This book is predicated on the notion of epigenetic inheritance and generational trauma. The idea is that perhaps people can inherit traumas which they themselves did not experience, but which is somehow written into their genes so that it produces certain reactions such as fear and anxiety, which within their own lives, cannot be accounted for. A sort of ‘remembering’ or memory, that is carried by the body, not the mind. Jamie Ford’s author note at the start of this novel cites a study of lab mice which were exposed to a particular fragrance whenever their cage floor was electrified. Not only were those mice conditioned to panic whenever that fragrance was released, but generations later, descendants of those mice would have the same fear reaction to that fragrance, even though they did not experience the pain of electrification.
The novel weaves together the stories of 7 women, who presumably share a inherited trauma. The story starting with Afong Moy (1836), who is supposedly the first Chinese woman to arrive in the USA, and who is treated as a circus spectacle, with crowds coming to gawk at her bound feet and her ability to eat with chop sticks. Then there is Lai King Moi (1892), who is born in California, but with the plague wiping out whole populations, her mother places her on a ship bound for Canton where they have family. Third, we have Zoe or Zou Yi Moy (1927), a student in an extremely liberal school called Summerhill where students are given the chance to determine their own schooling and even the running of their school. Zoe falls in love with one of her female teachers, with terrible consequences.
Next we have Fei-jin or Faye Moy (1942), daughter of Lai King, who is a nurse with the American Volunteer Group who has travelled to Kunming, China, to practise her profession in a war zone. Shifting to the current day, there is Greta or Margaret (2014) who has just made it big in the tech world with a dating app. The next two women are projected into the future, Dorothy (2045) and her daughter, Annabel (2086). Dorothy is perhaps the key protagonist if there is one out of the seven, because it is Dorothy who receives these special treatments to try to explain epigenesis. “How each generation is built on the genetic ruins of the past. That our lives are merely biological waypoints. We’re not individual flowers, annuals that bloom and then die. We’re perennials. A part of us comes back each new season, carrying a bit of the genus of the previous floret” (p247).
The last ‘act’ of the novel – Ford divides his novel into 3 ‘acts’, but it is unclear why or how this adds anything to the storyline – Dorothy puts herself into some kind of trance and is able to swoop across temporal zones, to revisit many of the lives of the other Moy women, as if she herself was those women. This is already confusing and surreal enough in itself, but then Dorothy also rights all the wrongs: she seems to have visited and/or become those other Moy women in order to set to rights and change the endings of their stories. Perhaps some readers will enjoy this happy-ending take, but I found it baffling and unsatisfying.
The 7 story lines are perhaps too many for one novel because although I wrote that the novel ‘weaves together’ the lives of these 7 women, in fact, the weaving is very loosely done. We are aware they are all linked and related, but it is not particularly easy to follow those connections. As a result, for most part, one feels like one is reading 7 stories with implied and sometimes explicit overlaps, none of the stories particularly well developed, and all the women just in vastly different situations, struggling bravely, apparently, in their own difficulties. Most of these women are mistreated by men, but most have parents who love them dearly, and all of them are apparently plucky characters. But that’s about all they have in common, besides their genetic ties. They are in different places, some are mixed race, some marry and some do not. It is not easy to relate to any of these characters, who seem to be there primarily to be storybook characters. In the Acknowledgements at the end of the novel, Ford writes that he described this book as his “big box of crayons” (p351). He writes that “I wanted to use all my colors to draw a story” (p352). That sounds a fairly good description of the novel; a mish mash of colours, lacking a clear theme, using perhaps too many colours altogether, when being more judicious in the selection of colours may well have resulted in a better structured, better constructed novel.
I confess I am disappointed. I loved Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Sweet and Bitter, and even Songs of Willow Frost was not a bad read, though I did not love it. This latest though, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, I actually did not much enjoy. I only finished it because I wanted to keep faith with the author of Hotel on the Corner of Sweet and Bitter, and so read on in hope that the author would reveal a resuming of his formerly excellent storytelling skills by the end of the novel. Alas, I just could not buy into the convenient ending where Dorothy is able to go back in time and revisit all those other lives and even ensure happier outcomes for them. A novel needs to be more than just throwing in all the disparate stories and colours there are available.
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