Ship of Fates by Caitlin Chung (Lanternfish Press)
“There once was a girl whose name was etched into the water so that she might never feel lost.” Who is this girl? Is it the one who fled China, riding the back of a whale that had a fortune in gold within its belly? Is it Mei, small and Chinese in the white city of San Francisco who persuades the owner of a gambling hell to hire her as a card dealer and who has a secret game going of her own? Is it Madame Toy, an entrepreneur in the flesh trade, with her “intrusive face, contradictory to her beauty”? Is it Annie, the girl who has just arrived from China, bearing the good luck that comes from having an eleventh toe, who loses all good fortune when she falls in love with a man who has only nine toes on his feet? Is it Annie and Jack’s daughter, Juniper, whom Mei sees as an escape from the curse she is bound by? Or is it the Lighthouse Keeper, enigmatic and solitary, who embodies all of the stories and none of the answers?
Caitlin Chung, in her slender debut novel, carries the strength and beauty of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales all the way through Ship of Fates. Underpinned by the history of the California Gold Rush, Chung’s story weaves through and beyond that reality, bearing echoes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with a poetic command of language that gives this novel a kinship with Steinbeck’s The Pearl. In common with its mythic premise of purloined Chinese gold being flung into the waters of California, the story has the beauty and mystery of a soap bubble, floating in brightness before it vanishes.
It’s Chung’s poetry that makes her book soar, with her sense of magic realism giving it an irresistible luster. Readers may have to go back to it more than once before grasping the intricacy of its plot but when caught in the web of language, they are certain to happily suspend any disbelief. Watching Jack and Annie disappear as Juniper takes on her full beauty is an image any parent will understand. Everyone will recognize the truth of “A fate is made of water, made to fit itself into the last spaces left open in a life.” And slowly all of the world is facing “a happy ending turned sad, an enchantment turned into a curse.”
In this time of disease and political turmoil, more than ever we need fables and poetry to soften the harshness of what we face every day. Caitlin Chung, in a little over one hundred pages, has given us exactly what we need. And as she works this magic, she celebrates the history and the beauty of the San Francisco Bay Area, rescuing it from the depredations of tech development that have intensified extremes of wealth and poverty, to reveal a city of lapidary beauty surrounded by the magnificence of the natural world, its “bay opened and fanned out like a deck of cards...with nothing but the lazy flight of gulls to pass the time.”~Janet Brown