Judy Fong Bates: The Year of Finding Memory

Judy Fong Bates describes her book, The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir as a work of “creative non-fiction.” It is a story, but not necessarily “the” story, of her family’s journey from Kaiping County, in Guangdong Province, southern China, to Canada, their lives in Canada, and the family and homes they left behind in coming to Gam Sum, North America, the Golden Mountain.

Fong Bates’s family is a complex one, with a complicated story of crossing borders - these days, we’d call it a melded family. Her father Fong Wah Yent had married in China, but came to Canada originally as a single man with his brother, leaving his wife and children behind. Though he travelled back to China several times, due to the passage of racist immigration laws, it would be years before he would be legally able to bring any of his family - which had grown to include three sons Hing, Shing, and Doon, and a daughter Jook - to Canada. But before that time, his first wife would die, and he would return to China and remarry, a widow with a daughter of her own, Ming Nee. But his plans to spend the remainder of his life in China ended with the Communist revolution, and in 1949 he returned to Canada, where he was finally able to sponsor his new wife Fong Yet Lan and unmarried children under the age of 21 - Hing and Jook remained in China, Shing, Doon, Ming Nee, and his youngest child - the author, Judy Fong Bates - by his new wife, were allowed to enter the country.

The occasions which prompted Fong Bates to write this memoir were two journeys to China, the first undertaken by the Canadian siblings, Shing, Doon, and Fong Bates herself, accompanied by their spouses, to China, to reconnect with the surviving members of their divided family still living there, the second by Fong Bates and her husband. In the first part to this memoir, Fong Bates intersperses her account of her experience returning after decades to a birthplace she left as a very small child, with her memories and reconstructed stories of her family’s life in Canada. The second part continues to tell her memories of visiting China with her siblings, and of her own childhood in Canada and her parents lives in both countries, but begins to weave into the narrative web elements of her current life as a middle-aged Chinese-Canadian author living in a small town in Ontario with her white husband. Two strands become three, then four as she writes about her second return to China in part three of the book.

Much of the book echoes with the vast differences between Fong Bates’ memories of her parents, and the stories about then that she discovers on her journeys to China. Her memories are of sad, defeated, often bitter, people, unhappy in their marriage, worn down from years of working in their laundry to clean the clothing of people who offered them no respect or understanding. Missing their homeland, their plans for a comfortable life together in China destroyed by the Communist revolution. Cut off from relatives, friends, culture, in a foreign land, sacrificing and denying themselves even the smallest comforts to send money home to numerous relatives struggling to survive under Communist rule. The stories she hears are of a respected, well educated woman, the best school teacher her father’s village had ever known, and a well-loved Gold Mountain visitor, generous, learned, who cared for each other, but were thwarted in their love by her father’s first wife, who refused to allow him to take a second wife into the home.

“The story of my family is filled with ghosts, their presence resonating from beyond the grave. In the course of a year, their whispers have turned my doubt and arrogance into a richer sort of knowing, and I have watched my parents grow into fully fleshed human beings. At the same time they have also turned into strangers. The more I find out about them, the further they are removed from the people who eked out a living in a small-town hand laundry. I cannot connect this charming, much-admired and respected woman to my sharp-tongued mother, consumed by bitterness. I cannot connect this confident man with high standing in his community to the diminished man whom I knew as my father, to the man who ended his life at the end of a rope. My parents were unhappy exiles in the Gold Mountain, shadows of their former selves. I am left aching to know the man and the woman who knew each other before I was born. Whatever truth I now hold feels insignificant and false.”

The Year of Finding Memory is at once an exploration of the universal nature of family histories, with their tensions, secrets, losses, fragmented stories, enduring connections and bitter disappointments, and the particular experiences of Chinese immigrants in North America, a place that seemed so alluring that its name in China meant the Golden Mountain, but which was for so many a daily struggle to survive in the midst of cultural shock and racism that ranged from the thoughtlessly callous to the brutally violent. It tells of families torn apart by ruthless immigration policies, messages of deception concealing from those left behind the difficulties of live in a new country that valued neither the people who came to its shores nor the back-breaking labour they undertook. Of obligations to send money home to those suffering under first the invasion of Imperial Japanese forces and then the Communist regime and the Cultural Revolution, when those who were safe from these horrors, at least, had barely enough to live on themselves. And it tells of the healing and becoming whole that comes of finding unknown family, piecing together the fragments of past lives only partially known and understood.

