‘Robbery of innocence’

Hopes Dreams Lies
by Edward H. K. Ho (second edition)

Kindle, 2025
$4.30 

Reviewed by Linda Rogers

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We have been called to witness as writers formally give voice and make room for a new generation of first-person speakers on behalf of colonised and exploited communities. To this end, there is now a flood of Indigenous artists telling their stories added to the narratives of Chinese and Japanese Canadians to report the exploitation and marginalisation of Asian immigrants in our colonial past.

Such a writer is Ed Ho, whose “fictional history” is the story of a boy and a community lured to the gold mountain to seek relief from the devastation of China in the dying years of the Manchu dynasty, only to meet a rockslide of bigotry as they descend the gangway after their long voyage across the ocean.

That peace, in his case, is broken en route by robbery of innocence in his shipboard encounter with racial hatred. Despite or perhaps because of their entitlement to first class bookings above the coolies and indentured workers below decks, who lived on meagre rations of rice and slept several to a hammock.  Wing and his Jewish playmate Louisa, who is fully literate in Mandarin, are tossed overboard by a resentful crew member, a situation he is able to turn around because a prophetic dream has prepared him for its eventuality.

According to his belief system, saving a life means responsibility for that life. That premise binds Wing and Louisa, in a sacrament of duty, a motif that recurs as he is saved from certain death in the Fraser Canyon, where he is a captive worker. For every page of suffering, there is redemption. Therein is the grace of Wing and his creator.

Responsibility is the form here, familiar to many Indigenous cultures, where the unbroken shape of infinity joins person to person, generation to generation in a continuous loop, and that is the premise of the novel, which shows us how healthy society is bonded in responsibility to one another.

This is the credo Asian immigrants brought to a settlement committed to emulating outdated aristocratic values and the new capitalism based on a Darwinian belief in the survival of the fittest. Individualism, which may be the undoing of neodemocracy, can be translated as alone. As the this story demonstrates over and over the strength in numbers as service to family and community is paramount.

Wing, the adolescent carrier of hope, has known some privilege in his middle-class family, and, in Victoria, where their ship berths, the prevailing mentality is that his presumed rights are undeserved. The times are dangerous for a young man like him.

In this book, he rebels against the protections put in place by his father and loses himself in the shuffle of expendable souls that was the story of the great Canadian experiment, a railroad from sea to sea, that recklessly gambled with the lives of working men. His redemption is finding the wisdom of his ancestors and specifically visions that will guide him home to his family and the young woman he loves. He is a lucky one, wiser in every episode.

Wing finds his fearlessness in his first brush with death: “I do not think I will ever fear death again.” It is his strong suit and his weakness as he learns that fear and caution are not synonymous. 

As in most coming-of-age novels, Ho’s special circumstances as a child immigrant himself shape the story that informs us about one life that is like all others, but unique in its circumstances.

This second edition of Hopes Dreams Lies was preceded by a book with a different cover, a betrayed Statue of Liberty, drawing attention to the shared disgrace which is experience of Asian emigration across the continent, slavery, and indentured labour having built modern America on the ashes of Turtle Island.

Yut Di, One Earth, the title of the first edition, was paginated from back to front, indicating his intention to the reader. Please respect my culture, my tradition. Please adapt. In the process of adaptation, he supports all his contentions and inventions with historical evidence, signalling that we are to read this book with mind and heart, taking its message literally. If we are to live as one people, we must know one another.  

Ho has written his story with full sensory impact. We smell the difference between classes on the ship that brings Cheung and his son Wing to Canada and between wealthy and poor neighbourhoods in Victoria. Rich people get more room and proper sanitation. He also contrasts the exquisite cooking odours of Chinese cuisine with the smell of cabbage and boiled beef and the beautiful tremolo of the erhu and the pleasant clicking of mah-jong tiles in Fantan Alley, the lane of foolish pleasure, where brothels and opium dens provided comfort to lonely workers away from home and family, with the harsh cacophony of hate speech and dangerous rockslides in the Fraser Canyon. 

Food is a cultural theme that joins episodes in the ongoing adventure of Wing’s welcome to the Gum San, Gold Mountain. On ship and on land, friendships are made in the sharing of Chinese cuisine and we are left to surmise that the Ma and Pa restaurants and cafes that dot the map of Western Canada have always been informal ambassadorships, softening bigotry, starting on the ships whose galleys often worked wonders of mutual appreciation.

As does this book, which explains itself to those who might wonder what really happened in the early years of colonial society, where the origins of racism are clearly explained. Hopes Dreams Lies is at once history and cautionary tale as we watch the so-called democracy of the meth lab below us blowing up once again in the egregious politics of division, always the go-to of opportunists who manipulate human fallibility for profit.

Bad as the situation was here, it was worse in California, which continuously legislated and discriminated against Chinese workers. Wing’s father had barely escaped his time in the gold fields decades earlier, only returning while Wing was held hostage by the railroad builders in Canada, to claim the bones of his murdered father and uncle.

“The best way for the Chinese to prepare for the future is by understanding the past.” As the title of this book announces its intention in hope, expressions of mutual understanding, and kindness, dreams, the optimistic alignment of prophecy and expectation, the narrative reveals and rejects the minefield of greed that is the human condition when there are no cultural barriers to inhumanity. 

For Ed Ho, the sharing of his story is a contribution to the communal wisdom that has been eroded by the cynicism of a politic that is as threatening today as it has been over millennia, whenever greed for power and money takes over the gentler mindset of civilisation.

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Linda Rogers is a Canadian People’s Poet and former Poet Laureate. Her recent book Masks Off: Finding the Balance tells the tragic and triumphant story of Kwagiulth artist Chief Tony Hunt. [Editor’s note: Linda has reviewed books by Evelyn Thompson-George & Art Thompson, Bruce McIvor, Cheryl Troupe & Doris Jeanne MacKinnon (eds.), Adrienne Gruber, Peyman Vahabzadeh, and Michael Elcock for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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