On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family Read online

  “Yes, I know that the Chinese find the combination of yellow and blue or mauve and gray attractive, but I am buying for American tastes,” he explained. “The people in my city won’t appreciate these colors together. I would like to see more of the two-tone rugs of light and dark blue.”

  Ming had learned from his father that time would always win out in this game. After several days, Ming might complete a deal and a dozen rugs would be rolled and packed for shipping. That merchant would grumblingly write up two sets of documents: one for customs with a false, low price, and another, true set, which would be hidden away by Ming.

  The more fluent Ming became in his Mandarin, the more Ray chafed at his own lessons. “Why should I spend my time learning a language, only to travel twenty miles and find that no one can understand me and I can’t understand them?” Ray asked his brother. Ray never received a satisfactory answer. As for the buying excursions, Ray raved at Ming, “How can you can sit in some dugout, hour after hour, nursing a cup of tea and pause between sentences and never arrive at a price and go back two days later and go through the whole thing again? This drives me crazy! I want no part of it.”

  No matter what he said, Ray couldn’t get his older brother to rebel. The pattern of their relationship had been established at an early age. Ming, as the firstborn, was entitled to the very best the family had to offer. Pa even plucked out the choice cheeks from steamed fish to give to his eldest son. Ming was being groomed to take over the store; Ray could only look forward to being a paper partner—all work, little pay, no respect.

  Ray knew that his parents had expected him to grow out of the malaise of his early teens, but how he could he? Memories of his childhood burned in his brain—his father’s raging, his mother’s quiet disapproval, his brothers’ mocking. In the store, his father would only let Ray wait on tourists—never the good customers. “Always some woman who wants to buy a pair of silk pajamas for her chauffeur!” he railed, but his complaints always fell on deaf ears.

  Just as Ming and Ray had begun to drift apart, so too had Fong See and Ticie. Fong See—after acting the powerful patriarch in the village and traveling as a man of respect and wealth—no longer listened to Ticie’s advice. She watched helplessly as, despite her objections, he bought property in the home village of Dimtao and in Fatsan, the commercial city west of Canton.

  When she questioned him about these purchases, he shrugged and answered sullenly, “I want a hotel in Fatsan. And I’m going to build a house in the village. It will be grand. It will be a mansion.”

  “Suie! We don’t live here! Why do we need a mansion in Dimtao when we live above the store in Los Angeles?”

  This particular disagreement was nearly as old as their marriage. In the past he might have argued with her. But now he only looked at her blankly. It seemed that every morning he left their compound and came back in the evening with another new property. “What are you going to do with a basket factory?” she asked. “It’s true we do a good business in baskets. Importing them has always worked just fine. But why do we need the headache of a factory?”

  “I’m the man. I do the buying,” he shot back.

  He was right, of course. He had always done the buying, but she had always done the selecting. She felt powerless against him. In China—where she was a foreigner who barely spoke the language—she had no power. She could only wait and see what would happen next.

  He came back from one excursion and announced that he had bought a factory to make fireworks. The younger children had been excited by this, but Ticie was angry. “Fireworks?” she fumed. “We’re in the antiques business.”

  “I can sell fireworks,” he responded hotly.

  “Suie, fireworks will lower the tone of the store.”

  But he didn’t care about her opinion. After all these years, he felt he knew as much as, or more than, she. In China he was a big man. He didn’t need her. Ticie took his new-found independence and self-confidence as an insult to her. The more he tied himself physically to China, the more she began to examine her own life. Questions that for years she had repressed raged to the surface of her consciousness.

  Why did he want to build a mansion in Dimtao? Why did he insist on appearing so grand before the villagers, exhibiting his deep pockets, bragging how he had made his fortune in the Gold Mountain? Most bothersome of all, why did he feel he needed to do all these things in China, while in Los Angeles she and the children still lived above the store? She tried to rationalize his excuses. Of course he felt indebted to the people of Dimtao for giving him the money to go to America. Of course he could make money, as he always had, importing both handicrafts and antiques. But with each passing day she saw him slipping away from her and into the arms of his mother country.

  Then, when she thought that her husband could no longer surprise her, he announced, “Eddy will stay in Dimtao when we go home. He take care of Grandma.”

  “Eddy?” she laughed. “He’s only fourteen.”

  “Fourteen a good age. I go to California when I am fourteen.”

  Nothing in her life had prepared her for the idea that Suie would consider abandoning a child to the backward village of Dimtao. Stunned, devastated, she found she couldn’t frame an argument, but could only say, “We can’t leave Eddy here.”

  “Eddy is the one.” Fong See explained that Eddy, as the youngest son, was the logical choice. According to tradition, he was responsible for the care of the old people—in this case, Shue-ying—as well as for the annual upkeep of the graves of the family’s ancestors. Ticie couldn’t dispute the importance of the Chinese tradition, but the idea of this separation pained her nonetheless.

