Rebecca Lim, Two sparrowhawks in a lonely sky, Allen & Unwin, August 2023, 304 pp., RRP $17.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781761180224
There is nothing like a well-written, emotionally engaging historical novel to give young readers an understanding about life in a previous time and place. This wonderful story exposes the reality of life under Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward, which resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese, and the institutional racism of the White Australia Policy during the 1950s.
Told in three parts, Part 1 describes Fu and his younger sister Pei’s life in a rural village in southern China. Their father was a schoolteacher who had fought for the losing side, the Kuomintang. One day he went off to work and never came back – but he hadn’t been killed. Rather, he had been sponsored to Australia and was working to bring his family to join him.
When the impoverished village and all its land and animals is commandeered to become a collective, Fu and Pei’s dying mother urges them to get away to Hong Kong and from there to try to find their father. They grab some personal mementoes their mother had kept safe to take with them – a restaurant menu from Melbourne, a typed letter, and a photo.
Part 2 tells the story of their passage by sea to Hong Kong, enabled by the kindness of a female soldier. She entrusts the children to Sister Zeng on her sampan and leaves them to it. After making it safely to Hong Kong, the children then have to negotiate their way into the Australian Trade Commissioner’s office with only a photo to guide them. How they and a kindly disposed acting commissioner jump through all the bureaucratic hoops to make it from there to Australia concludes Part 2.
Part 3 is the actual journey itself, travelling in steerage on a ship bound for Sydney and Melbourne. The conclusion, and very moving reunion with the father they hadn’t seen for many years, is perhaps a bit light on detail. The last we’d heard of Ru he had been threatened with deportation because he had left the job specified on his visa to work in the restaurant. Yet here he is in a three-piece suit meeting them on the dock.
It’s a minor quibble about a book that is well-worth reading and recommending. It tells the largely untold (for young readers) story of horrifying Chinese Communist Party atrocities, the plight of refugees and the Australian government’s former rules for limiting immigration from ‘coloured’ countries. It is based on personal stories from the author’s extended family and friends and shows how the kindness of strangers can make all the difference.
Reviewed by Lynne Babbage