Fong Bates’s memoir of her families is rich in profound emotional truths but never sentimental or overwrought. She gives us all the facets, fragments, from her own memories and the shared remembrances of others, slowly building pictures of her parents’ lives that hint at the unrealised possibilities taken from them by the forces of history. We watch as the lives of her siblings, cousins, and the extended web of family and neighbours her parents had known in China become as real to her as her own memories, and her own life in a country that is hers as it was never her parents’.

It’s a powerful book, a vital living story, rich and rewarding on many levels.

Rereading Heinlein: The Early Novels

Some of Heinlein’s early published novels - Revolt in 2100, Methuselah’s Children - are, I think, among his best. At least, they are some of my favourites. They’re tightly written, with lots of action and not a lot of editorialising or rambling - although both Revolt in 2100 and Beyond This Horizon have a number of passages where the characters, or the authorial voice, present large chunks of background on topics ranging from semantics to Mendelian genetics.

At the same time, two of Heinlein’s novels that I think are among his worst, Sixth Column and Orphans of the Sky, were also published in the first few years of his writing career, though Sixth Column we can perhaps excuse, as he wrote it to John Campbell’s specifications.

His first published novel, “—If This Goes On” - which is packaged, along with two linked shorter works, “Coventry” and “Misfit,” as Revolt in 2100, is the first of his Future History novels.

Methuselah’s Children, the novel that follows “—If This Goes On” introduces two key elements of Heinlein’s universe, to which he would return again and again at various points in hus writing career - the Howard Families, and the iconic figure of Lazarus Long, the irascible, irreverent, Senior of the Howard Families, the oldest human being thanks to a genetic quirk at the early stages of the Howard Family longevity breeding experiment. There’s a line in Methuselah’s Children that places Lazarus in the background of Heinlein’s first published short story, “Life-Line,” and Lazarus will play a key role in the last novel Heinlein wrote, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. In a way, Lazarus is Heinlein’s Everyman, not as he is but as he should be, the personification of everything Heinlein sees as quintessentially human, from his eternal restlessness to his refusal to be broken in spirit, no matter what befalls him.

Methuselah’s Children opens in the year 2125, a quarter-century after the end of the American theocracy described in Revolt in 2100. America is now part of a global world government, and is back in the space era - we can assume from various comments in both books that the exploration and development of colonies in the solar system continued under the management of other countries while the US was isolated. The establishment of a planetary civilisation the has as its main values peace and tolerance, in which we assume economic inequality has been overcome through technology and global resource management, has led the secretive Howard Families to believe that they can finally come out of hiding and live among short-lived humans without the need for changing identities and moving on every few decades to conceal their longevity.

Of course, it’s a mistake. Shorter lived humans refuse to believe that it’s just a matter of genetics, and set aside the Covenant that guarantees the rights of every human bring so that the Howard Families can be arrested and the ‘secret’ of long life forced from them. Fortunately, Federation Adnimistrator Slayton Ford, recognises from the early reports of interrogated Howards that there is no secret, and decides to try and resolve the situation without more violence - he, Howard Foundation Chief Executive Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus, develop a daring plan - to highjack the generation star ship New Horizons, which is about to be launched on the Second Proxima Centauri Expedition, and use it to evacuate all the Howards to another solar system, so the two branches of humanity can continue in isolation.

The plan works, and Ford, deposed and labelled as a traitor, joins the fleeing Howard Families as they seek a new home world. While a trip that would ordinarily take generations would be less daunting to the long-lived Howards, the timeline is further shortened by the invention, by Andrew Jackson Libby - last seen in Misfit - which brings them to a possible planet in a much shorter period of time, relatively speaking (a minor character, Hubert Johnson, who is an infant at the time of the evacuation, has grown into a nasty spoiled brat when they reach their destination). But the planet they land on is inhabited, and as it turns out, is no place for humans - the most numerous species, the Jockaira, may be intelligent and human-like, but they are all the willing servants and worshippers the dominant species of the planet, whom the perceive as gods. When it becomes apparent that the humans cannot, and will not, enter into the same relationship with the true rulers if the planet, the ‘gods’ of the Jockaira use their advanced abilities - whether science or psionic, is never clearly determined - to send them to another system, also inhabited. At first it seems like a paradise, but eventually the deep differences between the two species - the Little People are in fact a society of communal minds, with each ‘individual’ living in many different bodies - make it clear that this is no home for humans either. Frustrated and homesick, they return to Earth, prepared to fight for their rights as members of the human race - only to find that in their absence, determination and allocation of vast resources have achieved what the Howard Families’ more limited resources were unable to - a real technology of rejuvenation that is affordable for all, and which puts Howards and non-Howards back on an equal footing. And their exploration adventures - and Libby’s star drive - are enough to wipe clean the criminality of their escape. Humanity is reunited, the stage is set for real space exploration, and all is well.

