On Gold Mountain Read online

  Most parents in Chinatown wouldn’t spend money on luxuries for themselves, but they always tried to give something to their children. Like most girls in Chinatown, Jennie and Sissee had porcelain dolls and jacks. Their brothers had marbles and cast-iron trains and fire engines pulled by iron horses. But unlike the other neighborhood children, Sissee could splurge on special treats. Once Sissee had bought two tennis rackets, and she and Jennie had gone over to the USC campus to play. The balls had gone all over the place, and they’d never played again.

  Sometimes the girls did errands for their mothers. Sissee’s mother often sent them down to buy a whole meal from the Sam Yuen or See Yuen Restaurant. The girls especially loved See Yuen, which served American food—brisket of beef, pie, and the best bread any of them had ever tasted. They would stand behind the counter and giggle as the old man swatted at the flies that tried to land on the meat. Since Jennie’s family didn’t have much money, the girls also frequented the little market between the two restaurants, which sold buns stuffed with meat or soybeans.

  Once Pa had traded some merchandise for a pair of Shetland ponies, and for a while the girls had gone down to the stables every day. Men hitched up the ponies to a little wicker cart and led the girls around the corral. Some of those men, Sissee thought, would do anything for her father. But those ponies went the way of the tennis rackets. They were a nice idea, but they were the meanest darn things. They were dirty too, and someone had to brush them and take care of them. Pa had finally traded them away. “For glue, I hope,” Jennie had said, and the two girls had laughed some more.

  Jennie knew about fun, and wasn’t afraid of anything; Sissee was afraid of almost everything, but she had money. Between them they always had a good time. First they would walk into her father’s store, weaving through the clutter, taking care not to bump anything. Then Pa would give Sissee money. Jennie said it was because Sissee was his little pet. Then they’d walk over to Jennie’s apartment. The whole way—as they walked back upstairs, through the apartment heavy with the smells of roasting meat and potatoes, across the bridge, and into the other apartment, where Mrs. Chan peeled garlic and ginger for the Chans’ evening meal—Jennie made Sissee repeat Chinese phrases over and over again.

  “May we go to the movies?” Sissee would ask Mrs. Chan in awkward Chinese. “My father gave us the money.”

  Sissee knew that Mrs. Chan couldn’t say no, so off she and Jennie went every Saturday afternoon. First they’d see the movie, then they’d walk over to See’s Candies and buy a one-pound box. (They always chuckled over that name.) After they’d eaten it all, Jennie would muse, “It’s a wonder we have teeth.” That made Sissee giggle because it was such a grownup thing to say.

  Most of their adventures happened on Saturday, because during the week Jennie went to the elementary school for Chinese kids, while Sissee went to California Street School with Eddy, where they were the only Chinese. Ma said she wanted the children in American schools, so that’s where Sissee and her brothers went. Bennie was going to Custer Avenue Intermediate School. Ray and Milton—who were in the same grade—attended Lincoln High School. Like their older brothers, Sissee and Eddy had learned to keep to themselves. It wasn’t that the other kids were mean, exactly—well, there was some of that, but mostly she and her brother were just ignored. Every day after school, Sissee and Eddy came straight home. They were never invited to play with the other kids—either from school or in Chinatown. And Jennie couldn’t play then because she had to go to Mrs. Leong’s Chinese-language class at the mission.

  Before summer, the two girls had joined the Girl Reserves at Jennie’s urging. “We’re pals,” she’d said. “It’ll be fun.” But it hadn’t been fun. Sissee knew she was pleasant and could get along, but she was too shy to pick up with those girls. When vacation came, Jennie had begged Sissee to go to camp. “Mother won’t hold me back,” Jennie stated boldly. “I do what I want.” Sissee had been swept up in her enthusiasm. If her friend could do it, so could she. But when they’d gotten to the camp, Sissee had been so homesick that her brothers had to come and get her.

  Nevertheless, Jennie encouraged Sissee. “We’re not shy when we’re together, huh?”

  But Sissee always felt shy, even when she was with Jennie.

