--and mostly buried--truth of what actually happened during the Chinese diaspora of the last century.

“The Pagoda” is best when Powell sticks with Lowe and his secrets. In reality, there were Chinese women--and women of all races--who ventured out alone and physically defenseless. Until recently their stories have been neglected. When Lowe asks his captor and benefactor, “Did you once ask me what I wanted?,” it is as though he is asking for all of the women who, a century ago, left their homes and endured so much, as well as for those who appear to be ensconced in effortless and comfortable lives today.