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

  Stella loved art; Aunt Cora had recognized that. Before her death, she’d instructed her brother to make provisions for Stella to attend art school. Stella applied to Otis and Chouinard. In the meantime she went to the Potboiler’s Club, which had been founded by Sigurd Russell, the son of actor Edmund Russell. The newspaper called the place a “hotbed of enthusiasm, cooperation and genius.” Stella thought that was true. People painted and drank coffee to all hours of the night. On Saturday nights they held dances—not that she’d ever join in, but it was fun to be there anyway. On Sundays, Mr. Russell had lecture programs. Once a month, people got together and put on a play. The Potboilers had an employment agency for artists, a swap bureau, even a newspaper called Art for Art’s Sake. She met plenty of interesting people there—all of them artists and bohemians. Stella figured she could count herself among them now, too.

  Then, before she knew what hit her, Stella fell in love. She knew the exact moment: Polytechnic High Graduation Day, 1924.

  Of course, she’d noticed him in Mrs. Stonier’s commercial art class, and anyone could tell that Eddy See was a Chinaman, except that his black hair was just a little bit brown, and instead of hanging down straight, it went every which way. He didn’t seem like those other ones down in Chinatown, with their faces cast down, too nervous to look at you straight on. Eddy didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. When he talked to the other kids, they all listened and laughed. And there were rumors around the school that Eddy and the principal were good friends. People said that when Eddy didn’t want to be in class, he would go down to Mr. Preston’s office and the two of them would sneak out the window and be gone for the rest of the day. Anyway, she was surprised when Eddy asked her out for his graduation-day picnic, because what on earth would he want with a kid like her? Hell, she couldn’t even dance.

  Eddy picked her up in his car. She’d seen Model T’s before, she’d even been in one, but never one like this. The interior had been stripped and redone in some woven straw material that looked like basket weaving. He said it came from the Philippines. But the most amazing thing was that the car jumped with life.

  “I hopped it up,” Eddy explained, as the car roared up a hill. “My third brother has one too. It’s faster than mine but not as beautiful.”

  Stella didn’t understand what he was talking about.

  “My older brothers, they go for the flash,” Eddy continued. “You know, a Packard, a Stutz, cars like that. I can’t keep track. Pa buys them new ones every year. But Bennie and I would rather see what we can do with our cars. With a little more work, I’ll beat them all.”

  Stella and Eddy were supposed to join the rest of the class at the beach, but they never made it. Eddy said he’d made a wrong turn—east instead of west. And maybe he had, but Stella could hardly believe it, if he’d lived here all his life. Even she knew which way the ocean was. All you had to do was head into the breeze and the cooler air.

  But Stella didn’t mind, because soon the ramshackle buildings on the eastern edge of the city became fewer and she and Eddy were on a dirt road heading out to the desert. The wildflowers were out, and they were surrounded by acres and acres of bright orange poppies dotted here and there with bursts of lavender lupine. Finding a cluster of palm trees, they pulled over and laid out a blanket and opened the picnic basket Eddy’s mother had packed. She’d made sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Best of all, she’d put in a thousand-layer cake from the Elite Bakery. When Aunt Cora was still alive, she used to stop sometimes and pick up petit-fours at the Elite, and they were all right, just too small. On Stella’s birthday, Cora had brought home one of these big cakes, and it had been like taking a bite out of heaven—a thousand little creamy layers and just so much pastry. Now Stella and Eddy had their own cake, and it seemed to mean something, although Stella wasn’t sure exactly what.

  They spent the afternoon there, eating, laughing, watching the dry wind shiver through the palm fronds overhead. Mostly Stella listened. She liked the sound of Eddy’s voice, and he didn’t seem to mind that she didn’t say much. And it was true! He said he really did climb out the window with Mr. Preston.

  “I don’t have much time for school,” Eddy said. “I’ve been to China. I’ve been to the Great Wall. Stella, life isn’t like school.”

