Love And Other Consolation Prizes by Jamie Ford

 Inspired by a true story, “the Washington Children’s Home Society donated a baby boy to be raffled off at the great Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909. (…) 1909 was also the height of Washington State’s suffrage movement. (…) Also during that time workers from China were being smuggled into North America despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Young women were still being sold as Mui Tsai in China, or Karayuki-san in Japan, often ending up in the United States, where they worked as slaves or indentured servants, more than fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation.”

This story begins in 1902. Young is “the bastard son of a white missionary and a Chinese girl, (…) an outcast in both of their worlds.” 

Desperately poor, his mother sends him at the age of 5 to America with a supposed uncle. A so called uncle is a white merchant in an elegant suit, who takes Young and many other kids on his ship.

The sailors are blackbirders; “sailors who sold poor Chinese to plantations in Hawaii, outlaws who smuggled workers into the western world, and brokers who delivered brides to lonely men in the gold mountains of Gum Shan – the rich and mysterious frontiers of North America.”

After barely making it to the States, and thanks to a charity, Ernest Young, as he’s been renamed, has been attending different boarding schools.

Ernest “had long since given up hope for any sort of adoptive family, especially since he wasn’t Chinese enough for an Asian family and wasn’t white enough for a Caucasian home.”

But on his 12 Birthday, he gets a chance to go to the great big Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition that everyone is talking about and “that he would finally be given to a good home.”

At the Expo, he realizes that he is the one who is actually the prize. 

The winning ticket belongs to the flamboyant madam of a high-class brothel. 

Ernest becomes the new houseboy. He doesn’t mind shoveling coal in the basement and getting dirty as he is so happy with everyone being so nice to him and with the delicious food including “the rich creamy texture of real milk.”

Against all odds, this new life gives him the sense of home he’s always desired.

Fifty years later, in the shadow of Seattle’s second World’s Fair, Ernest struggles to help his ailing wife reconcile who she once was with who she wanted to be, while trying to keep family secrets hidden from their grown-up daughters.

Skillfully written connecting past and present times; work of depth and texture which characterizes all Jamie Ford’s books.

If you’re not familiar with this author, I highly recommend his other two books: Songs of Willow Frost and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

@FB/BestHistoricalFiction