Peace Corps, and a Chinese in Africa

American literature has one unique genre of writing that has not quite been labeled. For decades young graduates from liberal arts majors have been going aboard right after school, teaching or working in oversea programs such as Peace Corp and JAP, and many of them come back with rich experiences and in-depth knowledge of these far-flung countries most of people may have never heard of. Many of them, driven by deep empathy of humanity and literature ambition, start to compose both fiction and nonfiction, portraying characters in exotic settings, providing American readers slices of life that are alien and unfamiliar, helping bridge the understanding of each other. Of course, there are often Americans in the plots: aid workers, Peace Corp members, and ex-pats who are simply lost. They are used to study how Americans look at the world and how world look at them. For reference check website: http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/

I came across a few writers who turned their Chinese experiences into books, and among them, the most famous ones are Vikram Seth (From Heaven Lake: Travels Through SinKiang and Tibet), Mark Salzman (Iron and Silk), and Peter Hessler (River Town). The first two went on and became major writers of our time and stretched their literary careers way beyond travelogues. Mr. Hessler, the youngest and the latest, become a New Yorker correspondent and still focuses his reportage on China, although the day is not far for him to move on and write about something else.

But I am still surprised when I found Tony D’Souza’s short story called Club Des Amis in the recent New Yorker. Set in Ivory Coast, it centers on a Chinese man from Shanghai who shares the same last name as mine. The story is heart-wrenching. The main character, whose name is Wu, came to Seguela in the 1990s to make a fortune and eventually brought over his wife and his teenage son. His teenage son ran away with a African girl and died of tropical disease in a local village, leaving the girl a half-Chinese half-black infant. Devastated by this tragedy, Wu’s wife left him and went back to Shanghai. Wu stayed and tried to take the custody of his grandson so that he would not grow up in war and in poverty. But the mother was determined to keep her own son, hiding and running away from the police commissioned and bribed by Wu. Using force, Wu eventually took his grandson away from the mother and brought him back to China.

I traveled extensively and often found Chinese restaurants in the most unexpected places. I wondered how hard and how lonely it must be to be the single Chinese family surrounded by a culture so different from their own. Deprived of opportunities in an overcrowded country, Chinese always looked out and traveled far to survive, and since China opened its door in late 70s, Chinese diaspora has seen waves and waves of immmigration to so many different countries. When cultures clash and integrate, interesting stories are bound to happen in unprecedented circumstances. Unfortunately I have not found any Chinese writers who would dig this goldmine of materials. Maybe they are too busy struggling in their adopted lands? Souza’s new story, however, captured such an unusual situation from the perspective of an aid worker, but it was framed in a larger context of globalization and political turmoil. Wu in the end was ultimately destroyed by Africa, but a new life, together with hopes, was also born out of the ruined lives.


Souza lived in Ivory Coast between 2000 and 2002, and without that experience, who would conjure up such a plot? You have to live first before you can write, and more aspiring young writers will probably take the same path to go to more remote places. After all, life is stranger than fiction, and I only wonder whether there is actually a good ending in the reality version of this story of Wu.