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Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall
Wooden Fish Songs
Ruthanne Lum McCunn (1995)
The story of Lue Gim Gong, the Chinese American
whose innovative cross-pollination contributed
millions to the citrus industry, is pieced together in
this historical novel by RUTHANNE LUM MCCUNN
through the narrations of three women who know
him best: his mother, Sum Jui, his white Ameri-
can mentor, Miss Fanny Burlingame, and Miss
Fanny’s African-American servant Sheba. Even as
a child growing up in southern China, Lue seems
to have had a natural affinity with plants and
animals. His curiosity has propelled him to ques-
tion everything and experiment with new ways of
gardening. At the age of 10, fascinated by the sto-
ries that his fourth uncle brought back from the
“Gold Mountain” (America), Lue decides to come
to America. Once in America, however, Lue soon
becomes disappointed by the discrepancy between
his uncle’s stories and the harsh reality of every-
day life. Lue joins a group of workers and moves
to North Adams, Massachusetts, to work in a shoe
factory. In North Adams, Lue meets Miss Fanny,
who has volunteered through the local church to
teach the newly arrived Chinese workers the Eng-
lish language and Christian doctrines. A friend-
ship quickly develops between them, and Lue soon
becomes a Christian.
Miss Fanny encourages Lue to pursue his inter-
ests in plants, gains permission for him to work in
her father’s garden, and finds books about plant
improvement techniques for him. Lue diligently
studies the works of Malthus and Darwin and
begins to experiment with cross-planting in the
Burlingame garden. In the meantime, he regularly
sends money to China to help his family.
In the late 1870s, America falls into an eco-
nomic depression and the country’s anti-Chinese
sentiment becomes strong. At the same time, Lue’s
village in China suffers a long drought, and his
family faces starvation. With little work, Lue can
barely make enough money to support himself.
Miss Fanny convinces her father to hire Lue as their
gardener, but Mr. Burlingame only provides Lue a
minimal allowance. As Lue sinks into deep debt
trying to send money to his family, Miss Fanny
persuades him to put his family in God’s hands.
When Lue’s nephew dies of starvation in China,
both his village in China and his Chinese cowork-
ers in America blame Lue’s failure to provide for
his family as the cause of his nephew’s death. Lue
decides to go back to China as a missionary, but he
soon realizes that the liberal beliefs and scientific
knowledge that he has gained in America are in-
compatible with traditional Chinese values. With
Miss Fanny’s help he returns to America, where he
devotes his life to the development of a frost-resis-
tant orange and the Lim Gim Gong orange.
In life, Lue Gim Gong was ostracized by the
Chinese-American community and discriminated
against by white society, As the epilogue of the
novel shows, even after his death, Lue Gim Gong
remained unrecognized. Throughout the novel,
McCunn convincingly shows the alienation and
sorrow that Lue Gim Gong experiences as a person
living in between cultures. She also gives him his
due recognition for his accomplishments.
Stylistically, because the three narrators of the
novel come from different racial/ethnic and class
backgrounds, together they are able to create a
complex narrative about race, gender, and class
constructions in both China and the United States
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By inter-
twining the three voices, McCunn not only recov-
ers Lue Gim Gong’s contributions that have been
scarcely acknowledged, but also skillfully exposes
the unfair racial, and class hierarchies from which
this lack of acknowledgment originates.
Nan Ma324 Wooden Fish Songs