Why Read Novels? ‘To Feel More Fully,’ Says Jack Wang

Jack Wang already has some significant accolades under his belt. Originally from Vancouver, Wang is now a professor in the writing department at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. His last book, 2020’s We Two Alone: Stories, was longlisted for Canada Reads, shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and the winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best English-language debut short fiction collection.

Now he’s back with his first novel, The Riveter, published by House of Anansi this February. Wang’s heart-rending, deeply researched work of historical fiction follows Chinese Canadian shipbuilder turned paratrooper Josiah Chang as he fights for the love of his life and the right to be seen as Canadian during the Second World War.

Recently, Wang spoke to The Tyee about the gaps in our knowledge regarding the hundreds of Chinese Canadians who fought in the Second World War, the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, the balance between information and drama, and what he hopes people will take away from his new novel.

“I really just want the reader to feel something,” Wang said. “I want the reader to be moved. The best reason to read a novel is to feel life more fully, and only by feeling something does a reader understand what a novel is really about.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: First off, I want to tell you that The Riveter is, dare I say, riveting? Is that joke already old?

Jack Wang: I have heard it before. Let’s put it that way.

I see. Then let’s talk about this historical look at the Chinese Canadian experience. Josiah, your protagonist, is fighting in the Second World War, and in a sense he goes to war in order to be seen as Canadian, which is equated to being seen as human. There’s that line in the letter his lover, Poppy, writes where she says: “If I’m angry, I’m angry at the world for giving you such a terrible bargain: prove yourself and we’ll let you be human.”

I hope people appreciate, first and foremost, the courage and the sacrifice of Chinese Canadians in particular. There were about 500 to 600 (if not more) Chinese Canadians who served during the Second World War.

We have to remember that they did this even though they didn’t have full citizenship rights. They didn't have the franchise. These were the things they were fighting for.

At the same time, we understand that the lack of full citizenship rights is not something that's gone away, either in Canada or the U.S. or various places around the world.

There are people who still struggle to find their footing in a society and to have equal recognition. So I think it’s not just a look at the past, but a way to think about the fact that many people still struggle and continue to sacrifice in hopes that they will have full standing.

In this case, too, all of this is wrapped up in this beautiful love story which also has such a strong racial component. Poppy is white, and if she marries Josiah, she loses her citizenship. I feel like I was familiar with a lot of the history in this book, but I didn't realize that if you marry someone who’s not a citizen, you lose your citizenship at this point in history.

We have to remember at the time, there wasn’t Canadian citizenship, per se, right? People were British subjects. And if a British woman married someone who wasn’t British, they could, in fact, lose their citizenship.

It was a gendered thing, of course. It wasn’t true of British men. And it speaks, of course, to power dynamics and the need to protect white womanhood, and so on. This becomes a complication in the relationship between Josiah and Poppy.

It’s a really interesting take on the “will they or won’t they.” Because, you know, they do. Right away. But then the question is whether they can keep it. I’m always just so compelled by love stories where it’s not an internal issue that’s keeping them apart. It’s these external factors. It’s the war. It’s the sense of who people are, who’s human, who deserves to live here. In writing a love story like that, are you drawing at all from experience?

I am drawing from experience, as all writers do. It becomes inevitable. As it happens, I'm married to somebody who’s white, and she happens to be from the American South. So naturally, you draw on things. What I would say is that the relationship definitely faces external obstacles, and that is crucial to the dynamics of the plot.

But I do think at the same time, there are things that are particular to them as individuals that also complicate the relationship: Poppy's desire for sexual freedom and her unwillingness to just sit around and wait for Josiah to come back from the war.

When you have a story about someone who's coming back from war, it’s hard not to think of Odysseus and The Odyssey. So I was thinking of Penelope. She’s famous for being faithful. That’s her defining quality as a woman is that she’s faithful, and she’s celebrated for that. And when I realized that Poppy was the diminutive form of the name Penelope, I thought, this is a perfect name for this character.

But Poppy, of course, is a much more, I think, realistic and complicated woman. She’s sexual, she’s forward-thinking, she values her own needs and desires, and Josiah struggles with whether or not he can accept these aspects of her.

This love story has this beautiful, heart-tugging ending. You made me cry, Jack. The last time a book made me cry, it was André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs. I feel like that's good company. The Harrison Cries Metric suggests that you’re gonna win the Giller, so congratulations.

