THE SIX: The Untold Story of the Titanic’s Chinese Survivors, by Steven Schwankert
Has any tragedy been more exhaustively documented than the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic?
In the 113 years since the liner struck an iceberg and plunged to the bottom of the frigid North Atlantic, more than 500 books have been published about the calamity, according to Encyclopedia Titanica, an online resource for aficionados. At least 16 films have also retold this tale of hubris, heroism, class conflict, doomed love and icy death. They range from a 1912 one-reeler starring Dorothy Gibson, an actress who survived the sinking, to a 1943 Nazi propaganda film that contrasts the bravery of a fictional German officer with the supposed cowardice of the British crew.
Steven Schwankert’s “The Six” is an intriguing addition to the canon. A journalist, filmmaker and Sinophile, Schwankert stumbled onto this unexplored niche while researching a different tragedy. In December 1948, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, a ferry mysteriously blew up and sank in the Yangtze River, drowning 2,000 passengers.
Schwankert’s investigation into China’s worst maritime disaster turned up passing references to Chinese passengers on the Titanic — but he could find nothing about their lives. “Not one descendant of a Chinese passenger had come forward,” he writes. “No one had raised their hand and said, ‘My grandfather survived the Titanic. This is his story.’” Schwankert traveled across three continents, pored over ships’ logs, studied official testimony, dug up local news reports and tracked down living relatives. The result is an engrossing blend of detective story, disaster narrative and social history of the Chinese diaspora at the turn of the 20th century.
In the beginning, there were eight. All the men were in their 20s or early 30s at the time they embarked on their ill-fated voyage. And all seem to have come from Taishan province bordering the South China Sea, the impoverished epicenter of the Chinese global migration that had begun with the California gold rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad. They boarded the Titanic in Southampton as third-class passengers, bound for jobs as laborers on a merchant ship docked in New York.
None left accounts of what happened that night, but Schwankert recreates their movements with remarkable precision. After the Titanic struck the iceberg, a watertight door locked into place in steerage, sealing off the main escape route. But the men found a corridor nicknamed “Scotland Road” and clambered up a staircase to the aft boat deck. Four climbed into a collapsible lifeboat with about 40 others, including the Titanic owner J. Bruce Ismay, and dropped into the Atlantic minutes before the steamship sank.
Another clambered into a smaller lifeboat. Three men, all friends with shared dreams of opening a business in America, put on life vests and jumped into the water. One, Fang Lang, lashed himself to a wooden door and hours later was hauled aboard a lifeboat that had turned back to hunt for survivors. The others almost certainly died of hypothermia.
Schwankert captures the shameful treatment the men received after the rescue of the Titanic’s passengers by another liner, the Carpathia. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882, had slammed shut the door to Chinese immigration, so government agents unceremoniously escorted the six to a waiting Europe-bound vessel in the East River.
Stories circulated, fanned by other survivors’ faulty recollections or deliberate distortions, that the three on the collapsible lifeboat had disguised themselves in women’s clothes to get aboard, then kept out of sight until they reached the Carpathia. “These were creatures on their way to New York,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “who, at the first sign of danger, had sprung into the lifeboats” and “concealed themselves beneath the seats.”
Schwankert goes to great lengths to disprove the allegation, even building a replica to show that concealment wouldn’t have been possible. He also immersed himself, fully clothed, in a tank of 54-degree seawater to imagine how long Fang Lang could have survived in the Atlantic.
Schwankert’s prose can be workmanlike; he has a weakness for danglers and an odd attachment to the word “gruesome.” Frustratingly, despite all his digging, he loses sight of most of the men soon after their rescue. Anti-Chinese prejudice in Canada and Britain, as well as the United States, consigned them to rootless lives, and numerous transliterations of their names made them even harder to trace.
He manages to piece together in detail the life of only one of the six: Fang Lang, who lived as an illegal immigrant in Chicago, then Milwaukee; worked as a waiter, raised a family and became a U.S. citizen; he never seems to have talked about his experiences aboard the ship. In the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic,” the director James Cameron used Fang Lang’s survival story as the inspiration for the scene in which Rose, played by Kate Winslet, is pulled barely alive from the water.
Schwankert’s compelling account succeeds in rescuing him — and his confreres — a second time.
THE SIX: The Untold Story of the Titanic’s Chinese Survivors | By Steven Schwankert | Pegasus | 238 pp. | $29.95
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