  Sissee’s other brothers made fun of the threesome—Sissee, Eddy, and Jennie. Some days when Bennie walked in from school, he’d say, “I saw that highbinder friend of yours.” Sissee never got mad. It wasn’t proper for her to show anger at an older brother, even if he did call her best friend a tong thug. But Eddy would hoot and holler: “Highbinder? Did you say ‘highbinder’? That’s an insult, Ben. Why do you talk like that?” But Bennie didn’t care what he said. Everyone in the family accepted it. Bennie dressed however he liked, ate what he liked, talked how he wanted to—and if they didn’t like it, too bad.

  Today Jennie and Sissee met out on the bridge between their two buildings. Eddy joined them, and soon they were involved in a game of post office. Eddy went back inside to the bathroom, stood up on the toilet, and peered at the girls through the bars of the window. “Come on, you two,” he said in mock impatience. “I don’t have all day.”

  Jennie and Sissee took turns being customers. “I’d like to purchase two stamps,” Jennie said, slipping a few scraps of pretend paper money through the window. Eddy frowned, said, “Yes, ma’am,” and passed back the stamps that Ma had given them to use for their game.

  Sissee stepped forward. “This package needs to go to Macao. How much will that cost?”

  Eddy balanced the invisible package in his hands. “Well, let me see,” he said. “Do you have anything to declare in here? Do I need to collect for customs?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sissee replied. “It’s a gift.” She smiled as she had seen her father do with customs inspectors.

  Later they clambered back through the See apartment, yelling that they were going for a walk and promising to be home for dinner. Even without watches, the kids knew exactly when that would be. Around dinnertime, the vegetable peddlers with their lumbering horse-drawn carts would come rolling back into Chinatown. As soon as the teams hit Alameda, the drivers would loosen the reins and the horses would gallop pell-mell to the stable.

  The kids knew every inch of Chinatown. For the past few years people had been talking about how Chinatown was going to be torn down to make way for a big train terminal. With that possibility, conditions had declined. Landlords refused to do repairs, and tenants were too scared to ask. Any mention of Chinatown to white society only brought a sigh, a shrug of the shoulders, and a breezy, “Yes, conditions are bad, but they are Chinese!” So broken windows were boarded up, keeping out rain and cold winds in winter, flies and dust in summer, and light and fresh air all year. If a sink or a toilet became disconnected, then whatever went down the drain ran out on kitchen floors or under houses. In many buildings, standing water and rubbish filled cellars. The kids saw all of this and could smell it, too. They knew which places to avoid. They knew which restaurant owners threw dead chickens and leftover food into their cellars and smelled up half of Marchessault Street.

  The kids were always running into gruesome things, like the time they’d seen that man run over by the streetcar. He was already dead, but that car had rolled back over him and forward again too. Eddy said the driver must have panicked. The three of them stared at that body. They saw funny things, too—like the time Uncle Yun bought a horse and buggy and it ran away with him. The kids decided Uncle was too kind to beat a horse into obedience. By the next week he’d sold the horse and had begun walking to work again.

  Today, when the kids went east across Alameda and down into the oldest part of Chinatown, they noticed a group of people standing at the entrance to one of the alleys. Sissee followed as Jennie and Eddy sidled into the crowd. It was another dead body—a casualty of a tong war. Again, they stared and stared, knowing that neither set of parents would let them out again if rumors were circulating about rivalries heating
up.

  “I guess that does it for us,” Eddy said. “All we’ll be doing is playing post office for a while.”

  “Eye for an eye,” said Jennie.

  “Two-for-one revenge,” Sissee added.

  “No matter who you are, the tongs will get you if you cross them,” Eddy concluded.

  Fong Yun, “Uncle,” was, like Fong See, born poor. But unlike his older brother, he was destined to die poor. Between 1904 and 1918, Uncle, a kind, warm-hearted man, worked as a virtual slave for his illiterate but wealthy brother. Earning a paltry fifty dollars a month, Fong Yun wrote letters in Chinese, read documents, perused packing slips, kept the Chinese books, researched the antiques his brother brought over, and went to China himself every couple of years to buy merchandise for the store.

