Jack Wang reimagines lost stories of Chinese Canadians during WWII
The Vancouver-born author discussed The Riveter on Bookends with Mattea Roach
When Canadian writer Jack Wang read about Richard Mar, the only Chinese Canadian to serve in the First Canadian Parachute Battalion in the Second World War, he was compelled to imagine a character like him.
Inspired by Mar and other Chinese Canadians who served abroad, Wang's debut novel, The Riveter, follows a Chinese Canadian man named Josiah Chang who is a soldier during the Second World War. Buoyed by his love for Poppy, a singer who works with him in the shipyard, Josiah is determined to survive the battlefields and make it back home — but finds himself fighting injustice on all fronts.
"I became fascinated by the courage and sacrifice of people who didn't have full citizenship rights, who couldn't vote," said Wang on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
"But nonetheless, they were eager to serve their country and prove their loyalty."
Wang is a N.Y.-based writer and professor originally from Vancouver. He teaches in the department of writing at Ithaca College and his writing has appeared in publications such as Joyland Magazine, The New Quarterly and Fiddlehead. Wang's debut short story collection, We Two Alone was longlisted for Canada Reads in 2022, shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.
He joined Roach to discuss the historical context of the story and why he's interested in diverse historical perspectives.
Mattea Roach: Can you paint us a bit of a picture of what kind of a character Josiah Chang is?
Jack Wang: His name is Josiah Chang and those initials are meant to make people think of Johnny Canuck, who's this Canadian equivalent to Uncle Sam and is part of the popular imagination and represents Canada and Canadiana. He reemerged during the Second World War as a cartoon figure who fought fascism and the Nazis and he was a lumberjack.
So Josiah Chang is an attempt to suggest that Chinese Canadians were very much Canadian and part of the history of this country. He is someone who starts as a faller or a lumberjack and moves into a wartime industry building Victory ships in a shipyard in Vancouver as many Chinese Canadians did.
On the one hand, he's a larger-than-life figure. He's strong and he's able and he's confident. On the other hand, we have to ask ourselves why should an Asian male character who is simply strong and able and confident seem larger than life or unusual?
Many stories depict Chinese males and Asian males differently, but I think that many Chinese Canadians in fact were full of self-belief like he was.
MR: In the 1940s, Chinese Canadians were not considered equal citizens and didn't have access to the same sorts of rights that white settler Canadians did. Josiah is an interesting character because he's not an immigrant. He was born in Caribou, British Columbia. He's one of several generations of his family to have been born in Canada. What would life have been like for someone of Chinese ancestry living in British Columbia during this wartime period?
JW: Because subsequent generations of Chinese Canadians have gone on to assimilating Canadian society and are successful in many ways, and because new generations of Chinese immigrants often arrive already affluent or fairly affluent, I think we forget just how abject it was to Chinese Canadians 100 years ago.
Many people know about the head taxes that were levied expressly to keep people of Chinese descent out of Canada. By the time we reached the Second World War, the Chinese Immigration Act, otherwise known as the Exclusion Act, had been in effect for nearly 20 years.
The goal was to keep Chinese people out and also to essentially keep the population already in Canada from further growing. One couldn't be a doctor or a lawyer or a pharmacist or even a teacher and one couldn't be a British subject and so on. We really forget that Chinese Canadians were not just second, but even third class citizens in the 20th-century.
But someone like Josiah Chang, he's been in Canada for a long time. There is a point at which people cease to be immigrants, especially after many generations. My children, for example, in many ways have ceased to be immigrants, have ceased to understand the challenges of being an immigrant because they're so thoroughly assimilated. The challenge is that sometimes the culture, the society around you still sees you as the outsider.
MR: You dedicate the book to your wife and to your daughters. I'm wondering what you hope your children will take away from this book. Have they read it?
JW: I've given the book to both my daughters and my older daughter is reading it now, judging by the book lying around her room, thumbed through.
I dedicate the book to them because since I'm a late bloomer, I just spent so much time away from them. I wish I had published when I was younger so that when my children were born, I could do nothing else but pay attention to them. But it was after my children were born that I was most desperate to get a book out in the world. I've had to spend so much time away from them, locked away in my writer's garret.
I hope that what they come to appreciate is the freedoms they enjoy. It's a reminder to myself, it's a reminder to other people of my generation, to Canadians who will come after me, that these rights were hard won. It wasn't always the case. The arc of the moral universe is bending, and can continue to bend for others.
A novel is always particular, but it's also metaphoric. And there are many other people who are still in an analogous situation, who don't have full citizenship rights in a place or in a country. So what can we do to expand that circle of freedom and equality for everyone? It's not just to look at the past, but also at the present and the future.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews with thanks to Barb Carey.
