The Fortunes

Uncle Ng owns the laundry where Ah Ling works during his early days in the United States. Ng was able to purchase his laundry with money he made as a prospector. A habitual gambler, Ng is initially characterized through his kindness to Ling and his trusting nature. However, it is soon revealed that Ng purchased Ling and that he sold his own daughter into sexual slavery. Although not a true antagonist, Ng is a complex and unsympathetic figure. Having experienced anti-Chinese prejudice, Ng is happy to pass his delivery route on to Ling to avoid future conflicts. His experiences with racist violence are historically accurate and connect the novel to the early Chinese American communities that it depicts. His character also speaks to the theme of History and Chinese American Experiences in that he works in what was at one point the only path to business ownership for Chinese immigrants and their descendants. Laundries are a motif within this text and Ng’s laundry becomes a point of connection between this first section of the novel and its subsequent stories.

Little Sister is a sex worker in Uncle Ng’s laundry. She is sold into sexual slavery by her father, and as a result she hates Chinese men for the way that they abuse and exploit their women. She explains to Ling that because all of the Chinese workers who immigrated to America were men, sex work became a lucrative business and nearly all of the women who journeyed to the various communities that sprung up around the railroads were sex workers. Little Sister’s bitter, vituperative temperament is an outgrowth of this context, and her initial lack of trust in Ling can be read as part of her general antipathy towards her countrymen. That Little Sister ultimately becomes a madam and employs her own daughters as sex workers speaks to the cycle of abuse within the world of trafficking: Making the transition from sex worker to exploiter of other sex workers is Little Sister’s only option. Her character speaks to the theme of History and Chinese American Experiences in that the early waves of Chinese immigration were largely comprised of male workers and many of the Chinese women trafficked to the United States during that wave were forced into sexual servitude.

Anna May Wong is a character based on the real-life actress of the same name, the first Chinese American woman to find stardom in Hollywood. She is characterized by the way that race impacts her career, by the way that career impacts her family relationships, and by the way that she is forced to navigate between Chinese and American culture. Like several other characters in The Fortunes, she struggles to fit into both Chinese and American communities and ultimately feels at home in neither.

Although Anna is successful in Hollywood and becomes famous in her own right, she still struggles because of racism and is not as readily accepted as a leading lady as her white counterparts. She reflects that: “She isn’t a star, she thinks later, or an actress, but something in between. The first Chinese star, they call her, and it’s the qualifications that are crucial” (150). She enters cinema during an era in which yellowface, or the practice of hiring white actors to play the roles of Asian characters, is common. She is passed over for important Asian roles in favor of white actresses time and time again. Anna is never able to escape discrimination, even once she has become a household name.

Her career also impacts her family. Her father, who owns a laundry, is scandalized by his daughter’s career and feels that she has caused him to lose face. Her career choices represent a modern approach to gender and career, and her father would have preferred a more traditional daughter. Anna is a driven, hardworking actress with huge ambitions, and she is willing to sacrifice peace within her family to achieve her goals. She never marries or has children, which is another aspect of her characterization that is strikingly modern, transgressive even for a woman whose beginnings in Hollywood happened during the silent film era.

Much of her story centers around her journey back to China to make a documentary. Like other Chinese and Chinese American characters in The Fortunes, Anna struggles to retain a connection to her Chinese heritage. In the United States she has often been made to feel like an outsider and always felt more Chinese than American, but in China she is seen as American. In spite of Anna’s identity struggles, she is an important figure within Chinese American history, and her inclusion in this book speaks to the theme of History and Chinese American Experiences and helps the author to tell a broad, multi-layered set of stories about the various ways in which history has shaped both group and individual identity in Chinese American communities over the years.

Vincent Chin (who appears in the novel’s third section) is another of this novel’s characters who is based on a real person. The historical Vincent Chin was murdered by white auto workers in Detroit because they mistook him for Japanese and were angry that the Japanese auto industry was surpassing the American auto industry and thus (they thought) imperiling American jobs.

The character of Vincent Chin, who has already been murdered by the time the narration begins, was a 27-year-old, Chinese American man celebrating at his bachelor party at a strip club in Detroit. He is murdered by two white auto workers because they think that he is Japanese. This incident, which will come to be prosecuted as a hate crime, speaks to the novel’s interest in Anti-Chinese Racism. Although all of the Chinese and Chinese American characters in The Fortunes experience racism at various points in their lives, racist violence is the worst of this kind of prejudice, and Vincent Chin’s story is the novel’s most extreme incident of it.

Vincent is described as athletic, popular, and hardworking. Born in Hong Kong and adopted by a Chinese couple living in the United States, Vincent is simultaneously connected to his Chinese ancestry and able to move with ease through the predominantly white social world in which he grows up in Michigan. Although he and the narrator are subject to racist taunts as boys, Vincent is successful and well liked. In this way, his character speaks to the success that many Chinese American communities have experienced in the United States despite discrimination.

The narrator also notes, however, that media coverage of Vincent after his death was not without stereotype. He recalls the way the media “made him out to be a model citizen of the model minority” (181). The narrator understands that Vincent was more complex than that, that he was a whole, multi-faceted person with good and bad qualities. Although the media’s characterization is positive, it speaks to the way that representation of diverse groups of people often flattens their identities and depicts them through an essentializing lens.