Book review: Chinese Yankee by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

Chinese Yankee
by Ruthanne Lum McCunn
Design Enterprises of San Francisco

Award-winning writer Ruthanne Lum McCunn grew up in Sai Ying Pun and her books often focus on the struggles of what she calls "Chinese pioneers with compelling stories". For her sixth novel, Chinese Yankee - to be published on US Veterans Day (November 11) - she recreates a compelling true story that sheds light on a little-known aspect of American history.

After years of research in the US and China, McCunn has assiduously pieced together the life of a Hong Kong orphan named Ah Yee Way, who finds himself fighting in the American Civil War via the vicissitudes of life.

It's not common knowledge, even in the US, but there were 58 Chinese combatants in the civil war. One of them was this young Hongkonger taken as a child to the US in the mid-1850s for schooling but who instead was enslaved in Baltimore. At 16, having adopted the western name Thomas Sylvanus, he ran away to join the Freedom Army, and fight for his own freedom and for the abolition of slavery.

McCunn says she felt an immediate kinship with Sylvanus because they are both from Hong Kong and, while this is a story told with emotion. it is by no means an idealistic or romantic jaunt through 19th-century America. McCunn resists over-elaborate embellishment and deep characterisation in favour of simply recreating this young man's interminable struggle with physical suffering, injustice and racial bigotry within the context of a bloody civil war and its aftermath.

Period magazines of the time were rife with negative images of Chinese, and the widely used school text, Peter Parley's Universal History, proclaimed Chinese as "rat-and-dog-eating liars addicted to cheating". McCunn (herself of Chinese-Scottish descent) is not squeamish about confronting the casual racism endemic in 19th-century America.