The inability of humans to become, like the Jockaira, servants, or perhaps pets, of a dominant race, and their general reluctance to merge into communal groupings of Little People, are, like Lazarus himself, keys to Heinlein’s beliefs about the essential nature of human beings. Throughout his novels runs the theme of the ‘free man’ - an individual who can be captured, even killed, but cannot be conquered. There’s an interesting tension here - on the one hand, Heinlein sees this as the defining quality of humanity, and yet so often, it’s only his heroes and their associates who display this trait, and they are surrounded by weaker men who give up and give in.

Hidden in the story of the highjacking of the New Horizons is the seed of Heinlein’s next novel, Orphans of the Sky - which comprises two distinct sections, Universe and Common Sense. The New Horizons was built for the Second Proxima Centauri Expedition. Heinlein’s next novel would backtrack slightly and tell the story of the first Proxima Centauri Expedition.

The first part of Orphans of the Sky, Universe, begins with the notation “The Proximo Centauri Expedition, sponsored by the Jordan Foundation in 2119, was the first recorded attempt to reach the nearer stars of this galaxy. Whatever its unhappy fate we can only conjecture . . .” The novel is the story of what happened to the lost expedition. The protagonist is a young man named Hugh Hoyland, who is apprenticed to become a scientist - which, we quickly learn, has nothing to do with science, and is rather his culture’s term for priest. It is through his eyes that we discover what’s happening on the lost ship, generations after its launch. For Hugh, there is only Ship. It is his universe, and he has no concept of an outside, a space through which the ship moves. Few people can read or write, outside of the ranks of the scientists, and what oral history there is has become entangled with a theology in which Jordan, the supreme god, created the ship and its people, who when they die will go to Centaurus to live forever in paradise. There’s a memory of a mutiny, in which most of the original ship’s crew was killed, which is probably the point at which survival needs took over and much of the basic knowledge about the nature of the true universe was lost. What books remain have been interpreted by the scientists as religious allegories.

The plot begins to develop when Hugh, on an expedition with some other young scientists to the sectors where Muties - mutants born as a result of higher radiation levels in the ship, though it’s generally attributed to the resurgence of the original sin of mutiny - live, is injured and left for dead. He’s taken as a servant by conjoined twins, Jim and Joe, who share one body and who are also possibly of Howard stock, being several generations old. Jim and Joe are highly intelligent, and have gained a position of some leadership within the Mutie community. They have also read extensively, explored the low-gee areas of the ship, found the main control room, and looked out at the stars. They have deduced much of the true nature of the ship and its voyage - though their sense of scale is sadly lacking - and they introduce Hugh to the truth as well.

The second part of the novel, Common Sense, is largely about Hugh’s attempts, with the backing of Jim and Joe, to take control of the Ship and carry out ‘Jordan’s Plan’ - colonisation of a new planet. Of course, the attempt to convince the other ship’s officers of the truth eventually fails, and Hugh, Jim, Joe, and a small handful of supporters find themselves hunted, with no way out - except the single shuttle remaining after the catastrophe that was the mutiny. The novel ends as Hugh and the others - minus Jim and Joe, who died in the fight to get to the shuttle, land through the greatest of luck on an unknown planet that can sustain human life. We would not learn if Hugh and his followers survived until ears later, when Heinlein revealed their fate in a casual discussion in the novel Time Enough for Love.

Orphans of the Sky has never been one of my favourite Heinlein novels. It’s an interesting concept, with a reasonable amount of action, but the characters are thinly realised and even Hugh Hoyland doesn’t have much depth to draw one into the story. Conjoined twins Jim and Joe are perhaps the most memorable characters, but it’s rather annoying the way that Heinlein can’t quite figure out whether to treat them as one person, because they share a body, or two people, because each head clearly belongs to a distinct individual with a definite sense of personal identity. Plus, there are virtually no women in the story, other than a mutant woman knifesmith who has one short appearance, and the wives of Hugh and his handful of human supporters. Women on the Ship are slaves, used for domestic and sexual service, treated with physical violence even by the supposed hero, and don’t even have names of their own, only what their men choose to call them - at least among the ‘normal humans.’ Hugh hasn’t even bothered to give one of his wives a name. It is clear, hiwever, that the female Mutie, Mother of Knives, has not only a name but a degree of respect within her community.

