Destinies Divided: A World War 1 romance of the Chinese Diaspora

Destinies Divided begins: --

In Dunedin, despite his having a wife and baby son in China, Zhou Yu and Horowhai have three children, which secret he keeps from his Chinese wife until the birth of the last one, Alex.  The mixed race children stand on a cultural divide. Eddie and Emily are sent to China for their education at the turbulent times of the Boxer Rebellion. At the mission school they come face to face with their hostile half-brother HongYun and endure the hardships of their holidays at the Zhou family farm with their father’s bitter and unforgiving first wife, Yung. Alex, the most Maori-looking child, grows up in Dunedin and trains as a missionary under Alex Don who persuades him to serve in China.

The Chinese son, HongYun, takes his revenge on Zhou Yu by making him pay for his studies in America. He graduates as a doctor and lives the American dream.  Eddie, scarred by early racial prejudice in New Zealand, goes to British Malaya to begin a new life. Emily returns to Dunedin to nurse Horowhai at Seacliff Mental Asylum.

World War 1 breaks out. China sends nearly two hundred thousand labourers to the Allied cause. Emily, re-trained as a doctor, goes to search for her lover Wiremu in the Native Battalion but falls in love instead with Doctor James Hopkins, a son of China missionaries, of the British Medical Corp.  Alex travels the ten thousand miles and more across two oceans and Canada with the Chinese as their pastor and HongYun goes to be with his same-sex lover. Amongst the Chinese is Feng Hua, the teacher of a village school who volunteers in order to have the opportunity to avenge his father’s execution at the hands of Germans during the Boxer uprising twenty years prior.

Here, each discovers his destiny in the trenches of the Western Front where nearly 200,000 Chinese coolies struggle and die in an effort to regain China’s self-respect as a sovereign nation.  Only to be betrayed at the end of it when the Allies elicits Japanese support to form the League of Nations with the gift of Shandong Province, the province of saints to the Chinese. China refuses to sign the Treaty of Versailles.

From Memories in the Bone: The precursor

Dunedin in the last years of the 19^th Century is now a country full of prejudice and hostile to the Chinese who came sixty years previously at the invitation of the Dunedin City Council to pan for gold. A late comer to this scene is Zhou Yu, rebel soldier of the failed, disastrous Taiping Rebellion, and lately of Melbourne who had struck the mother lode on the Sebastapol Plateau in Victoria. He is now a refugee from the Victorian police for injuring the two brothers of a white girl he was romancing in a fight.

He finds refuge and work in a newly Christianised Maori village outside Oamaru where he tries to learn the ways of New Zealand in order to re-create the business he was part of in Melbourne. Here, in his relationship with the Rev. Pita Hohepa and Auntie Ngaire, he repents for the crimes he committed during his rebel days but not before the mysterious Scar Face catches up with him one fateful evening on the banks of the Waitaki River. In a fight to the death, Scar Face is killed by a spear mysteriously thrown from the dark and Zhou Yu is now haunted by who his saviour is. A little later a horrifying return to an old tribal custom forces him to leave the village taking with him Horowhai, a slave born into the village and the victim of the event.