Crimson China (28 page)

Wen pauses to remove his shirt in the late morning sun. It is the first warm day of spring. A breeze stirs the branches overhead, and with it comes the salt off the ocean. High tide, he thinks absently, picking up the spade. Over the past few months, he has internalised the rhythms of the sea. The sea is a part of him now.

The past several weeks have been rainy, but this morning he and Angie woke to a brilliant cobalt sky. When he opened the door to the garden, he was hit by the pungent smell of new growth. The compost heap he started last summer is already rich and dark, seething with tiny life. After breakfast, he roots around in the old shed for a plastic sack and fills it with fresh compost, hoisting the heavy sack to the front of the garden. For roses need feeding, he muses, dropping to his knees. Just as we do.

He kneels in the moist earth and spreads the peaty matter evenly across the flower bed. Miraculously, Miriam’s roses have survived the winter, weathering several bad frosts and a battery of storms in the early weeks of the new year. Now they look taller and heartier, and have sprouted a profusion of small green leaves. They no longer seem out of place against his garden wall. He peers at one and sees that it has formed a tightly furled, lime-green bud. He smiles. With a bit of luck and trial and error, he will find the one that suits.

On the night of February 5th, 2004, twenty-one illegal Chinese migrant workers drowned in a tragic incident off the coast of Morecambe Bay. A further two went missing, though their bodies were never recovered. Some weeks later, at a memorial service for the deceased, a member of the local community posited the hope of a better outcome for those who had not been found: perhaps one or both had somehow emerged safely from the freezing waters that night, however unlikely this seemed.
Crimson China
picks up that thread of hope and spins it into something more tangible, though sadly it remains a work of fiction: the character Wen is entirely my own creation, and bears no similarity to persons living or dead.

The background to the novel is based largely in fact, but there are a few knowing errors: the cockling incident occurred on a Thursday, not a Sunday, as my story suggests; the one-child policy in China was not introduced until 1978, two years after Wen and Lili’s birth; and the vast majority of illegal Chinese workers in Britain come from the south-eastern province of Fujian, rather than from Hebei, as Wen does. The use of Wen’s sister as collateral for a loan by snakeheads is an unorthodox, albeit plausible, scenario – but it is not common practice. If there are other inaccuracies, then I apologise.

When I began this book three years ago, one of my objectives was to write about one of the great forgotten tragedies of modern history: the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, in which more than a quarter of a million people perished. But during the course of writing, I was overtaken by events: in the summer of 2008, another terrible earthquake struck China, this time in the south-west province of Szechuan; and in January of this year, a catastrophe on a similar scale occurred in Haiti. Let Tangshan be remembered alongside both of these.

The experience of illegal Chinese living and working in the UK is indeed fraught with hardship: if anything, the conditions they endure are far worse than anything I portray in this book. The Morecambe Bay tragedy resulted in even greater suffering for the victims’ families in China, as the latter were forced to carry on repaying their debts to the snakeheads without the benefit of foreign
wages. In 2004, the Morecambe Victims Fund was established to help the families of the victims, and thus far it has raised more than £400,000, nearly enough to clear the half-a-million pound debts outstanding.

In the wake of the tragedy, the UK government instigated the Gangmaster’s Licensing Act to regulate those agencies that supply labour to the agricultural and shellfish industries. It aims to reduce the ruthless exploitation of casual workers by requiring employment agencies to carry a licence, but its critics argue that it only serves to drive illegal immigrants and asylum seekers further underground, putting them at even greater risk.

Huge thanks to all those whose editorial comments helped to shape this book: Margaret Glover, Andy Carl, Clive Brill and Flora Drew (who, together with the vital help of her newborn twins, gamely agreed to vet the Chinese content).
Xie xie ni!
Big thanks as well to Hsiao-Hung Pai for enthusiastically sharing her hard-earned knowledge on the conditions of illegal Chinese working in Britain; to Bill Grant for his expertise on horticultural history; and to Jane McDonagh for legal advice.

As always, I am indebted to the fabulous gang at Short Books, whose matchless enthusiasm, unerring judgement and sheer bravado continue to prove that small is by no means inferior: Rebecca Nicolson, Aurea Carpenter, Vanessa Webb and Catherine Gibbs.

Huge thanks as well to my extremely loyal and long-serving agents: Felicity Rubinstein and Sarah Lutyens and their team in London, and Kim Witherspoon and David Forrer at Inkwell in New York. If you have not yet patronised the inspired bookshop run by Lutyens & Rubinstein in Notting Hill, then you are missing out on one of the great pleasures of literary London.

And for putting up with my near-constant state of distraction, big hugs to all the gang at home: Peter, Theo, Cody, Maddy and Megan.

What prompted you to write
Crimson China?

I was haunted by the tragedy at Morecambe Bay. I followed the aftermath and kept a file of clippings before I eventually embarked upon the novel in 2007, some three years after the disaster. For me it had a particular poignancy: the idea that you could journey to a strange land and perish without any lasting imprint of your presence seemed unimaginably sad. As a writer I’ve always been drawn to the notion of identity and culture, and the extent to which we locate ourselves in a particular place and time: what happens to our sense of identity when we are displaced, and what impact does rootlessness have on who we suppose because I left my own country twenty years ago, and I never experienced anything like the extreme isolation of the illegal Chinese community in Britain, who really do operate in a parallel world here. In the words of the character Jin, they are like shadows, and when a shadow disappears, nothing remains. In writing this book, I wanted to create a lasting monument to those who died: to carve them into our collective memory so they would not be forgotten. But I also wanted to conjure a tale of hope, rather than despair.