  Fong Yun was a family man in his heart, but it was hard for him to be a family man when his wife and children were thousands of miles away. So he always saved his money, scrimping until he had enough to go home to see his growing family. In the last nine years he had made four trips to China—in 1909,1913,1915, and 1917—each of them lasting more than a year. Uncle would rather see his money disappear in time spent with his wife and sons than buy another carving or altar table.

  Uncle was the first person in the family to stay on Angel Island. Returning in 1910 from a buying trip to China, Fong Yun had been detained at Angel Island for a week with hookworm. He would always remember the wave of panic he felt before the board of special inquiry upon hearing their final pronouncement: “Inasmuch as the medical examiner of aliens at this port has certified that this alien is afflicted with uncinariasis, a dangerous contagious disease, it is the unanimous opinion of the board that he be excluded and ordered deported. From this decision there is no appeal, and he is so informed, and he is further notified that if deported his return trip shall be at the expense of the steamship company that brought him here. However, if hospital treatment is applied and granted in this case, and a cure effected, he will be admissible under the immigration law. Whom do you wish to notify?”

  “My brother,” Fong Yun had answered, and within two weeks—with his brother footing the medical bill of seven dollars and fifty cents—Uncle was on his way south to Los Angeles. But he would never forget the fear of that day, or the fact that he owed yet another debt of obligation to his brother.

  While Fong Yun stayed loyal to his family in China, his time spent with them only elicited excess household worry. Uncle’s wife, Leung-shee, from Low Tin village, was a foot-bound woman, high class, but very weak from a coughing disease no one could cure. When she deteriorated, Fong Yun found a no-name girl of the Leong clan from the neighboring village of Shuck Kew Tow to help out. Hired as a servant, the Leong girl understood that she would also be a concubine, for although Uncle was a poor man in Los Angeles, he was a prosperous man in Dimtao.

  Was it his fault that when he went back to Dimtao in 1913 and found Leung-shee too weak to perform her wifely duties, he turned to the servant girl with the wide feet of a peasant? Was it his fault that the servant girl gave him a son first? Was it his fault that Leung-shee only accepted him after the servant girl was pregnant, so that the child who should have been the first son turned out to be the second son? No matter. Leung-shee died and the servant girl became the Number One wife, acquired the proper married name of Leong-shee, hired a wet nurse to care for her stepson, Ming Ho, and bought a new no-name girl from a poor family to take over the chores. Relieved of her workload, the new Leong-shee devoted herself to her son, Ming Kuen.

  On Thanksgiving Day in 1918, Ticie busied herself in the kitchen. She had shooed out Dai-Dai, the fake Fong Lai, who ordinarily served as family cook. Her husband and children were two floors down in the basement warehouse “staying out of Ma’s way” as she prepared the meal. Enjoying the quiet and solitude, Ticie peeled sweet potatoes, scraping away the rust-colored skin to reveal the bright orange flesh. As she worked, she ran down a mental list of what still needed to be done. The turkey was stuffed and roasting in the oven. The cranberry sauce was cooling on top of the stove. She still had to make soda biscuits, mashed potatoes, and gravy—all last-minute tasks. She wanted the meal and the day to be as traditional as possible.

  Ticie understood that the more her Chinese neighbors knew about Thanksgiving, the more they thought all this work for one meal was unnecessary. No Chinese liked turkey; to them it was almost indigestible. Despite this, local missionaries pressed would-be converts into celebrating Thanksgiving—as well as Christmas and Easter. These were American holidays. If the Chinese were going to accept God and Jesus into their lives, they should also try to become American—in their dress, eating habits, and holiday traditions.

  Ticie considered this kind of thinking ridiculous. If you were Chinese, you should be able to meld Chinese and American traditions in whatever form you wanted. As an American who lived in Chinatown, she would celebrate this day with her family in her own way. In a nod to her Chinese husband and his workers, she added special ingredients—water chestnuts to the stuffing and fresh ginger to the pumpkin pies—to make the food slightly more familiar. She had chosen these sweet potatoes, though they were thoroughly American, because they were a common food in the Chinese countryside.