  Eddy didn’t help. He said he wanted to stay behind in China. He loved it here. From their first days in Canton, she’d seen how quickly he’d picked up the language, how kind he was to the sedan-chair bearers, how he was always ready—when the rest of the family was exhausted and took naps during the enervating heat of the late afternoons—to go out and see “just one more thing.” She knew that he’d gone to bawdy houses. He was his father’s son, after all, and at fourteen he was old enough. The problem was, she didn’t want to lose him for what she recognized was a business deal.

  When Fong See said he wanted Eddy to stay behind to take care of Shue-ying, she knew that he intended her son to manage the new ventures and property. Again, she couldn’t win an argument with Suie about this, because he had come to America at the same age, worked hard, supported himself, gotten ahead. Eddy—with his father’s blood running in his veins—could do whatever job or duty was required of him.

  Her conversations with Suie took on a tone new to their marriage. They spoke in low, controlled, angry voices. “I want my son with me. I don’t want him here to take care of properties that we don’t need anyway.”

  “I can trust a relative,” Fong See replied, as though he had not heard her. “I can trust Eddy.”

  “I’ve helped you bring many of your relatives to Los Angeles,” she continued. “Why would I want to leave my son here when Wing and Dai-Dai and the others have done everything humanly possible to get out of China?”

  “Eddy stay here. Go school. Learn Chinese,” Fong See continued.

  “Never,” she responded. “One thing will lead to another. First he’ll be in school, then a go-between will suggest a betrothal, and we’ll lose Eddy forever. I’ll never get him back.”

  When Fong See insisted, she said, “Family’s family. I won’t allow us to be separated. We’re going back.” She told Fong See of her private cache of gold. “You can either come with us or stay behind. If necessary, I’ll pay our fares home.”

  In January 1920, after six months abroad, Ticie decided to cut short the trip and return home. She wired for Ray and Milton to come quickly to Canton. As soon as they arrived, Ticie and all of the children boarded a ferry bound from Canton to Hong Kong, where they would catch the Nanking back to the United States. Fong See chose to remain in China, ostensibly to oversee his busi
ness ventures.

  Amazingly, a time would come when Ray would exaggerate and embellish upon his time in China—that he had spent two “memorable” years in Peking, “collecting antiques and designing carpets for the family import business,” and that he was “completely fascinated by the incomparable beauty and ageless simplicity” of the antique furnishings he found in the homes of cultivated Chinese. In China, Ray would later tell reporters, he decided to “incorporate the venerable Oriental qualities into contemporary furniture geared to Occidental living.”

  Eddy would spend the rest of his relatively short life regretting that he hadn’t stayed in China. In future years, his imagination would magnify his lost opportunities. But even as his professional disappointments and resentments increased, he would evolve into the most “Chinese” of all the brothers. For Bennie, by contrast, his time in China would be an aberration in a life that would otherwise be simple and defined by American convention. Ming would return to Los Angeles with a hands-on education in Chinese art, which he would use for the rest of his life.

  On this trip, after twenty-two years of marriage, Ticie had distanced herself from Fong See. Still, as she stood at the ferry’s railing on that day in 1920, she refused to worry about the future. She reassured herself that her disagreements with Suie were only temporary, and that when he came home their marriage would go on as before.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 8

  PLAYBOYS

  1920–24

  BY 1920, the population of Los Angeles had risen to one-half million, and that number increased daily. In August of 1919, while the See family was in China, 21,000 people had come by train, automobile, and steamship to reside in Los Angeles. In the same month of the following year, the city doubled this number. During the 1920s, slightly more than 350 new immigrants—some longtime Americans, some fresh off the boat—would take up residence in the county each day. Intoxicated by their good fortune, they would help Los Angeles grow from a mere thirty-two square miles at the turn of the century to a languid sprawl of more than 390 square miles by 1925. This development would catapult Los Angeles from the tenth largest to the fifth largest city in population in the country, considerably irritating residents of San Francisco, who had long held that theirs was the most important city on the Pacific Coast.

  In this decade, average life expectancy in America would climb to fifty-five years. One out of every four American families would buy or sell an automobile, and the Ford Motor Company would go to market with a car that sold for as little as $290. Radio would become all the rage. Women would ponder the meaning of the first Miss America Pageant, and would take pride in the first woman senator, the first woman governor, Amelia Earhart’s adventures, and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

  Despite these sweeping changes, the two thousand Chinese who called Los Angeles home still weren’t encouraged to pass beyond Chinatown’s borders. They weren’t allowed in the Bimini or Brookside pools. (A Chinese would have needed a doctor’s prescription, and even that would have been a dicey proposition.) But distrust and suspicion worked both ways. To most Chinese, Caucasians were still considered foreign devils who could bring evil upon the neighborhood. During a school census, for example, residents of every apartment in China Alley had lit candles and hung prayers in front of their doors to ward off any evil the investigating teachers might bring with them.