Great company. Thank you. I love that book too.

Without giving anything away, I’m interested in when you knew you had your ending.

The way the novel ends wasn’t always how I imagined it. There was a point at which the novel is called The Riveters, and I had imagined a band of Chinese Canadian characters going off at different theatres of war, because I also wanted to capture the Pacific Theatre, and other things like special operations executives, where Chinese Canadians worked as secret agents. But it was just too much. I just had to make the decision that I couldn't write a 1,000-page novel.

Yeah, you’re not supposed to do that for your debut.

Three hundred pages for the book club.

I’ve always wanted to write a historical novel. But for me, the research is just too intimidating. So I’m a modernist. And the Second World War is especially thorny, because people are obsessed. History nerds. Modern-day Nazis. You’ve gotta get the planes right. The artillery shells. Normandy. Passchendaele. How did you do that research, and how did you get over the anxiety that someone would say that you hadn't done enough of it?

I did a lot of reading. And I guess I had some training ground, because I wrote a short story collection called We Two Alone. And a lot of the stories in that collection were historical fiction.

I wrote about the Second Sino-Japanese War, for example. I wrote about Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. And I learned some things about doing research and the difference between information and drama. Because you can get just mired in information. You can read for the rest of your life, 24-7, and never read all the books about the Second World War.

I did a lot of different kinds of research. Some of it was digging through archival material. But I also am the kind of person who likes to magpie a lot of little authenticating details. I found a 1942 Canadian Army basic training syllabus. This was like a little booklet they gave to every soldier, and it gave me the contours of what basic training was like.

And I found a Christmas Canadian Army menu, which told me what they had for Christmas dinner. You could just make it up, but I love it when I can find that information and know there were things like candied and snowflake potatoes.

I noticed that you got a great blurb from the Historical Novel Society, who called it true to life. True to life, Jack!

I think trying to imagine the experience of being a soldier was probably the most challenging part. To get into the consciousness of someone who’s in the middle of war when you haven’t been in war yourself. When we talk about appropriation and literature, we often think across certain categories like race or gender, but to me, this was a kind of appropriation. To be someone who’s never been in war. To write about people who are in war.

Do you anticipate any pushback at all from people who would say, like, you weren't there, or you are not allowed to write about this? Are you prepared at all for that?

People are allowed to critique however, but I actually don’t imagine that I’m gonna get very much pushback. I’ll just remind people that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, like, 60 years after the fact, right, and that great literature can be written by people who weren’t there.

Many great war novels have been written by people who were not there. Everything from The English Patient to The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. So I’m not alone in my attempt.

Things are always different for racialized authors, though. You can assume how things will go. And then it just goes a little bit different for you.

Right.

I have that anxiety. I’m glad that you don’t.

I sometimes have the anxiety that people will say, yeah, but there was only one Chinese Canadian in the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. The way I see it, I’m also recognizing the entire battalion and the things that they achieved as Canadians. It’s not just focusing on Josiah Chang.

You're also writing from a very particular vantage point. I’m reminded of that Toni Morrison interview where someone asked her: Are you ever going to write about any white characters? And she basically said, fuck no, I don’t have to do that. You do that. I'll do my thing.

I do think more Canadians could stand to know about the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. I don’t think all that many Canadians do. Certainly not the way that people know Easy Company from Band of Brothers. And I think of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion as Canada’s Easy Company.

Are there any books or sources you'd recommend for people to learn more about them?

Boys of the Clouds: An Oral History of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, 1942-1945. I also read books like Men of Steel: Canadian Paratroopers in Normandy, 1944. And Paras Versus the Reich: Canada's Paratroopers at War, 1942-1945. But I will say that none of them read like Band of Brothers. They’re not really narrative non-fiction. It’s not the kind of stuff that necessarily people pick up to read for pleasure, as it were.

Would you say then that The Riveter is filling a gap in the literature?

Yeah, I think so. And I think it also fills the gap in the sense that, you know, Chinese Canadians didn’t write memoirs about their service experience.

There isn’t, like, an autobiography or a biography of Richard Mar, for example, the one Chinese Canadian who served in the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. There are gaps in the archival record that historical fiction can fill.