We then leap from the railroad to Hollywood, where the life of Anna May Wong shutters past like stills from a film. Ah Ling, “aware of his whole life as an invention of others”, is an orphan in multiple ways, disconnected from his family, land of birth and even the biographical fiction in which he finds himself.
The railway has left a trail of buried bodies – deceased workers who will be repatriated back to China, “each foot and hand bagged in its own pouch and nestled in a box among other bones”. “You dream your railroad will annihilate distance,” Ah Ling thinks, knowing the vast psychic distances within the US will not be bridged by technology. Throughout the book, Davies’ handling of genre and form, moving from historical romance to fragmented narrative to a final section that presents earlier chapters as the unfinished work of the writer John Smith, is both purposefully distancing and multilayered, creating another history out of alternate puzzle pieces. The depths of both his Chinese and American selves seem to actively resist the narrative language. Details of his Chinese life, meanwhile – his thousand-layer shoes and games of heaven-and-nine – are set off in quote marks, as if foreign even to his own mind. His observations are filtered through period language, so an attacker is described as “a liverish redhead in a fustian jacket”. In The Fortunes, Ah Ling is given the lead role, but he seems detached, even ghostly, from himself. According to historical sources, Crocker, impressed by the “docile servitude” of the Chinese, chose Chinese labour for the construction of his Central Pacific Railroad. Davies presents us with a cascade of details of Ah Ling’s American life – the new attire of a western suit and hat, the loss of his long braid – while keeping the man just beyond our grasp. In the first story, we meet Ah Ling, born in southern China and sold across the Pacific as an indentured labourer, who becomes manservant to real-life American tycoon Charles Crocker.
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