  Stella said she understood. She also knew what it was like out of this city with its streetcars, tall buildings, and honking automobiles. She longed to tell him about summers spent on ranches in the cook tent with Mama, how Papa got drunk and got in fights, how people she loved seemed to die in the most awful ways. Instead, Stella kept her mouth shut and listened to Eddy’s tales of Chinese girls losing their eyesight from spending their days doing the forbidden stitch, of big brothers bargaining for woven rugs just outside the red walls of the Forbidden City, of men and women who did forbidden things—thank God he didn’t tell her what they were—for just a few American cents.

  A few days later, Eddy asked her over to his house for dinner. Ida helped Stella wrap bandages around her breasts, tightening them flapper-flat. While Stella brushed out the pincurls in her bob, Vernon gave her a pep talk. He was that way, always encouraging her. She knew her cousins had a special sympathy for her and everything she’d told them about Eddy, since they’d married against their parents’ objections.

  “Things can go either way,” Vernon said as Eddy’s car pulled up. “But Ida and I are for you, no matter what anyone else says.”

  Eddy drove her down the dirt roads of Glassell Park, across the Los Angeles River, and onto pavement. Stella was surprised when they passed Chinatown and went out along Figueroa. They pulled up at the corner of Seventh and Kip, in front of a place called the F. Suie One Company. It didn’t look like a house to her, and she wondered for a moment if maybe she’d made a big mistake. What if this family was a bunch of white slavers, like the ones Aunt Cora always talked about? The loud buzzing of an alarm greeted them as they entered the store, and Eddy called out, “It’s only me.”

  Stella trailed behind Eddy and stepped into another world. The smell here was musky, heady. She felt for a moment that she might faint. Darkness cast a gloom through the long room, and she blinked for what seemed an eternity, waiting for her eyes to adjust. When they did, she was afraid to move, everything was so cluttered. What she was looking at moved her in some strange way. The rich wood of the carved chests seemed to invite her to run her hands over their surfaces. Her eyes danced over floor-to-ceiling carvings attached to the walls. Statues of gods and goddesses—many taller than she was—stared at her, some welcoming, others stern and condemning.

  “I’d like you to meet my sister—everyone calls her Sissee—and my mother,” Eddy said.

  The girl with the ringlets! Behind her, that woman with the face as kind as you could ever hope to see.

  “So this is the little girl that my son has been talking about,” Eddy’s mother said, extending her hand and smiling. Her words washed over Stella, so cool, so calm, so gentle. Ticie put a hand on the small of Stella’s back and guided her through the narrow, uneven aisles to the back of the store and upstairs to the family quarters.

  Soon other people began to arrive. Bennie with his girlfriend, Bertha Weheimer. Ray with Leona. Dorothy came alone because Ming was out of town on a business trip. Eddy had said Dorothy was a knockout. “She has to be,” he’d said. “She works over at Paramount. Ming met her in a nightclub.” Stella had only read about people like that in magazines.

  Stella wanted to like Ray. He appeared big and sure of himself. He was handsome like a movie star, with dreamy eyes and swollen lips. But Stella had learned long ago how to recognize someone who didn’t like her. “We want Brother to go to medical school,” he said. “You’d better understand that right now.” Eddy had never mentioned anything about medical school, but that wasn’t the point. Stella and Ray just didn’t take to each other.

  While Ticie cooked, the family perched on straight-backed chairs set about a long wooden table in the brightly lit k
itchen. On the table Stella noticed chopsticks but no forks. When Stella began to finger them nervously, Bennie explained their purpose. “We use them like this,” he said, taking up the sticks and putting them in his mouth like straws, “to drink our soup.” When Ticie ladled soup into Stella’s bowl, she picked up the chopsticks and tried to drink her soup, but nothing came through. Everyone laughed, Bennie the loudest.

  Stella felt her cheeks redden and she thought she might cry, but then Ticie said, “You boys stop kidding the life out of this girl.” Stella couldn’t believe it, but they stopped, at least for a while. Once the dinner was laid out on the table, Ticie sat down next to Stella and showed her how to hold the chopsticks.

