Much of what happens in Chinese Women (2010), the latest work of fiction from
Guyanese Jan Lowe Shinebourne, occurs in the mind of the central character as
he looks back at his colonial upbringing. Events begin in 1956 and end in 2006. You
follow along as if you’re on his Facebook page, his voice giving twitter like
accounts of what he has endured over the years.
At first you’re not quite sure what to make of him. You sense there’s much
more to his narrative which the writer has chosen to keep off the page.
His story? After falling from a tree at age 10 ("I did not allow myself to feel any
pain. I never have.") and lying in plaster cast and splints for two years, the
narrator recovers to begin an amazing sequence of transitions.
From a high school in Guiana to a university in Toronto; then on to success as
an international oil engineer and a millionaire father of two. From life in a
resentful “ingrown Muslim family”, right through the aftermath of New York’s
9/11 attack, his identity in full blown “Arab Muslim” membership.
These transitions to riches and contentment overseas end, however, when he
discovers his brother in bed with his wife.
Carnal betrayal inside the family, conceivably more calamitous than the
NY 9/11 attack, could have set off eruptions of neurological proportions.
Shinebourne doesn't linger on how or why it all happened. Her narrator, cast
this time in emotional splints and plaster, simply turns away and resolves
to reset what remains of his life.
Immersed in "no pain" and still financially endowed, he begins a search for a
girl he'd fallen in love with as a boy in a classroom; the Chinese girl who sat two
rows in front of him, now a Chinese woman, whose image he'd carried locked
away in his Guianese head all these years.
He locates the object of his old love in England – like author Shinebourne,
the girl had forsaken the yards (and populism) of the old country for the
gardens (and order) of the old colonial power. They catch up; he begins
a diligent courtship, offering money, security and if possible marriage.
Psychologically, you could argue, he’s still “going home”, back to old familiar
starting blocks; hoping to add fresh meaning to his broken life. Shinebourne,
however, seems more interested in the grandeur of their romance: will her
narrator enter his Chinese kingdom? can his new money buy out old feelings?
≈☼≈
The focus of the novel is not, as the title suggests, exclusively Chinese women in
Guyana. Shinebourne writes to help us what lies beneath her narrator's
fascination with the Chinese as a group. His assumptions about the colonial
world had developed through the funnel of what "my father told me”, and
what he observed growing up on the sugar estate where his father was an
estate manager.
In 1960 in British Guiana, he tells readers, the African “collected his pay
…[headed] straight to the dancehall [?] where the many mothers of his many
illegitimate children waited.” The Indians on the other hand maintained
“values of thrift and ambition…for generations.”
Emblematic of political leadership of the times was the hero, Cheddi Jagan,
“the Hindu revolutionary communist, our Fidel Castro”, and the villain,
Forbes Burnham, “leading his supporters to attack Indian people and turning
the country upside down.”
The ethnic group which wins the narrator's admiration and approval are the
Chinese, represented by the Yhip family who own a bakery near the sugar
estate. What seems prominent in the Yhips, and apparently in no other group,
are the traits of “hospitality and generosity… kindness and mercy…the only
civilized behaviour I ever knew.”
After such group approval and admiration it doesn’t take much “linking” for him
to be enchanted with a Chinese girl, Alice Wong, though on several pages he is
at pains to point out her “race did not interest me.”
Perhaps aware that some reference to lovemaking is almost de rigueur in
contemporary fiction, Shinebourne digs up stuff from an undisclosed archive on
intimacy in the colonies.
Readers are asked to accept that “on the apartheid regime of the sugar estate”
in 1957 Guiana, where “the master watched the slaves like vultures and
swooped down to knaw at their humanity”, everyone was copulating; or
watching copulation in progress.
There was copulation on the lawns, in the canals and drains and under the
bridges. Even the stiff-mannered white overseers with wives and lovers had
their own good times rump romping in full world view.
Coupled with awful living conditions on the estate – people "shat and urinated"
everywhere, and oh, the flies, the mosquitoes! – these descriptions, you sense,
are meant to elicit sympathy for the narrator, for his pursuit of a kind of dry
cleansing romance with the Chinese girl; and his attraction to the inert,
shop-bound (bed-room kept secret) lives of the Chinese Yhips, blessed with
consoling "powers of endurance and stoicism”.
≈☼≈
Unlike, say, Guyanese author-diplomat David Dabydeen, also resident in England,
who works and writes from inside the brickwork of academia with its resources
for recovering information, Shinebourne's novel scrapes along on the residue of
loving memories, hoping the results would be embraced as a postcolonial
achievement. But issues of language threaten to undermine the book's ambitions.
The prose falters in stretches of expired usage. The narrator describes, for instance,
the plight of Africans and Indians “dragged in chains to the country to labour like
brute animals.” There’s mention of “racy calypsos” and a woman who “danced
with abandon, winding her hips”. Characters and scenes feel underwritten,
feebly imagined, then drafted into service.
The absence of compelling matter in Shinebourne’s fiction has been defended
through the courtesy of academic paper work, intent on covering up short-
comings with sociology fillings and forgiveness – often reading more into the
books than is actually there.
This time around, with its purpose skewed, its "groups" honoured or caricatured,
Chinese Women ( 50 years of its narrator's colonial tree fall and independent
high rise, compressed in 96 memoried pages) pleads for credibility. Sad to report,
there’s more of nothing here.
- Wyck Williams
Book Reviewed: “Chinese Women”: Jan Lowe Shinebourne, Peepal Tree Press,
England, 2010, 96 pages
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 