It’s an early novel, but where his other early novels, Revolt in 2100 and Methuselah’s Children, and even, to some degree, Sixth Column, are already clearly ‘Heinlein’ novels - well-written, strong characters of both genders, solid plots - Orphans of the Sky does not pass muster.

The last of Heinlein’s early novels for adults is Beyond This Horizon, written in 1942. The world as portrayed in Beyond This Horizon owed much background to his unpublished novel, For Us, the Living. It’s not hard to see where he built the flesh and muscle of this book, on the skeleton of the socialist-influenced, socially progressive society he invented in that very early work. Gender equity in many respects (though in an armed duello society, women generally go unarmed and have immunity from challenge), a multi-national government (in Heinlein’s future, Asia and Africa were virtually destroyed by imperialistic wars their people are considered to be at the developmental level of barbarians), guaranteed annual income, respect for privacy and personal choice - there’s a lot here that’s admirable. What’s highly questionable is his whole-hearted embrace of eugenics - the deliberate breeding of human beings for so-called desirable traits - which underlies both the entire notion of the Howard families in the Future History novels, and the way that, in Beyond This Horizon, ‘genetically compatible’ humans are urged to create children together, with or without any existing or on-going relationship between them. He goes to some lengths to differentiate ‘bad’ eugenics, which produced humans bred for specific functions and purposes and the horrors of two world wars, and the ‘scientific’ eugenics of his near-utopian civilisation that sought to conserve positive traits and eliminate inherited weaknesses, from bad teeth to depression.

The protagonist of Beyond This Horizon is Hamilton Felix, a product of multiple generations of genetic selection designed to conserve several favourable traits, who presents a serious problem to the genetics planners - he sees no particular reason why the human race should continue, genetically improved or not. Felix is intelligent, rational, highly adaptable, a survivor on many levels, the kind of person the natural selection would favour if civilisation wasn’t making that aspect of evolution obsolete. He himself enjoys life, but he does not see much real happiness around him, nor a clear argument for continuing humanity, or at least, an argument fir him contributing to its continuation.

It’s clear, though, that he’s not as disaffected as he seems. When he comes into contact with a revolutionary group planning to overthrow the current world government and replace it with a fascist regime that sounds far too close to the ideas behind the empire that was responsible for the Second Eugenics War, he willingly volunteers to infiltrate the organisation and report on its plans. In the meantime, his life becomes complicated when Longcourt Phyllis, the woman who’s been selected as the best match to conserve and strengthen the genetic lines that make him of some importance to the genetic planners decides to look him up, he discovers that she’s exactly the sort of woman he’d like to be involved with - except for the fact that she, like every perfect Heinlein woman, wants a passel of kids.

Everything comes to a head when, during the attempted coup, Felix, Phyllis, and Mordan Claude, the genetic planner responsible for the breeding lines they represent, are all pinned down in Claude’s office, fighting off the rebels trying to seize control of the valuable stores of germ plasm Claude is responsible for. Facing death, Felix realises what it is that would make him sufficiently interested in the future of humanity to participate in its continuation - answers to, or at least, a serious investigation of, the great philosophical and metaphysical questions that have haunted humankind. The nature of consciousness. The fate of the self after death. The limits of human knowledge. The beginning and the end of time.

The revolution is, of course, unsuccessful. Felix, Phyllis and Claude survive. And Claude presents Felix’s questions to the world ruling council, who realise that Felix has in fact identified a key lack in their modern, rational world. After some discussion, they establish a massive foundation (a society where technology ensures high productivity and values tend not to encourage obscene concentration of wealth and power being a society with cash to spare) to explore exactly the kinds of questions Felix wants answers too. He and Phyllis marry and proceed to have children who are even more exceptional than they are. The end.

What’s interesting about Beyond This Horizon is Heinlein’s argument, presented through Felix, that freedom, love, and material well being, as important as they are, are not enough to satisfy the human soul. That there are needs beyond the physical and emotional, questions that reach beyond the realm of the rational and phenomenological world, that are of importance to human societies. That the driving question that underlies all others is simply “is this all there is?”

The publication of Beyond This Horizon marked a sharp change in Heinlein’s writing career, likely brought about at least in part by the entry of the US into WWII and Heinlein’s war work. After this novel, he would spend the next ten years writing mainly short stories and juveniles, until 1952 when he would write the thinly disguised Cold War, Communist-under-the-bed novel The Puppet Masters.