Courtney Milan is a treasure and frankly, this book should be mandatory reading in school. How are Hemingway and JD Salinger and all those other Sad White Dudes mandatory reading and this goddamn treasure of a human being is not?
Plot: Amelia, a Chinese girl of six is adopted by British missionaries in Shanghai after the Taiping Rebellion. She is intensely bright and curious and all the things a good daughter of missionaries is not, but she tries so hard to be good, even if it’s often denying her nature and marrying a missionary twice her age that is basically looking for a free maid-of-all-work. When he dies, she goes home, and her mother immediately tries to find her a new husband that will be pretty much like the first. Only her brother, who has encouraged her intelligence and curiosity from when she was a child, sees how miserable she is, even if she won’t quite admit it to herself. So when he meets Grayson, an African American man and the son of a British lady and an American abolitionist, determined to connect east and west through telegraph lines in a way that honours the differences in language between English and Mandarin rather than trying to shoehorn English Morse code to use for Chinese characters, he sends the Grayson to the “criminally undervalued” Amelia. He offers her the job of figuring out precisely how to solve this problem and the world is never the same.
This book is dense. If there is a broad theme to the numerous threads in the story it is the immense power of systemic racism and sexism to normalize itself to a point where even people who push back against those systems have internalized aspects of it that can just absolutely shred them from the inside without them even realizing it.
It delves soul deep into racism against Asians, Black and brown people, and mixed race people, both personal and systemic. It delves soul deep into sexism that comes not only from systems built by men but also from women who have internalized the diminished position of women as immovable fact. It not only shows the ways in which these harms play out at a personal level but also their impacts on a person’s ability to trust their own instincts, when the world takes so much that the very act of wanting something is in itself paradigm shifting. The ways in which hundreds of slights accumulate to rip up a person’s insides even if they are determined to do more and be more than the box society has slotted them into. How much of that harm is internalized without even realizing it.
The book also talks about the ways in which systemic racism and sexism impacts people who blindly participate in discrimination not because they are cruel or hateful but because they don’t want to make waves so they don’t go out of their way to see the problems in the first place. Milan is surprisingly kind to those people, even when the harm they have caused with their belligerent blindness is unfathomable and unfixable. The people in this book are obviously fictional, but these are very much rooted in true harms caused by colonialism and slavery.
The amount of research that went into this book, which Milan started thinking about in 2008, is pretty wild. There are a lot of deviations from reality necessary to make the plot work, but as always, her author’s note at the end is almost as interesting as the book itself in terms of what happened in truth and where Milan deviated and why. A lot of the book is spent talking about the massive undertaking that putting down telegraph lines across the Pacific was and coming up with a viable alternative to English Morse code. In fact, the alternative was thought up by Milan herself which is kind of wild when you think about it.
Honestly, I have only scratched the surface of all the just unbearably lovely things in this book. But bottom line, this book will steal your heart, shatter it into a thousand pieces, give it back to you three times bigger, and it will do that while educating even the most researched of us a few things we didn’t know (or didn’t understand) of the very real human toll of colonial imperialism.
Must, must, must read.