Crowd Sourcing - First of Five

This is the first section of a draft version of one of the chapters for my upcoming book The Silver Bowl. Four more sections of the chapter will follow, each with a thumbnail sketch of four Irishmen whose impact on Hong Kong in its early days as a Colony were significant. My hope is that helpful readers can set me straight if I am wrong about any of the facts. I still have much to learn.

On Monday, January 25^th 1841, six months before the birth of Thomas Jackson in faraway Ireland, a small British contingent raised the British flag on the western shores of Hong Kong Island, at a promontory later called Possession Point. The soldiers then drank a toast to the queen and fired several rounds of celebratory gunfire. Even though the final agreement took another year to conclude, 1841 is still as good a date as any to mark the birth of the Colony, at least for the purposes of this book.

An 1845 map of Hong Kong Harbour, showing Possession Point near the centre. Map by Thomas Bernard Collinson (1821–1902). NOTE: Collinson’s survey of Hong Kong Island benefitted from his previous work with the Ordnance Survey in Ireland. In other maps of Hong Kong, he used the same contour system that had recently been developed and adopted there.

The fingerprints of a small group of Irishmen were all over the battles and documents which had led up to this day. They had either manned the guns which had preceded the treaties, or wielded the pens which made them official. As Woodie Guthrie once put it: Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. ’Twas ever thus -, although in Hong Kong, not all of it played out in such a black and white manner.

There is a fondly held notion, shared by many people of Irish ancestry that history would have unfolded more favourably if only they, rather than the British, had been in charge of the British Empire. Perhaps - but we should be wary of taking this notion too far. A sobering example is revealed in the history of how the Irish ran Montserrat in 1630. Like most groups in power in the absence of checks and balances, they passed slews of unjust laws solely to their own advantage. There is also sad and incontestable evidence that many of them treated their slaves far worse than Oliver Cromwell had ever treated their own people.

This is not surprising. Throughout history it has been the rule rather than the exception that no matter how rich or poor we are, our actions are often shaped by our fear of losses and/or our sense of entitlement. When I served a couple of terms as a local politician in the 1980s in Mission City BC, a fellow alderman often subjected any proposed bylaw to the following test: Whose ox is being gored? When it came to Hong Kong, most of the Irish in positions of power, tended to favour the merchant class.

There are several reasons why so many Irish ended up not only working but also living in Hong Kong. In the 19^th century, it was easier to be proudly Irish when living and working in the colonies than it ever could be in London. Although many wealthy Irishmen were Irish when it suited them and British when it didn’t, they still faced a fair bit of discrimination in the England of the mid-1800s. Another factor that drew them to Hong Kong was that for most of the 19^th century, it was hard for ambitious young Irishmen to make a fortune in Ireland, even for those born into relatively well-heeled families. Lacking coal, Ireland lacked industry, and lacking industry, it had little in the way of cities, and lacking cities, there was little opportunity for accumulating capital. In the mid-1800s, up to two thirds of the soldiers and officers serving in the colonial British army were Irishmen, and many of them graduated, as they aged, from the battlefields into the British civil service. Most of these men had skills and tenacity, and in that were quite unlike that class of Englishmen, captured so brilliantly in Jane Gardom’s novel Old Filth, where the name of the central character is an acronym for Failed in London Try Hongkong.

Four such Irishmen were Lord Palmerston, Sir Hugh Gough, Sir Henry Kellett and Sir Henry Pottinger. All four had been born into Anglo-Irish families, with Irish roots that went back to the early 1600s. Most of them had little to show for it in terms of wealth or security. Palmerston was the only one who still owned his family’s ancestral land. The fortunes and/or family expectations of the three others had obliged them to sign up for military service when they were mere teenagers: Henry Kellett at 16; Hugh Gough at 14 (with his father’s Limerick militia); and Henry Pottinger at 12, going to sea, then serving in India when he was only 15. By the time these three men had landed in Hong Kong, with instructions to either fight or govern, they had already served on dozens of battlefields, and had defended numerous colonies of the British Empire. This had seasoned their approach to both war and governance, and shaped how they approached the issues of their day in Hong Kong. Snapshots cannot do these men justice, but they can at least set the context for much of what followed in the later 1800s.

SNAPSHOTS:

Lord Palmerston

Sir Hugh Gough

Sir Henry Kellett

Sir Henry Pottinger

Samizdat Literature and Malarky

Thankfully, we are not quite at the point in Canada where we have to resort to samizdat literature, but with the federal government’s silencing of our scientists, I do tend to fret. A bit. At the same time, I also take heart. All around the country, people are meeting in the dark of late autumn days to celebrate literature. Call them sleeper cells. At their gatherings, these people engage in ritual acts that often involve food and drink and reading aloud from texts. It can get downright sacramental.

Bev has copies at Talewind Books

I have inside knowledge of one such event. It occurred just before Anakana Schofield gave a reading recently in Sechelt. Her book, Malarky, features a central character referred to as Our Woman. Our Woman has a fractured mind, a troubled spirit and a single purpose – to make sense of love and death and religion. After all, what else is there? Power, I guess.

The novel had me laughing on the first page, in spite of the seriousness of the quest. Once I had finished reading it, I knew that I would have to reread it, and I did. Our Woman had been so misled by the hijinks of her own mind, that she had made me question my own reading of reality. Few books sustain a second reading, but this one did.

Anakana, born in Ireland, may disavow the influence of Joyce and other members of the Irish canon on her work – citing instead the influences of Helen Potrebenko and Vancouver’s Concrete Poets - but when I heard her read, I recognized a cadence that for me is unmistakably and deliciously Irish. There is a music to it.