  Ming and Ray had no interest in the superstitions and limitations of Chinatown. China, especially the luxuries of Peking, had expanded their horizons. When Ming and Ray returned to Los Angeles, they had exotic stories to tell. The boys were rich. They were sophisticated. And they were extremely handsome. Ming’s face was narrow and smooth like his father’s, while his hair curled in small waves like his mother’s. But everyone in the family thought that Ray was the more handsome. Ray’s lips were full. He had a tendency to tilt his head down, then look up through thick lashes. The effect was sexual, sultry, and irresistible.

  As the boys had changed, so had Los Angeles. When they were in high school, they had been ignored, shunned, excluded. With the release of each new Rudolph Valentino film—The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, or Blood and Sand—exotic sensuality became the epitome of male attractiveness, and Ming and Ray, with their Eurasian blood, found themselves increasingly popular. They looked for and found “Beverly Hills People,” “American Friends,” and “Jewish People.” (Although it could just as easily be said that those groups looked for and found Ming and Ray.) They were asked to clubs and dances. Women brazenly invited them out to dinner and to bed.

  Ray abandoned his resolution to “get the hell out of Chinatown.” In the first place, neither Ray nor Ming had occasion to socialize with what they perceived to be their backward Chinese neighbors. More important, Fong See was still in China. As a result, the entire family was freed from his tyrannical presence. The boys now had the luxury to spend their father’s money—drive fancy cars, buy expensive clothes and gifts, treat their new-found friends to evenings out—without having to justify a penny, listen to lectures, or obey any commands. They could, quite simply, do as they pleased.

  Still, shouldn’t Ray, with his dislike for his father, have broken away from Chinatown completely? He certainly could have looked for a job, and perhaps he may have, in a halfhearted fashion. But neither of the older boys had to work; all of their needs were provided for, all of their bills were paid. Why should Ray worry about “living in Chinatown” when he spent most nights sleeping between cream-colored satin sheets in the arms of some lovely woman who willingly accepted him into her bed?

  It was the twenties. Ray and Ming didn’t worry about a thing. What little work they did do became just another way to play and have fun. While their mother managed the downtown store, Ming and Ray spent most of their days out in Ocean Park, where they auctioned goods on the boardwalk. In this carnival atmosphere, the elder scions of the F. Suie One Company competed for attention with the roller coaster, dance halls, bath houses, and the splendor of Abbot Kinney’s Venice, just a few blocks away, where crowds clustered to view the curiosities: the charms of Madame Fatima, the snake charmer, and the man who “eats ’em alive!” Along the boardwalk, with its Italian deco buildings, Fong See’s sons set up a tent. To attract passersby, they kicked things off with a vaudeville show, or sold tickets to see the stuffed mermaid. Then they took turns standing on a platform and auctioning off antiques and curios. Customers paid with hundred-dollar bills. Money was coming in so fast the boys could hardly count it.

  Their take, considerable in the early years of this cash-crazy decade, was collected in a glass jar during the day, and spent in speakeasies, roadhouses, country clubs, and honkytonks at night. Since Prohibition was in effect, the boys hung out in Venice to the west and Vernon to the east, where “dry” laws were relatively relaxed. Sometimes they’d drive out to the Cotton Club, on West Washington in Culver City, and take over the whole place for a private party. But nowhere were Milton and Ray better known than at the Vernon Country Club, where the swankiest of the swank went to socialize and imbibe the best hooch. They liked to host big parties, hire Gus Arnheim’s band, and generally have a wild old time. Unlike the poor Chinese, who eked out their livings in Chinatown under constant fear from unfair laws and harassment, Ming and Ray encountered no racism. Instead they were accepted for their looks, their money, and their never-ending desire to have a good time.

  Ming and Ray cut a wide swath. They looked resplendent in their tuxedoes of exquisite cut. They wore their hair slicked back with bandoline. They could shimmy and tango from one end of the dance floor to the other with every girl in the place and have enough energy (and gall) to start again before the evening’s end. Unlike some of the other young men about town, who babbled silly nothings like “bee’s knees,” “suffering cats,” and “flea’s whiskers”—Ming and Ray could regale ruby-lipped maidens with tales of Peking and Shanghai, of opium dens and Russian princesses.

  Young women—their shou
lders powdered, their rolled garters showing just above their knees—could tell that these men were rolling in big bucks. They drove the fastest, most beautiful, most expensive cars. They knew the best bootleggers in and out of town. They talked constantly of their plans for making their millions. They had dreams of becoming big land developers, owning penthouses, buying buildings, opening their own nightclub. As most of the young ladies must have noted, to dream such dreams didn’t require any real work. These boys had a rich daddy who, it seemed, would buy them anything. Besides, what girl didn’t like it when a man talked oil? When Milton and Ray mentioned the family property on Signal Hill, there wasn’t a young woman in the county who didn’t know that gushers were blowing in out there almost every day.

  Milton’s days as a playboy were destined to be short. On June 11, 1921, in a civil ceremony in Tijuana, he married Dorothy Hayes, a contract player at Paramount. Dorothy, like many who interpreted the federal law against alcohol as all the more reason to drink as much as possible, drank far too much. Ming didn’t hold back either. Their early married years were one long, glorious party.