  During American holidays, Ticie often yearned for the company of other Caucasian women. Even though her family had disowned her—perhaps because they had disowned her—she often thought back on the holiday traditions her family had observed on the farm. In her memory, Christmas was a time filled with the scent of baking gingerbread. She remembered her brothers coming in with a fresh-cut tree, and her sisters-in-law putting aside their petty quarrels to work companionably in the kitchen, making dinner and wrapping modest gifts. On Easter morning they had all met at church and, in the late afternoon, sat down together for baked ham. She recalled the chill in the air on Thanksgiving Day, the promise of snow to come, and, again, the gathering of the family.

  In twenty-one years of marriage, Ticie had tried to make all holidays—both American and Chinese—joyous. When Chinese New Year approached, Ticie made sure that the children sent the kitchen god to heaven in a burst of firecrackers. Suie pasted up door gods outside the apartment and the various stores to keep evil spirits from entering during the festivities. Uncle, the only one among them who could read Chinese, decorated the walls with red paper scrolls filled with good thoughts: “May everything be according to your wishes.” “Wealth, high rank, and good salary.” “May we receive the hundred blessings of Heaven.”

  Suie took charge of planting narcissus bulbs in low-sided celadon dishes, knowing that if they bloomed in time for New Year’s the family would be rich in the coming year. He adorned the family altar with oranges to bring future wealth and good luck, tangerines to symbolize good fortune, and apples for peace. During Chinese New Year, Ticie stepped aside and let Dai-Dai take full charge in the kitchen. He cooked dishes that would bring the family good luck, paying special attention to good-luck-word foods. San choy, lettuce, sounded like the Chinese word for prosperity; ho yau, oyster sauce, sounded like “good moments.” The words for sticky rice cakes mimed the tones for “getting higher.” The bachelors who came by to pay their respects sampled Ticie’s rice cakes with gusto, for they implied possible promotion. They nibbled at her tray of togethernèss, each octagonal dish filled with a different treat: candy, so that everyone might say good words, candied lotus seed to have sons, candied melon for growth and good health, coconut for companionship, and watermelon seeds to “have plenty,” a salute to male sexual prowess.

  As a family, the Sees participated in the ritual events of the neighborhood. At night the younger children—Bennie, Eddy, and Sissee—helped their father hide money inside cabbage and lettuce. The next day, lion dancers pranced and writhed down the street from storefront to storefront, snapping at the lettuce that hung before each business, The dancers knew ahead of time that the lettuce in front of the F. Suie One Company would be generous. Another year’s good fortune assure
d, both for the See enterprises and for the charitable organizations of Chinatown.

  This year, as the heat of September and October finally ebbed and the younger children began coming home with construction-paper pumpkins, drawings of cornucopias, and stories of the Thanksgiving fathers, Ticie knew that she and her family had a lot to be thankful for. They’d made fifty thousand dollars in sales last year, and would top that this year. The stock was holding steady—$15,000 in Chinatown, $25,000 in Pasadena, and $15,000 at a new store on Ninth Street. It was a measure of her husband’s trust in his one real partner, Wing Ho, that he didn’t worry about the Long Beach store.

  In fact, Suie had been away for most of the year and had left her in charge of both the business and the family. He’d been traveling around the country, exhibiting and selling goods, then coming home for a few days or weeks, then going back out on the road again. When the influenza epidemic broke out, Suie was home just long enough to hire Mary Louie, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a produce man. She’d just started college when the epidemic started. When the school closed—as did all the schools in the city—she needed a job.

  Alone except for the workers—the old “partners” and Mary—Ticie confronted her fears and appeared brave before the children during the epidemic. It seemed she didn’t know a family that hadn’t lost a son or daughter to the illness that swept through the community. Her daughter’s friend Jennie had almost died. At night, Ticie had stayed awake listening to the ambulances as they screamed through Chinatown, taking the dead and sick to the hospital.

  Ticie turned to her neighbors to ask what she could do to protect her children. “Western medicine won’t help the fever,” a neighbor woman told her. “Chinese won’t get better if they take it. You should try herbs.” Remembering how she’d been healed of her smallpox by her father-in-law, she took the children to an herbalist. During the rest of the epidemic, they’d all worn bags of herbs around their necks. Fortunately, none of them had gotten sick. And finally, Suie had come home.