For your amusement, and as an ongoing act of sedition, here are some photos of our recent gathering:

In keeping with the ethnic flavour of the novel, I ground some soft wheat and made Irish soda bread. There were also wonderful puff pastry bites, and a subtly flavoured cream cheese wrapped in prosciutto – thanks to Geoff & Rosemary for those bites.

Years ago, Michael Ondaatje published a book of poetry: There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do, but my trick with a knife – performed on butter - was taught to me by Tante Gertraut, who looks on approvingly.

You will have to content yourself with a picture of the tables as they were arranged before everyone arrived. Then imagine 20 people and a bit of chaos. The table is laid with a cloth - thanks to Kinga - which has pictures of books, and a quote: So many books, so little time. The pictures I took after guests arrived did not have the benefit of a steady hand. You can blame the contents of the next photo.

This was what was left over. At least as many bottles are in the recycling bin. Note: we didn’t drink the dish detergent, which is on the extreme right. As for the food which I did not get around to photographing, it was visually sensational, delicious, and everything paired well with the wines. As well as the aforementioned appies, we also tucked into a veggie casserole by Jane; roasted roots by Katherine; salads by Helen & Irene (or their spousal pontoons – I am unsure); and desserts by Eleanor, Linda and Bev. Our household managed to score some leftovers of the latter, created from a recipe included in The Dirty Apron Cookbook. Tee hee.

2014 Vancouver Writers Fest

One year, I really will take the time to write in some detail about my annual week at the Vancouver Writers Fest, but not this year. I simply can’t spare the time. Even so, I feel compelled to steal a few moments away from my current writing project to share my latest discovery: Girl Runner, by Carrie Snyder. I had read about her writing, but until now had not actually read any of her books. This kind of connection, this kind of find, is always my favourite part of the festival.

Just after her workshop, Andreas and I were chatting with Angie Abdou, whose book The Bone Cage, I had bought a couple of months earlier at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, and had recently read with great pleasure. Both she and Carrie are a generation younger than me, and unlike myself, both of them are athletes. Those who know me well, will agree that if a quick twitch muscle ever showed up in my body, it would probably die of loneliness. Fortunately, you don’t have to be either a competitive swimmer or a long distance runner to enjoy either book.

Angie told me that when she had read Girl Runner that she could not help but think of Margaret Laurence’s Stone Angel. I had that same sense, but here is the kicker. When I went to compare the two novels, being curious about what might be the same and what might be different, our copy was gone. Damn! Why do we ever lend books anyway? Why do we never keep a record of who we have loaned them to?

I remember Margaret’s voice on the phone on January 3^rd, 1987, so strong and sure, two days before she died. She had wanted to be sure to talk with both of us and with her god-daughter, our eldest, while she still could. We all knew that she was dying of lung cancer, although that was not what took her out. As in most things, she was ahead of her time. The likelihood of winning the case for dying with dignity would be decades in the future. The advice of the Hemlock Society was all that she had to help guide her in her final steps.

Yesterday, I spent some time with a friend who has a terminal brain tumor. Time for reflection. As readers, we always come to novels with our reading of it seasoned with what is in our hearts in the moment. This is as it should be. Understandably, one of the themes which jumped out at me in my reading of Girl Runner was that you can never know what gifts you leave behind you when you go. Aganetha Smart, the central character, had to live to be 104 years old before she could figure that one out. Don’t skip to the ending before you have read your way there. Even though it is a page turner, you may be tempted. I know that I am glad that I didn’t succumb.

Carrie Snyder’s use of language, and the insights that are conveyed ever so lightly, ever so quietly, are well worth the candle all on their own. It would be a great book to read aloud, as an elongated bedtime story. I can’t do that in a blog, but here are a few nuggets. After Aganetha has just placed fourth, out of the medals and the record books and the newspapers, in a race that was hers to win, she finds herself running on a track, all by herself, trying to make sense of it all:

I run strong. I run fine. I can feel my sadness running out behind me, like it’s being spilled on the ground, and I figure that will be that. I won’t be sad, anymore, not over this. I have a sense of impermeability, of elasticity, of bouncing off of something hard, and believing in the first instance that I had been hurt, then understanding the pain is superficial. It is already gone.

This is called recovery. I recognize the sensation from running. Under every layer of pain another layer of recovery lies in wait, the sweet, forever surprising truth of endurance.

Later, in her old age, when she is living in isolation on the family farm with her arthritic sister Cora, with both of them suffering the indignities of age that Margaret Laurence’s Hagar also railed against in Stone Angel, she finds herself still struggling to make sense of life:

She [Cora] is like father was, at the end, empty of all but the most persistent fragments of original self. Like I may be too, losing myself without even knowing it. I wonder: what is the meaning of what’s left behind? I don’t think, not really, that what’s left behind is the true self revealed. I am not that cruel. It seems instead an accidental picture of a life, and true to the way life is lived – not as we may wish it to be lived, but as it insists on being lived.

As I was thinking about all this, in the context of my own current life, I recalled the time when a reader phoned me the day after he had finished reading Some Become Flowers. It was a most unexpected call. We had both been aldermen, serving together on Mission City Council, and had often locked horns with opposing views on policy. He was right wing, ex-military, and stood for so much that I opposed. He was also the last person who I expected to even read my book. My wife made me, he said. I stayed up till 4:00. Then he told me: Several years ago, we lost a child. I didn’t cry at the time. I thought that was how a man should behave. As I listened to him, I was totally puzzled how this connected to my book, a book about a dying mother, not a dying child. He continued. Your book made me cry for my dead child. Thank you.

I sobbed at the end of Girl Runner, but this is part of what art is for, and this is also part of what this novel totally delivers. If Margaret Laurence were still here today, she would be eighty-eight years old, and I can imagine her saying to Carrie Snyder, Kid, this is great.