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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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The Money Dragon by Pam Chun
PAM CHUN's first "novel" THE MONEY DRAGON is a fictionalized biography of her great-grandfather Lau Ah Leong, who was a sort of Chinese Sam Walton in late 19th and early 20th century Hawaii. This Chinese immigrant ended up, through hard work and canny investment, owning large chunks of downtown Honolulu.
I put "novel" in quotes because so much of the structure of the book, the people, dates and incidents is true that THE MONEY DRAGON might almost be classified as "biography". The facts are based on extensive research in archives in the USA and Guangdong, while the conversations are based upon recollections of her grandmother, who is in many ways the real protagonist of the book and through whose eyes much of the action is filtered.
This tension between truth and fiction works rather well. "If Lau Ah Leong was the richest Chinese in Hawaii ... and one of the largest retail-wholesale grocers in the Islands, why," asks his great grand-daughter, "was Lau Ah Leong never mentioned in any history of Hawaii or history of the Chinese in Hawaii?" One reason is probably that he was a grocer and grocers rarely figure in "histories". But if one can be allowed certain liberties with the exact truth, the story of Lau Ah Leong makes one fascinating and page-turning tale.
In America, Lau was a grocer; but this grocer left Guangdong a beggar, became a US dollar millionaire, returned to China to build one estate of 48 bedrooms and another of 118 bedrooms (financed with chests of silver dollars). Lau also had an eye for the ladies and on the way he collected a clutch of wives, including the formidable Dai-Kam (who, one suspects, was the real brains behind the business and got her way by whacking her husband), the conniving Ho Shee and the beautiful Chung Shee.
The book is filled with fascinating details: daughters were just give away, servants were "sold" as wives (even in "America"), Lau would don silk for his trips back to China but would only wear Chinese work clothes when in Hawaii, arguing that everyone there already knew who he was. Lau once lived (and had his shop) across the street from Iolani Palace (the somewhat bourgeois home of the Hawaiian monarch). Sanford Dole (he of 'Dole Pineapple') makes a cameo appearance as a judge.
But what really saves the book from being a perhaps pedestrian Chinese family history is the voice of Phoenix, the wife of Tat-Tung, Lau's son -- and the author's grandmother. "The first time I heard L. Ah Leong's name, I was swinging upside down from the lychee tree," starts the book. Phoenix came from a well-to-do merchant family, had an extended honeymoon on the family estate -- and then ended up an immigrant, facing first the stern evaluation of US immigration officials operating under the Chinese Exclusion Acts and then a life of hard work.
While it is Lau's intrigues that fascinate, whether claiming one woman or another as his "official" wife, depending on how any particular prosecution for bigamy is going, or whom is initiating divorce proceedings; or playing one haole (that's Hawaiian for gweilo) against another -- this is really Phoenix's story. As dedicated wife and mother, she provides a human and humane counterpoint to the rather distant figure of the family patriarch.
The writing in THE MONEY DRAGON is in many ways raw rather than refined; that is perhaps part of the book's appeal: there seems to be little pretense here and if Chun has an axe to grind, she keeps it well hidden.
But THE MONEY DRAGON also paints a multi-faceted picture of Confucian ideals bumping up against American individualism, of hard-edged American capitalism funding a scholarly lifestyle back in China, all mellowed by the soft breezes of tropical Hawaii.
Lau Ah Leong's story, that of the successful Chinese emigrant, has of course been repeated all across then world, from Malaysia to Peru to Australia, but these stories are only rarely written down. Nor perhaps, do most overseas Chinese display character by the bucketful that author Chun would us believe the Lau and his many wives and children had. But whether they were really as interesting as all that doesn't matter -- because this is a "novel", after all.
Peter Gordon
13/04/2003
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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