Hollow Bamboo, by William Ping
There’s been a lot of local book buzz about William Ping’s debut novel, in which he explores the experience of Chinese immigrants to Newfoundland in the early 20th century through the story of his grandfather, known in Newfoundland as William Seto Ping, an early business owner and pillar of the Chinese community. I’m glad I picked up a copy because this was a fascinating reading experience.
The novel doesn’t start off as a traditional piece of historical fiction; it begins in the present day (well, January 2020) with a first-person narrator William Ping whom the author admits in his afterward is a somewhat caricatured version of himself. This modern-day William Ping is one-quarter Chinese, white-passing, and knows almost nothing about his grandfather or his Chinese heritage. These gaps in his knowledge are heightened when he begins dating a Chinese-Canadian girl and meets her family. While navigating an awkward family dinner, William passes out in a restaurant bathroom and begins to have a series of visions that bear more than a passing resemblance to the spirits that visit Scrooge on Christmas Eve.
The enigmatic creature known as Mo shows William scenes from his grandfather’s early life in China, but soon both Mo and William step aside to allow us to be fully immersed in the story of the first William Ping, who somewhat unwillingly comes to Newfoundland to work for an uncle who, he has been told, is already running a laundry there. The plan is that Ping will take his uncle’s place running the laundry for a year to allow his uncle a visit home, then return to his wife, child, and job in China. But of course it’s not so simple, and this is where the novel really picked up and became fascinating to me.
We are plunged into the world of the first Chinese men to immigrate to Newfoundland — all men, because Chinese women were not allowed to come, and Chinese men had to pay a “head tax” for the privilege of coming to the far eastern end of North America to do backbreaking labour and receive often-vicious racist abuse from the locals. The story of the elder William Seto Ping is full of twists and turns, comedy and tragedy — much of it based on real historical events. By the time Ping the younger emerges from this time-travel journey to the past, he is a different man in a different world.
This is a piece of local history I knew little about; entering the world of these early Chinese immigrants was startling, unforgettable, and sometimes heartbreaking. An excellent read.
