“The Queen And The Empress”

Red Bluff novelist William Wong Foey, who earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Chico State in 1973, mixes fact and fiction in his eighth novel. “The Queen And The Empress” ($14.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) traces the parallelism in the nineteenth century between two of the most powerful women in the world, Britain’s Queen Victoria and China’s Empress Dowager Cixi (“pronounced Tz’u-hsi”).

Both are cigarette-smoking, scotch-drinking, headstrong, power-hungry rulers, one seeking to extend the reign of the Union Jack to ancient China, the other seeking to protect 400 million Chinese from British control by means of devious plots to upend the conciliatory tendencies of the governing regents and wrest power from them. The women have a grudging admiration for each other even as Cixi survives attempted assassination.

The story imagines two key meetings, the first at Buckingham Palace when Cixi is a mere teenage concubine of the emperor yet willing to tell Victoria (whom she is wont to call “Vicky”) where to stuff it. As the queen muses years later, the dowager “was only sixteen and was addressed as the concubine Yi at that time. ‘That young Chinese tart was strong-willed even then,’ mouthed Victoria softly.”

The second comes in 1897, at the celebration of the Queen’s sixty-year reign, when, in her private room, Victoria and Cixi duel with swords. Cixi accuses the queen of extorting Chinese silver and addicting the population to opium. The Queen replies that “our true ambition for the heathen countries we acquire is to fill their hearts and souls with God, and to be good Christians so the dark races can join civilized society. Think of us as the nurturing parents….”

Cixi wants nothing to do with the gwai los (“whites”) yet she has little choice as she schemes for power. The Empress Dowager works to modernize her country to push back the British threat, but as the twentieth-century dawns it becomes clear that monarchs around the world were becoming more like figureheads.

The two powerful women survived in a man’s world even as they mixed the personal and political at the cost of many lives. Foey’s fiction tells uncomfortable truths.

"The Trail To Tlaxiaco"

Looking for escapist reading? A local author transports readers to Mexico just after World War II and introduces a man and his wife from Hunan Province in China who emigrate there to escape the Communist revolution. The novel is called "The Trail To Tlaxiaco" ("Tlah HEE ah Ko"), self-published for Amazon Kindle, by Michael Shaw Findlay.

When Findlay, my Butte College colleague, retired from teaching anthropology he decided to write a fictional account based what his father told him about being a grad student in Mexico in the late 1950s. 

Mike's father and his chums visited "Tlaxiaco, way up in the mountains. ... Several times we went to this Chinese restaurant ... where the woman who owned it ... told us that her husband, the Chinese chef, had killed his first wife down in Veracruz."

Findlay himself, having done extensive research in Mexico, decided to fill in the gaps. Who might this mysterious chef be? The result is a riches-to-rags-to-riches story of Cheng Li, driven by his goal of opening a Chinese restaurant in Mexico but whose ambition is thwarted at every step, often by his inner "dragons." In the midst of an argument one day he throws a wok at his wife and kills her.

Cheng Li flees. He's taken in by a poor family, abused in a labor camp, sucked into serving corrupt officials, befriended by another family. Can he escape his past and realize his dream?

Findlay, who asked for my help in formatting the manuscript and uploading it to Amazon, celebrates the cultural nuances of Mexico and the Mixtec (MEESH tehk), "the ethnic group dominating the western highlands of Oaxaca" (WAH HA kah).

And the glorious food Cheng Li prepares. He "sprinkled scallions and toasted sesame seeds over the top of the pork dish before serving it alongside dumplings in hot spiced chicken broth. ... The vegetable dish had a lemon and garlic sauce that acted to pull all of the carefully integrated flavors together."

Can we pull our lives together? As Findlay writes in an author's note, "we must be diligent in maintaining our kindness to one another and try in earnest to keep our dragons in check."