Jack Wang’s The Riveter opens with Allied paratroopers parachuting from Albemarles into occupied France at Normandy. It is World Waw II, and the battle for Europe is heating up. Among the paratroopers is a young Chinese Canadian man who is part of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. It is D-Day, June 1944. From this prologue, the novel jumps forwards and backwards in time, to tell Josiah Chang’s story of struggle, love, and social belonging.
Josiah Chang grew up poor with his laborer father, Franklin, in the interior of British Columbia, on the Cariboo Plateau. Josiah stops his studies in middle school and starts working hard labor at age 12, starting with woodcutting. His father has a “junior matriculation” or high school education. As a young man, he loses his father to a work accident, and he is alone in the world.
It had always been the two of them, Josiah and his father, under the open sky. A few months each year when winter turned nasty, dropping to forty below, thy would take to a bunkhouse and the amity and stink of other men, but otherwise, it was just them, cooking over an open fire, bathing in rivers and lakes, and sleeping under a great big diamond-encrusted sky.
Josiah’s male lineage in Canada goes back generations. He is from a long line of men who made their lives by their physical labors. His great grandfather was a 49er and pursued gold mining. His grandfather was an “axeman” and “surveyor” for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. His own father worked for a barrel-making company until he was pushed out of a job by returning men in World War I. His link in this chain sees him first working woodcutting and then working in a shipyard, since as a person of Chinese origin, even though born in Canada, he is a “resident alien.” A strain of borderless itinerancy and living off the land runs through his family history. They have an independence that stems from their non-acceptance in larger Canadian society.
Chang is an original in Asian Canadian literature. He is a handsome man who catches the eyes of women. He holds his own in fights. He is aware of his social standing in Canadian society and strives to improve his life. He figures that in a time of national need, such as a world war, he should serve so as to be useful and to gain social entrée. With responsibilities come rights. If war is a “carnival of chance,” he will role the dice. While his name may evoke a Biblical character, he is a staunch non-believer.
If wartime opens opportunities for people, there was “Rosie the Riveter” in the U.S. and perhaps, “Josiah the Riveter” up north. The novel cites a slogan: “Every rivet a bullet.” Chang works on naval warships.
The novel touches on a time of great change. Given the numbers of Canadian men gone to fight against the Axis in the European theater, women are integrated in the shipyards to do work. Canada declared war on Germany in 1939. [The U.S. did not until 1941, after the Pearl Harbor attack.] Josiah falls into love/lust with the spirited Poppy, who is one of the women at the shipyard. She is a jitney driver and a torch singer. She has a strong appetite for male attention, and it is not clear if what the two have is a fling or the beginning of something more.
She has a libertine streak. When she goes to see his outdoor encampment, she is not put off.
At length they came to the clearing and the pup tent and all the things he had added in the weeks since, like a chopping block, clothesline, firepit, and stump stool. Poppy surveyed the scene as she might have a child’s elaborate hideout: impressed, amused, and vaguely alarmed. When he pulled back the flaps of the tent, revealing a space that was now quite lived in, she hunkered down for a better look, the hem of her day dress riding up her thighs.
There are stolen moments of sweetness and intimacy. Jack Wang writes:
He’d been sitting on the edge of her bed for what seemed like hours, staring at his uniform, his woolen green battledress and maroon beret, staving off the moment he would have to put it on and catch three planes and two trains for Camp Shilo. A trip of days, and he had no more to spare.
He veers between a worshipful approach to her and also realizing her fallible humanity. At one point, Wang writes:
She had become a refracting presence, the eye in the sky through which he saw, admired, and pitied himself. And what he saw now was a man who had no need for gods but still believed in the unseen.
Her approach to Josiah is not innocent per se:
She loved Josiah, but she knew her love was shot through with other feelings. Novelty, for one. Daring, for another, especially in public, a flouting that matched her sense of herself. And, if she were honest, a feeling of self-abasement that was feral, reckless, and thrilling. All of which made her burn with shame.
The Riveter serves as a powerful bridge to an aspect of WWII history that is not that known in the larger literature. It captures the challenges of receiving societies (Canada) and those born within but still see as perennial newcomers and are so-othered. This is not historical fiction exactly, but it is inspired from real history. It is solidly imagined and memorable.
The Riveter captures the immediacy of individuals striving to make meaningful lives against the backdrop of historical events.
Wang has a Ph.D. from Florida State University. He is the award-winning author of We Two Alone, a short story collection. He is originally from Vancouver, Canada. He is a professor of writing at Ithaca College in New York.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
