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

  The older children were enrolled in school and encouraged to take American names. (Kuen was renamed Charlie, Ho was renamed Danny Ho, and so on. Perhaps because he was from a different mother, only Danny Ho embraced his name, using it consistently throughout his life). Too old to begin in first grade, the boys started in an “opportunity class,” where they learned English and tried to catch up with classmates their own age.

  Everyone who knew Milton wondered how he could stay married to Dorothy. She was a gorgeous woman, all right, with big, dark brown eyes. She was petite and had delicate features, but these surface manifestations hid a troubled interior life. It wasn’t just that Dorothy’s manners were crude, which they were, but everyone recognized her for the tramp she was. “He’s too nice a person to be married to a woman like that,” people said behind Milton’s back. “But she has him under her thumb, and he’s so madly in love with her.”

  Milton and Dorothy didn’t care what anyone said; they were having a jolly time. They lived extravagantly. Milton rented a house out west, off Wilshire. Dorothy had affairs. Ming had affairs. They gave great parties.

  “Come and have another drink,” Dorothy would cajole her friends. “Be as crazy as we are.”

  “Dorothy won’t be happy unless you all have a drink,” Milton would add, topping up everyone’s glass with the best bathtub gin money could buy.

  At one party, Dorothy was so drunk that she stumbled and fell flat on her rear end on the heater grate in the living room. She sat there laughing, and everyone laughed along with her. When her friends finally got her standing again, they saw that the squares of the grate had burned straight through her clothes and into her flesh. She’d felt nothing.

  Most of their friends suspected that it was this aspect of his wife that decided Milton never to have children. Only a few heard Milton’s real reason. “I don’t want them to go through what I’ve been through,” he would say when his guard was down. “It’s not easy to be Chinese in this country.”

  Ming’s younger brother, Ray, focused on his ambition. Much as he would have hated the comparison, he was just like his father. Ray wanted to get ahead, to change his life. He thought for a while that Milton would go along with him. Buy real estate. Open a club. But Milton was so secure in the knowledge that the F. Suie One Company was his that he had, it seemed to Ray, become complacent. Milton liked life in the store, while Ray had spent years wanting to escape. Now that his father was out of the picture, Ray understood that it wasn’t Asian art or his brothers that he disliked about the family business. He didn’t care for the slow pace—the boredom of waiting for a customer to walk in, the weariness that overcame him as he followed the customer around the store, the monotony of price negotiations. He wanted to do something more exciting, where he could play a dynamic role. Now, with his brothers married or getting married, it was clear that one or two stores couldn’t support all of the families. With so many opportunities in the world, Ray wondered, why stay locked in the store?

  Ray listened to people when they came in the F. Suie One Company. Lucky Baldwin, one of the great real-estate tycoons in the city, had long been a customer. Lucky’s daughter also frequented the store on Seventh Street. One day she came in to buy some silk pajamas for her chauffeur. Ray had vowed to himself that this wasn’t the type of life he was going to lead, and here he was, doing just what he abhorred most—following some dame around the store selling bits of silk. But Lucky’s daughter had a passion for ivory carvings, and on this day she batted her eyes at Ray and asked, “But where will I put them all?”

  And Ray, like the son of his father that he was, responded, “We will build you a cabinet to put them in.”

  Then Ray went to Bennie, the one in the family who loved woodworking above all else, and said, “Do you want to go with me and open a factory, or stay with them and be a dutiful Chinese son?”

  Bennie answered simply, “With you.” Eddy also agreed to help out. In 1928, armed with a ten-thousand-dollar loan from Baldwin’s daughter, the boys opened See Manufacturing—“makers of fine furniture, mirrors, novelties, and objets d’art”—in one of the warehouses of the F. Suie One Company, down on Ceres Street in the industrial section of the city. The factory quickly caught on. With the boys’ Hollywood contacts, See Manufacturing got orders to custom-make furniture for Mae West and other prominent celebrities. Ray did the designing, while Bennie and Eddy built the pieces.

  Ticie insisted that everyone stick together. She didn’t want the boys going on their own without the security of the steady income that the Pasadena and downtown stores brought in. None of them wanted to model their business on that of Fong See’s. There would be no paper partnerships here. Instead they created a family pot. The profits from whatever new enterprise each child embarked upon would go into the pot, to be redistributed equally among the family members. Only Fong See wasn’t entitled to a share. He had made a choice to separate himself from the family. With the family pot, Ticie’s children widened the rift even further.

