The Celestials Fails to Shine

The Celestials

Karen Shepard

Tin House Books 9781935639558

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There’s a popular proverb that goes: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.  To this I would add: When someone hands you a lean, juicy sirloin, don’t chop it up, mix it with Wonder Bread crumbs, and make a second-rate hamburger. Kate Shepard has done the literary equivalent of the latter by serving us a unique tale, crumbling it, blending it with some of the blandest elements of Victorian romance, and trying to pass it off as fine literature. It doesn’t work; The Celestials is palatable in the way that a fast food burger is palatable–vaguely filling, but hardly a well-rounded meal.

T’is a shame because in the hands of a more skilled novelist, Shepard’s tale would have been a corker. The history behind the tale is fascinating. In 1870, North Adams, Massachusetts, shoe manufacturer Calvin Sampson faced labor unrest led by the Knights of St. Crispin. The Crispins wanted to reduce their workday from 11 hours to 10 and a raise, which the parsimonious Sampson could surely have afforded given the fortune he made selling shoes during the Civil War and the lucrative contracts in his possession. Instead of negotiating with his mostly Irish and French-Canadian laborers, he hired 75 scabs–in this case, Chinese lads aged 16-22 imported from California on a gang labor contract. Of them, only their foreman, “Charles” Sing, spoke any English. They arrived in North Adams unaware they were strikebreakers, but willing to work 11-hour days for 90 cents per day, half of what the Crispins were earning. This is the first known use of Chinese scabs in American labor history.

The Chinese arrived at a peculiar moment in history–a ten-year period in which those once viewed as exotic “Celestials” were inexorably transformed into the “Yellow Peril,” and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned future emigration to the United States. It was also a time in which more than 99% of all Chinese in America lived west of the Rockies. How would such Celestials, both far from home and far from the support of an ethnic enclave, survive in North Adams with her remoteness and unforgiving winters?

Shepard populates her novel with real people, including Sampson and his wife, Julia; Sing and his future wife, Ida Wilburn; the zealous Baptist proselytizer Fannie Blasingame and her gardener, Lue Gim Geng  (whose hybrid orange launched Florida’s citrus industry); and numerous others. What she doesn’t do is delve very deeply into the lives of the befuddled Chinese youths cut off from friends, family, and most things familiar. Although Samson hired 50 more Chinese in 1871, almost all left North Adams when their contract expired in 1873, and all but Sing and Geng were gone before 1880. (Both left before their deaths, Geng following Blasingame, his employer, and Sing fleeing when his store failed.) Shepard overplays the exoticism angle and would have us believe that hostility between whites and Chinese eventually cooled. That’s not what happened.

What could have been an elaborate fictive weaving of class, culture, and ideology gives way to the most conventional of all stories: a romance. It centers on Julia Sampson, whose 13 pregnancies all ended in either miscarriage or infant death, but who suddenly gives birth to a child whose features more than suggest an assignation between herself and one of the Celestials. Alas, this plot line means that our weaving unravels and we are left with the dullest and most recycled thread of all–the suppressed longings of white, Victorian women. Put simply, Julia just isn’t all that interesting, nor can the big-fish-in-a-small-pond social circle of the Sampsons hold a candle to the Chinese community that Shepard reduces to a single individual’s struggle to assimilate. The latter is handled in ways that might evoke in a modern reader’s mind Star Trek’s Data and his longings to be more human.

The narrative shift is a curious one given that Shepard is Chinese American and has previous writings that deal with the identity issues she sidesteps in The Celestials. She doesn’t deal with the Knights of St. Crispin very well, either, and they too are more interesting than Julia Sampson. My overall sense is that Shepard is a good researcher, a mediocre historian, and a writer whose sensibilities and style are better adapted for family memoirs and soapy romance than the grand sweeps of historical fiction. In short, she’s better with hamburger dishes. –Rob Weir