Rough Landing

In 2020, Jack Wang, a much heralded author of children’s books, published his first book for adults, We Two Alone, an inspired collection of six stories and one novella set in several areas of the world, including Vancouver’s Chinatown, Vienna, and Port Elizabeth, South Africa. In “Belsize Park,” for example, the narrator, a young Chinese student and the son of immigrants, meets a young girl at Oxford. “I couldn’t quite believe I had fallen in with someone like Fiona, so clever and lovely and thoroughly English,” he says. But when they visit her home in London, they soon realize their budding relationship can never sustain the forced politeness of her parents. They also conclude that she will never meet his parents, who run a takeout shop in Stoke-on-Trent. All the seven tales, vividly realized portraits of significant moments for a sprawling diaspora, indict the ostracism behind the racist taunts and trials that bedevil our beleaguered society.

Now, five years later, Wang has published his debut novel, The Riveter, an account of Chinese displacement seen through the eyes of twenty-two-year-old Josiah Chang. A native British Columbian and a strapping six-footer, Josiah has worked as a lumberjack felling trees with his beloved father for ten years. Then his father is killed by a falling branch. Left alone, Josiah takes the train to Vancouver, where he encounters outright prejudice. When he asks for directions, for instance, he receives the curt response: “What you’re after, son, is Chinatown.” Josiah’s grandfather “had already moved out of Chinatown, back when the Changs still lived in the great metropolis.” So finding the neighbourhood, as the stranger condescendingly suggests, “wasn’t the way for him.” When he seeks accommodation in a rooming house instead, the landlady is equally rude: “We’re full up.” Josiah notices that the “For Rent” sign on her front lawn does not come down.

The time is May 1942, and the Second World War is raging in Europe and the Far East. Like many Canadians, Josiah wants to prove his loyalty by serving his country; Canada, however, has largely barred those of Chinese descent from signing up, for fear they might demand citizenship in return. Someone like Josiah could not join “the army, not the navy, not the air force, especially in British Columbia, where most Chinese lived. The province had opposed conscription for fear that Chinese would earn the franchise.” Reluctantly, he heads to the shipyards, where he finds work as a riveter, fastening together the ribs and steel plates of Victory ships.

One evening he meets Poppy Miller, who is singing at a navy club. Despite their differences, they fall in love, and soon he is spending his nights in her small house. Their romance continues until Poppy’s father comes to visit. Again the realities of prejudice interfere with Josiah’s life. “You’re not a British subject, son. You’re a resident alien,” the older man warns him. “If Poppy marries you, she’ll lose her citizenship.”

Josiah is determined to prove himself to Poppy and her parents. “Rumour had it that some had managed to join up east of the Rockies,” so he leaves for Toronto. “The farther he got from the coast, the better his chances would be.” At last, thanks to the “whims of the recruiting station,” he is granted the opportunity to enlist.

Detailed chapters follow Josiah’s military career, first in Toronto, then in a parachute training school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and ultimately in the battlegrounds of Europe. As Josiah and his group are moving into barracks at Fort Benning, a master sergeant reprimands him: “You can’t be here, boy. You need to be down on Wold Avenue. With all them other darkies.” Josiah realizes that “the South was a different world, or the same world made plain. But he was neither Black nor white, and it was confusing, never really knowing where you stood.”

Throughout, Josiah works to sustain his relationship with Poppy through cards and letters. He progresses successfully through each stage of his military endeavours, ending his wartime service as the only Chinese member of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion (a detail grounded in fact). Even Poppy’s parents suffer “a kind of repentance,” talking about him now every time the war comes up: “We know someone who jumped in Normandy!” Is this a new racial harmony? Or is it simply relishing someone’s fame?

Returning a war hero, Josiah dreams of citizenship: “I just want to be Canadian. Like everyone else.” But he receives a discouraging letter from John Hart, the premier of British Columbia, with a “polite no” to his request. “The Charter amendments of next year will ask for the necessary changes to give the franchise to your people,” the premier prevaricates.

The Riveter is somewhat reminiscent of Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising, with its nine-day focus on a love story set against the background of the First World War and the Halifax explosion of 1917. In the 1941 classic, the love between two characters forms the novel’s true centre.

After an extraneous prologue that depicts its protagonist’s sterling service in Normandy, The Riveter turns to Josiah’s early years in the B.C. forests. More akin to a collection of short stories, the subsequent tales of action are connected only remotely by his presence. And since the battle scenes “in the carnival of chance that was war” emerge with such spectacular ferocity, they become the essence of the book. The Riveter is a gripping tale of the Second World War, couched not so securely in an interracial love affair, and a remarkable expression of the hidden and not so hidden costs of racial intolerance.