Pleading to be saved, Guyanese writer Jan Lowe Shinebourne seems locked
in a mind shaft of her own preoccupation, unwilling to step out for air or fresh
direction.
Her latest book, “The Last Ship” invites readers to follow once again the
tribulations of Chinese immigrants ̶ whose narrative is still considered
“overlooked” and in need of “recovery” ̶ to the colony of British Guiana.
(For richly insightful work on the Chinese in Guiana, readers are best served
by Trev Sue-A-Quan’s “Cane Ripples”, 2003 and “Cane Reapers”, revised ed.
2003)
“The Last Ship” (2015) sets out along familiar ________________________
Guianese memory routes. The main character,
Clarice Chung, leaves China in 1878 speaking THE LAST SHIP
Mandarin and carrying “heirlooms…silver coins by
and a purse of seeds of the plum tree”. When
we join her In Guiana, her Chinese husband Janice Lowe Shinebourne
has died and she runs a shop in Canefield,
Berbice, with the help of her eldest son, Peepal Tree Press
Frederick. Great Britain, 2015, 156 pgs.
__________________________
She has suffered the indignities of the colony’s character-defining mores:
changing her name, no longer speaking Mandarin. Once, with land and
property in China, her family felt at ease; now they live “like animals in a
zoo, to be pointed and stared at.”
She looks out on an arrangement of colonial types identifiable by groupish
dispositions: black slaves and their Christian religion, the British ruling class
in Georgetown; Amerindians presented and viewed in the streets as “exotic”;
the Portuguese running the shipping Industry, the Indians dominating the legal
profession.
Her heart’s determination is simple: to raise her profile as a no-nonsense
enterprising shopkeeper, and to assert a “pure Chinese” identity, untouched
by the ragged creole lives around her.
But Frederick, the eldest son, has other ideas. Faced with shoppers unable to
pay for goods over the counter, he introduces the colonial backroom sweet
deal: the exchange of goods for sexual favors.
When his mother finds out she’s outraged; but in a move that could be
interpreted as “counter-intuitive”, she encourages her son to use condoms
if he must fornicate (how he secures contraceptives in Plantation Guiana
readers might hesitate to ask). And at the end of the day she counts the
number of condoms discarded in the backroom, then resumes her ledger
calculations.
Eventually her son’s carelessness (or willfulness) leads to the birth of a mixed
race child. Clarice decides a suitable Chinese bride must be found if the
purity of the heritage line is to be maintained. Marriage into a Chinese
family (doing well in “restaurants, groceries, bakeries”) would also help firm
up her social standing.
A prospect is found but the girl who presents herself, Susan Leo, proves unsuit-
able (she looked Chinese “but she was dressed like an East Indian”). Clarice is
poised to reject, but her son protests: Susan Leo is just the woman he’d been
looking for.
Apparently, he’s been cultivating faraway desires, collecting photos of white
Hollywood movie stars ̶ Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth ̶
which he kept pasted on the shop walls. Susan Leo is acceptable since she
bears close resemblance to the American actress Jane Wyman.
Stop for a moment and imagine what a young V.S. Naipaul might have done
with this steamy family dynamic ̶ the lacings of irony (mute on anatomical
intimacy); the balloons and bubbles of delusion (agendas of a swollen self-
importance). Or a young Jan Carew, layering his sentences with descriptive
extensions.
Shinebourne shows little interest in evoking the inner lives of her Chinese
characters, or in fleshing out the spiritual contortions of their new residency.
“The Last Ship” is earnest about its heritage excavation. No humour here, no
tales worth extracting about “Sex and the Plantation” life down there.
Halfway through the book (page 80), when Clarice Chung realizes her “pure
Chinese” cause is almost lost, she dies. At which point for this reader the
narrative loses its drive belt and a compelling reason for continued
engagement.
With the central character’s intentions no longer in play (the matriarch
continues “to live like a ghost in the minds of the family”) events go scrappily
down slope, with Shinebourne dropping names and cultural flags to indicate
where the reader is at any given moment.
As the generations move from the village shop and the narrow village roads
to new paved sequences of possibility elsewhere, Clarice Chung’s offspring
soon become victims of “rapid aging” and rapid writing. They get married,
bear children and grow old.
They occupy sites and times marked by the bell ringing of Cheddi Jagan,
Bookers Sugar, communist policy; “Indians and Africans tearing the country
apart”; famous authors and singers (Albert Camus, Bob Dylan); college
ambition and attempts at a life overseas shorn of plantation origins.
* *
Over her publishing years Shinebourne’s fiction has laboured to awake or alert
readers to matters of importance buried in Guyana’s colonial and recent past.
Somehow, though, you come away thinking: there’s an absence of anything
resembling “style” in her prose.
So few situations in the book seem imagined; a great deal is, in fact, sparsely
“reported”. Readers might ask whether anyone could have lived the lives
portrayed. (Curiously, the multi-award author David Dabydeen moves in a
different direction ̶ lush prose that sucks up “extravagant” lines, and dramas
that often require a suspension of mistrust.)
“The Last Ship” relies on short stretches of exposition, with flashbacks and
trips back that provide readers with useful “information”. Conversation is scant, and usually intrudes when individuals vent displeasure (“You can’t give me Chinee gran’children. I want Chinee gran’children. You ain’t Chinee, you is
half-coolie.”); or when, as at a family gathering in England (in 1968),
characters offer living room argument and angst about new dangers back
home (“He wanted to save the country from British colonialism, but it has
led to American colonialism now.”)
Near the end (in 2000) readers tag along when one of Clarice’s grandchildren
takes a trip to Singapore. She’s determined to trace her family ancestry. She
learns (from an old frail American historian) that the heirlooms brought to
Guiana in 1878 were cheap tourist trinkets. Clarice Chung’s ancestral artifacts,
the armour for her striver’s self-esteem, were the basis for false assumptions
all along.
With a clash like that of Chinese opera gongs, the last paragraph of “The Last
Ship” announces closure for the book’s ocean spanning generations: “As the
plane took off from Hong Kong and soared into the sky, she felt as if her
wings were spread and she was flying away forever from all ideological
and ancestral ties, and she promised herself never to relinquish her freedom
for such ties. Never.”
Some readers will thank heavens, and say Amen to that. And to any more jade
worn accounts (part fiction, large part peripheral research) of ethnic group
survival on the plantations in Guiana.
– Wyck Williams
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 