How did you research the book?

I read everything I could about the illegal Chinese community in Britain and the snakeheads who transport them, and I travelled to Morecambe Bay to see for myself where the tragedy happened. It is a starkly beautiful place, and there is a small, makeshift memorial at the edge of the sands to those who died. If there is an expert on this subject, it is Hsiao-Hung Pai, the journalist who covered the Morecambe Bay tragedy for the
Guardian
, and eventually published
Chinese Whispers: the True Story Behind
Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour.
Her compelling account of the harsh realities of life for undocumented Chinese workers is one of the finest pieces of investigative reporting to emerge in recent years. She was a great help to me in my research.

Were you concerned about accurately representing the Chinese
characters?

To a greater or lesser extent, writing fiction is always an imaginative leap of faith. Creating any character is a challenge, but at the end of the day characters must be true to themselves, rather than to some preconceived notion of who we think they should be. I lived in China as a student in the early eighties and speak some Mandarin, so was able to draw upon my own experience. I’ve also travelled extensively throughout China in the last five years, so have a strong sense of the country and the challenges it faces today. I hope the book and its portrayals are convincing to both Western and Chinese readers alike; certainly it reflects my long-held interest in Chinese culture.

How did you come up with the story?

I set out to write a contemporary ghost story about a Chinese woman who is haunted by the spirit of her dead brother. But as often happens in writing, the tale that emerged took an unexpected turn. I never intended for Wen’s relationship with his rescuer Angie to become the central arc of the narrative: it really was a case of the characters quite literally running off with the story. After I wrote the first chapter, I remember being desperate to shove dinner into my children so I could return to work and see where they were going. For a time Angie and Wen’s world became more real to me than my own; it was certainly more engaging.

What about Lili’s story?

Lili’s story is essentially about a woman who goes in search of one thing and finds another. I wanted Lili to have her own encounters in Britain, and I had been reading about the experiences of Western families who adopt Chinese children. I was very struck by the complexities these families face when trying to reconnect their adoptive children to their Chinese heritage. The Chinese writer Xinran launched a charity in Britain in 2004 to address these issues. Mother’s Bridge of Love aims to help the more than 50,000 Western families who have adopted Chinese children, the vast majority of whom are girls. (Chinese families traditionally value boys over girls, and one of the saddest outcomes of the government’s one-child policy is that it created 
a nation of orphaned daughters.) Although Lili endeavours to help May find her Chinese roots, it is really May who ultimately grounds Lili, and shows her that each of us carries the burden of identity within.

What does the title signify?

I am indebted to my friend Andy Carl for the title: he read an early draft and, knowing I don’t have much of a green thumb, offered to vet the gardening content. He contacted an American friend who is an expert on rose germination, and it was he who brought the China roses to my attention. I had no idea that the vast majority of our domesticated rose species were actually imported from China in the eighteenth century, particularly since the Chinese do not especially value the rose. (For the record, they prefer chrysanthemums, plum blossoms, peonies, lotus and water lilies.) As transmigration is a central theme of the book,
Crimson
China
seemed an apt image, though not one that is immediately apparent to the reader. I like the idea that the meaning behind the book’s title unfolds only gradually, and that the person who conveys this information is Miriam. The Chinese venerate old age enormously, and Miriam acts as a sort of parallel character to Wen’s stepmother in the book; both women are conduits, offering advice, history and wisdom from their respective corners of the earth. Crimson also seemed appropriate, as red has enormous cultural importance in China: it symbolises courage, loyalty and success, as well as happiness, fertility and passion; red is traditionally the colour of choice for Chinese brides.

Do you agree with the UK government’s policies on illegal
immigrants?

This is a thorny problem: from 2001 to 2007 the estimated number of irregular migrants (the official term for illegal immigrants) in the UK nearly doubled from 430,000 to 725,000. While the government purports to not want these workers, even in a recession there remains considerable demand for their labour. Irregular migrants tend to work in low-skilled, low-paid jobs in construction, agriculture, hospitality, cleaning, care and domestic work, often doing jobs that local workers refuse for lower-than-normal wages. They are not entitled to public services, but neither
do they pay tax, so while they contribute to the economy, their contribution is reduced by their irregular status. Most illegal Chinese have no intention of staying in Britain permanently: they are here to work hard for a fixed period of time to improve the living standards of their families back home. In recent years, tougher immigration controls have made it more difficult to live and work illegally, but rather than drive illegal immigrants away, they tend to drive them further underground, often keeping them here longer than they intended. While the government needs to exert tougher border controls on human trafficking and smuggling, perhaps greater flexibility is needed for employers to recruit unskilled labour from abroad, including temporary visas and return packages that do not jeopardise workers future immigration status. Such policies would encourage greater fluidity between borders and a labour force that is responsive to the needs of the British economy.

Why should this book appeal to Western readers?

I think there’s a growing appetite in the West for books that take readers to places within their own culture they would not otherwise go. Not all readers are prepared to venture into completely foreign territory; the appeal of this novel is that it of us could be Angie: an ordinary person whose fate, through chance, is yoked together with that of a stranger from the far side of the world. Many of us seek to broaden our cultural understanding, but we need pathways that intrigue and compel – I set out to write a gripping story with characters that readers would be drawn to from the start.