  The dinner was strange, no getting around that. Every so often Eddy or his mother expertly reached their chopsticks into the main dishes, plucked out a morsel, and plopped it into Stella’s bowl. What could she do but eat them? No one told her what they were, and she thought it was a good idea not to ask. She liked the food, sort of. The green stuff tasted like soap, but tasty soap, and those spongy white cubes and wrinkled black things floating in a brown sauce were oddly comforting. And by the end of the meal, she’d learned how to eat rice by holding the bowl up to her lips and shoveling the kernels into her mouth with her chopsticks.

  She learned other things too. They weren’t “Chinamen,” but Chinese. “When people call us that,” Ticie said, “it’s like calling a colored person a nigger.” Stella wondered why Eddy’s mother said “us,” as if she were Chinese too, but again, she wasn’t about to ask. Stella found out that those tiny feet were called “golden lilies.” Chinese women’s feet weren’t bound in an effort to subdue them to their husbands, Ticie explained, but because it was an old Chinese belief that they were graceful and pleasing to the eye. Ever since the new Republic, though, men had cut off their queues, and women had unbound their feet.

  As Eddy drove her home, Stella considered. She had never been around a real family—a family where everyone got together for dinner, where people squabbled good-naturedly, where people cared about each other. And that store, it had hypnotized her, seduced her, enveloped her in something—what?—forbidden, enchanted. Stella knew one thing for certain. She’d never been in such a beautiful, mysterious place, and she would do everything within her power to stay there forever and ever.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE KIDNAPPING

  1925–28

  DOWN in Chinatown, tongues wagged about Fong See’s divorce from his white wife, but during these years there was plenty else—good and bad—to keep everyone occupied. Electricity was installed, streets were paved, and sidewalks laid. Opportunities blossomed. In 1922, Y. C. Hong, a hunchback who had worked as an interpreter for the Immigration Service, became the first Chinese to pass the California state bar and spent the rest of his years in Chinatown doing immigration work. In 1924, Anna May Wong, the daughter of a local laundryman, starred as a scantily clad slave girl in The Thief of Bagdad, simultaneously scandalizing the inhabitants of Chinatown and creating a stereotype of the China doll/vixen that would tap into the lustful fantasies of men around the world.

  Chinatown was gradually becoming more westernized. In 1924, the Los Angeles Chinese Chamber of Congress met, hoping to correct the bad impression among whites about the enclave. By the end of the meeting, these honorable men had resolved that Chinatown was a good place for tourism and a safe place for women, accompanied or alone. The businessmen promised to suppress “rowdyism among the lower class of white people visiting Chinatown,” and invited one and all to drop by during Chinese New Year’s festivities.

  Two years later, in 1926, a teacher at the Macy Street Elementary School in Chinatown approached the Southern Pacific Railroad, which now owned the land under the old part of Chinatown east of Alameda Street, to ask if the area that had once housed the stables for the vegetable peddlers could be converted to a playground. Young and old came out to remove debris, haul stones, and smooth the land. Once completed, the Apablasa Playground had a sandbox, bars, slides, swings, and a field.

  The following year a group of boys from the Brethren Chinese Church formed an all-Chinese baseball team called the Low Wa, or Chinese Owls. Although Japanese businessmen had already sponsored close to twenty teams, and wineries and breweries had sponsored several Mex ican teams, Chinese merchants refused to pay up. They couldn’t understand the frivolity of the sport when there was so much real work to be done. As a result, no two Chinese Owl uniforms were alike: some were purchased secondhand from the Goodwill store, while other team members bought bits and pieces of new uniforms.

  Perhaps these changes inspired Uncle. In 1923, he approached his powerful older brother, saying, “I would like to go out on my own, but I need your permission.” Fong See remembered all of his brother’s hard work and granted him his freedom. “I will always be loyal to you,” Fong Yun promised. On May 1, 1923, he opened his own store at 807 West Seventh Street, across and down the block from Ticie’s new enterprise. Like other Chinese, Fong Yun formed a paper partnership with four partners. His only true partner in the Fong Yun Company was his dead sister’s husband, Jun Quak. Each of them invested two thousand dollars, enough to make them legitimate merchants in the eyes of the immigration officials. Sadly, Uncle wasn’t the businessman his brother was.

