{"id":7577,"date":"2017-10-02T12:13:34","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T12:13:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7577"},"modified":"2017-10-09T11:56:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-09T11:56:00","slug":"love-and-other-consolation-prizes-by-jamie-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7577","title":{"rendered":"Love and Other Consolation Prizes by Jamie Ford"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Allison & Busby 12 September 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

352pp, paperback, \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Rachel Hore<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jamie Ford\u2019s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet<\/em> (2009), a powerful exploration of a dark episode in Seattle\u2019s history – the internment in camps of its vibrant Japanese community during World War II – spent two years on the New York Times <\/em>bestseller list.\u00a0 In this new fictional outing he colonizes similar territory, but this time he follows the fortunes of a young half-Chinese immigrant in the city.<\/p>\n

Ford ably and movingly dramatizes Yung Kun-ai\u2019s pitiful childhood as \u2018neither pure Oriental or Caucasian, nor fully American or Chinese\u2019. In China in 1902, this five-year-old bastard son of a white missionary and a Cantonese girl witnesses his mother suffocating his new-born half-sister because the woman has only \u2018soups made from mossy rocks and \u2026boiled shoe leather\u2019 to feed them on.\u00a0 Subsequently she hands Yung Kun-ai over to a white merchant in order to save her son from the Chinese Boxers who are slaughtering missionaries, foreigners and their offspring.\u00a0 On the boy\u2019s arrival in Seattle, Mrs Irvine, a detestably narrow-minded, fervently religious matron, sponsors him to attend a school where, renamed Ernest Young, he\u2019s treated as a servant rather than a student. In 1909, angry at the fourteen-year-old\u2019s rejection of the humble employment she\u2019s organized for him, she punishes his lack of gratitude by raffling him off as a prize at Seattle\u2019s World Fair.\u00a0 She\u2019s horrified, however, when the lucky winner is the exotic Madam Flora, a brothel owner, and Young ends up working in the city\u2019s famed red light district where, remarkably, he thrives.<\/p>\n

In parallel to this narrative runs one set in 1962, shortly before the opening of another World Fair in the city.\u00a0 Here we find Ernest Young retired, married to Gracie, who is suffering a mysterious kind of dementia, and the father of two grown-up daughters, one of whom, Juju, a journalist, badgers him finally into revealing his life story.\u00a0 There is less energy about this aspect of the book than the earlier tale, as though it\u2019s a framing device rather than a true opportunity for Ernest to reflect on the past and to make further sense of it. One is, however, made curious about Gracie\u2019s true identity and the nature of her illness.<\/p>\n

The strengths of this traditionally told novel lie in the richness of its setting, which must have involved an impressive amount of research, and in the vividness of some of the characters \u2013 particularly Madam Flora and her daughters, and a young Japanese maid, Fahn, sold into servitude.\u00a0 Ernest himself is convincingly drawn, but he is passive for a protagonist, often more of a survivor than an agent of his own destiny, which may be a reason that the past narrative sometimes loses drive.\u00a0 The reader does however gain a strong sense of the character of the city, its teeming masses, its politics, the bitter, sometimes violent struggles between the religious and business elements. Above all, there is the establishment\u2019s deep failure to address social injustice, especially for immigrants.\u00a0 Ernest\u2019s story must have been representative of many, and in this alone is worth the telling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Rachel Hore<\/p>\n

Ford ably and movingly dramatizes Yung Kun-ai\u2019s pitiful childhood as \u2018neither pure Oriental or Causcasian, nor fully American or Chinese\u2019. In China in 1902, this five-year-old bastard son of a white missionary and a Cantonese girl witnesses his mother suffocating his new-born half-sister because the woman has only \u2018soups made from mossy rocks and \u2026boiled shoe leather\u2019 to feed them on […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7577"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7586,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7577\/revisions\/7586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}