WHISK

‘What matters is what you do in this world, not how you come into it.’

Eliza was found in a soap crate, wrapped in a man’s sweater and placed carefully on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company. Jeremy Sommers represented his firm in Chile, and lived with his sister, Rose, as colonial masters to an illiterate nation. Rose Sommers raised Eliza as her daughter, taking her as the child she could never have, with the “proper” upbringing and airs associated with a young English gentlewoman. Latin blood, however, dominates Eliza’s personality. She is neither cold, nor distant. Her emotions are tempestuous and wild, and her determination and obstinate nature overrides any amount of upbringing that Rose may try to instill in her.

When Eliza falls in love with an unsuitable Chilean with the heart of a poet, a tormented soul and an inheritance of dire poverty, Jeremy, Rose and Eliza’s long-suffering duenna, Mama Fresia, are appalled and determined to keep the lovers apart.

So far, the tale sounds like yet another version of Romeo and Juliet. Isabel Allende, however, is nothing if not a great story-teller. Though she started out as a journalist, she confesses herself that she often made up stories where she couldn’t verify information. Her compatriot, Nobel winner, and Poet Extraordinaire, Pablo Neruda once said to her: “you are the worst journalist in this country. You lie all of the time. Why don’t you switch to literature“.

As storyteller, Allende is phenomenal. The Daughter of Fortune is symbolic of the assertive, independent female figure that dominates every story Allende has written. When Eliza’s lover, Joaquin, struck by the gold fever raging in California, steals supplies from the British Import and Export Company and sets sail to seek his fortune, Eliza leaves her comfortable, polished life and stows away on a ship to seek her true love out and win him back into her life. In the best romantic tradition, she disguises herself as a boy, armed with nothing more than her wits, some trinkets from her jewelry box and a prayer for luck.

Fate puts her in the hands of the proverbial Chinese cook, the redoubtable Tao Chi’en.

The fourth son of a poor farmer deep in the Chinese countryside, Tao Chi’en had left his family many years before to seek his fortunes in Hong Kong. As the fourth son, he had no hopes of inheriting the family land, and had been apprenticed to the local doctor at a young age. After his master’s death, he found there was no future in the tiny village of his family, and decided to extend his knowledge in the big city. As talented a healer as he was, he was a mediocre gambler, at best, and his first experience of Hong Kong is that of poverty and hunger. As he finds his way out of a quagmire of his own making, he finds a wife, an English doctor with whom to exchange knowledge and ideas, and settles in to comfort and contentment.

When Fortune steps in, she ravages his life. His young wife dies in childbirth, and the child itself does not survive. Depression robs him of his ability to heal and practice with any responsibility, and leads him towards an inevitable night in the poorer section of town, where he meets, of all men, John Sommers.

John Sommers is the black sheep of the Sommers family. Captain of a ship, traveler of the world, John is rough and tough and though good at heart, he has no compunction in shanghaiing Tao Chi’en and bringing him on board his ship as cook to replace the one that Tao could not heal. What was once a predictable life for Tao is now an adventure he did not want. His fate, however, seems to be inextricably interwoven with a girl from the other side of the world, whose only link to him is John Sommers.

With veteran ease, Isabel Allende takes her readers around the world, weaving innumerable characters that appear and reappear, reinventing them at many stages. As she once remarked in an interview, the American lifestyle allows people to make fresh starts at any stage of their lives:

“One of the characteristics of North American culture is that you can always start again. You can always move forward, cross a border of a state or a city or a county, and move West, most of the time West. You leave behind guilt, past traditions, memories. You are as if born again, in the sense of the snake: You leave your skin behind and you begin again. For most people in the world, that is totally impossible. We carry with us the sense that we belong to a group, a clan, a tribe, an extended family, especially a country. Whatever happens to you happens to the collective group, and you can never leave behind the past. What you have done in your life will always be with you. So, for us, we have the burden of this sort of fate, of destiny, that you don’t.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both situations. In the United States, the fact that you can start again gives a lot of energy and strength and youth to this country. That is why it’s so powerful in many ways, and so creative. However, it has the disadvantage of loneliness, of individuality carried to an extreme, where you don’t belong to the group and where you can just do whatever you want and never think of other people. I think it’s a great disadvantage–a moral and spiritual and ethical disadvantage.”

- September 1994, Interview with Isabel Allende for the Mother Jones Magazine

Almost every character in “Daughter of Fortune” recreates itself as some point in the book. Rose Sommers, in her youthful days, was a daring woman who fell in love with an operatic tenor at the height of his career. An indirect student of the Marquis de Sade, Rose’s lover teaches her the Marquis’ ways and ideals. As the Lady of the Manor in Valparaiso, Ms. Sommers has an impeccable reputation that could never entertain works from a man like the Marquis.
Jacob Todd is a bible salesman in Valparaiso. When he reappears in San Francisco, he is the editor of the local newspaper, and well-known as a journalist with exclusive contacts, notably among bandits among the Californian hills. Joaquin, Eliza’s love, who desperately seeks gold for the sole purpose of returning to his mother and to Eliza a rich man, becomes a notorious bandit, feared by the miners and gold-hunters in San Francisco.

Perhaps the most common theme in almost all her novels is that of exile. Exile seems to be the inevitable cause of rebirth, and the justification for dramatic and sudden twists in the plot. Fate brings together characters from a radical cross-section of cultures: the upright English, the hot-tempered, passionate Latin Americans, the cool, traditional Chinese, and the hard-working, determined Americans. As an historical novel, Daughter of Fortune provides many Americans with a perspective of the Gold Rush they may not have read before: from the perspective of the exiled man, the refugees, the races that the white American male spat upon in his search for wealth.

“I have a grandchild in fourth grade and he’s studying the gold rush. The teacher read my book and she asked me to come to the school and talk to the school. So I went and they had from third grade up: everybody there. Because the teacher said that they had never read the story from the perspective of the immigrant and the people of color. The losers. Not the people who conquered and took over. But the ones who had been there and lost everything. And there were a lot of Chileans and Peruvians. The whites made many rules against the people of color. Especially against the Chinese. The worst abuses were against the Chinese.

And where did I research all that? Well, half of it in Chile. Because the Chilean miners who came to the gold rush, after the first year they were kicked out. The mines were taken away from them and the gold was taken away. So they returned. But they wrote letters home and they kept journals. And one of them wrote a book. So researching from that perspective is very interesting. Also the letters of miners who went to the gold rush and wrote home. That is very interesting too because there you discover that a glass of milk was more precious and more expensive than a bottle of Champagne because liquor was all over but there was no one to milk the cows. A loaf of bread was the most precious thing because there was nobody to bake.”

- Interview, November 1999, with Linda Richards, editor of January Magazine.

Daughter of Fortune is a silk tapestry that will cover every inch of your walls. The colors are vivid and stark, at times subtle and intricate. Her plot is unlikely, sometimes shocking, sometimes starkly despairing. The historical background is harsh in its realities, and yet softly covered with the tatted lace that is Eliza and her search for true love. The story flows easily, without rocks or rapids, and yet with enough momentum to keep the reader engrossed till the very end.