  Uncle had chosen an “exclusive white district” to set up shop, and, like Ticie, began to rent props and set pieces to the motion-picture studios. Goldwyn Studios, which sent a purchasing agent to see Fong Yun once or twice a week, was a particularly good customer, renting rugs, embroideries, screens, porcelain, and furniture. (Goldwyn Studios had once rented one of Fun Yun’s screens, valued at seven thousand dollars, for $150 a week. This was just peanuts. The studio had recently paid Fong See ten thousand dollars for set pieces for a street scene.) But the rent for Fong Yun’s location—a whopping $450 a month, while his brother paid a mere sixty-five dollars a month on Los Angeles Street—drained his resources. In 1924, during the greatest boom in the history of Los Angeles, Fong Yun carried thirty thousand dollars in stock, did seventeen thousand dollars in gross sales, and lost $1,070.

  Just one year later, Fong Yun lost his store due to an unfortunate combination of his distracted thoughts for his family in China, his high rent, and his kindly disposition, which rendered him weak in bargaining sessions. Yun went to his older brother and asked for help. Fong See stepped in and took over the business. Fong Yun’s emotional debt to his older brother grew even deeper.

  Despite Fong Yun’s failure, two of Fong See’s other “partners” also decided to go out on their own. Ho Wing, who had managed the Long Beach store for so many years, bought out his benefactor’s share. Now the Long Beach directory listed “Wing’s Chinese Art—Bronzes, Brassware, Cloissoné, Jade, Silk,” where “F. Suie One—Curios” had been before. The false Fong Lai, with a wife brought over from China to help him, opened the Chinese Art Company, at the arcade in the Jergins Trust Building in Long Beach. Immigration inspectors noted that the store was just forty by fifty feet, but that it was an up-to-date place with “an immense stock of goods consisting of vases, pottery, silk goods of all description, curios, ladies’ ware, shoes, slippers, wooden ware, blankets, and practically everything carried by similar stores.” Fong See’s “partners” had learned well.

  In addition to the loss of these partners, Fong See’s business had suffered a blow from which it would never entirely recover. He had been trying to achieve success ever since he had first set foot on the Gold Mountain. His dream was very “American.” He wanted to make money, have influence, be respected, have a wife and children who loved him. In 1919, when he traveled to China, he could look at his life and say he had achieved his dream. But once in China, he suddenly saw his life in a different context. In America, was he really rich? Could he live where he wanted? Did he make an impact on people? Did Americans care what he thought? Was he truly respected by his white customers, or simply enjoyed as “that funny Chinaman”? Had his wife and c
hildren ever shown him the deference he deserved? The answers played in his head—no, no, no.

  In this emotional state, he was seduced by his home country. His American dream turned into a Chinese dream. All that he had desired—respect, wealth, power—was actually possible in China. But his impulsiveness in marrying Ngon Hung—either as a business deal or out of physical desire—cost him dearly. Much of his success had resulted from his marriage to a white woman who could make customers feel comfortable. As her longtime friend Richard White said in a 1921 interview, Ticie was “the brains of the establishment.” She oversaw and directed everything, and she took that knowledge with her to Seventh Street. Fong See tried, ineptly, to replace his Caucasian wife by hiring another Caucasian woman, Helen Benjamin. He paid her a high wage—one hundred dollars a month—but somehow it just wasn’t the same. In 1926, for the first time, Fong See reported to an immigration inspector that the art store had shown a loss—two thousand dollars—but he expected to make it up in future profits.

  With this change in Fong See’s fortunes, immigration harassment intensified. After returning from a brief visit to China to see Ngon Hung this same year, Fong See found himself hounded for the birth dates of his children. He listed them all by their Chinese names—from his eldest son, Ming, to his new daughter, Jong Oy—but he couldn’t remember any of their birth dates. It took two months to sort it all out. Fong See anticipated that one day he would be able to bring over his new wife. He hoped she would rejuvenate him so that he wouldn’t turn into an old man.