Abstract

Fortune Makers is a collection of prose and prose poetry narrating the lives, journeys, and interiors of undocumented migrants from Fujian province in China to Turtle Island, weaving together autobiography, fiction, and historiography. Its stories emerge from the proliferation of illicit migration in Fujianese communities and its tightly bound histories with American and Canadian nation-building and transnationalism.

Fortune Makers was inspired by the author’s own migration story. Her mother was pregnant when she left Fujian in 1989 after witnessing the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and lived undocumented in New York until the author’s birth granted them both legal asylum. Researching her mother’s story exposed her to the reality of thousands deported, suffocated to death or drowned, or working off their smuggling debts through indentured labour. While journalism on Fujianese smugglers and migrants abound—written by community outsiders, and often from the perspective of legal and state officials—there is limited scholarly research, and scarce literature on the experiences of undocumented Fujianese.

Fortune Makers is the first short story collection told from the perspectives of Fujianese migrants and their co-conspirators; it chronicles the lives of the Fujianese diaspora over three generations: from early waves of migrant labourers in the 1970s, to the height of illegal migration in the late 1990s and early aughts, and to the children whose futures are eternally shaped by this legacy. Here is a community’s tale of becoming and unbecoming through journeys home.