  While his brothers jockeyed for position and wavered between trying something new and sticking to what was familiar, Bennie maintained his usual equilibrium. He’d always relished the feel of wood, and now he spent his days doing what he loved best. From the time he was twelve, Bennie had insisted he would marry Bertha Weheimer. Now, with his future secure, Bennie followed through on his promise, driving Bertha down to Mexico to get married.

  In 1928, four years after her first date with Eddy, Stella still hadn’t released her tenacious grip on him or his family. She had patience. It was the same patience, the same obsessive focus that enabled her to concentrate for hours on designing a rug. Stella intuited that if she just stayed with the family, something would happen.

  Over the years, she had fallen into the Sees’ rhythm of life. On Tuesdays, Mr. White came for dinner. Sometimes Ticie would make Chinese food. At other times she sent Stella and Sissee down the block to buy thick steaks. On Wednesdays, Mark Robbins, a character actor from the movies, dropped by. He was a great friend of Ray’s, so on that night there’d be a lot of drinking and wild times. Mark liked Stella and gave her a parrot, which she then gave to her mother. On Fridays, Mrs. Morgan, who doted on Sissee, came for dinner. On Sundays, all the married couples came over: Milton and Dorothy, Ray and Leona, Bennie and Bertha.

  Stella realized early on that her main ally was Ticie, who was more of a mother to her than Jessie Copeland had ever been. Ticie was good and kind to Stella. Stella saw her as a very gentle soul. Ticie, in turn, had taken to Stella right away, recognizing the blue-eyed, red-haired girl as another lost soul like herself. Ticie hadn’t pried, hadn’t asked questions. She didn’t need to because Stella could have been Ticie herself: small-town girl, on her own, lonely, with no one to love her.

  During the last couple of years that Stella and Eddy had been going around together, Ticie found that she herself got lonely for the girl. “Did you see Stella today?” Ticie would ask her son. “Wouldn’t you like to ask her to supper?” To her daughter she would say, “Stella’s a good companion for you.” Ticie never noticed that Sissee had mixed feelings about Stella. On the one hand, it was wonderful to have a friend—Sissee’s first true friend since Jennie Chan. On the other hand, Sissee felt transitory pangs of jealousy. I am your daughter, she longed to tell her mother, not Stella.

  When Eddy came home with his pants ripped up the back after one of his evenings with Stella, Ticie decided it was better to keep them together under her roof, where she could make sure things didn’t go too far. She knew what it was like to be young, to be in love, and how a lifetime’s caution could be thrown to the winds. As the years passed, it had been easy for Stella to stay the night, or two nights, or three.

  Stella and Eddy continued to see each other. Part of the time, Stella stayed with her cousins in Los Angeles. Part of the time she stayed with her parents, who had moved down to Redlands. The rest of the time she spent with the Sees—either downtown or in Pasadena. These long driving
distances had made it difficult for Eddy to keep up with his premed studies at USC. Stella and Eddy were enough in love that neither of them felt bad when he dropped out. They just wanted to be together as much as possible. For Stella, that often meant using the excuse of helping Ticie or baby-sitting Ray and Leona’s daughter, Pollyanne.

  Now, in 1928, while Leona was out in the desert recovering from an illness, Stella stayed with Eddy’s mother and had Pollyanne to herself. Stella had such feelings for the baby. What a hard life she’d already had! Leona had almost died giving birth to Pollyanne. The obstetrician had spoken privately to Ray, and had told him that Leona was going to have twins, and that they were so tangled up inside that one had to be cut out to save the other one. Ray had been forced to choose which one would live. One baby had died, while Leona and Pollyanne had lived.

  “I love you, Pollyanne. I love you so much. I’ll always be here to take care of you,” Stella cooed, then nestled the infant’s sweet-smelling neck. How she longed to have a baby, a girl baby, of her own.

  Everything would have been perfect if Stella hadn’t had this terrible sore throat. She didn’t want to say anything to anyone, because she didn’t want to go home to Redlands, but she knew she couldn’t wait any longer, and finally told Ticie. “Ma, my throat is pretty bad. I’d better go home.”

  Ticie looked at her quizzically, but took the baby and said good-bye.

  Stella took the train out to Redlands, where Jessie and Harvey were living in an old shack with no windows and a dirt floor. Harvey was drinking an awful lot. Ted, Stella’s new baby brother, cried like nobody’s business. And Jessie, who had tried many times to have another baby, only to miscarry all except this one, didn’t have the energy to take care of the child.

  Stella’s throat worsened. Jessie made her daughter tea with sugar and lemon, but it didn’t help. Then the fever came. Stella overheard her parents arguing.

  “She needs a doctor,” Jessie said.

  “I won’t spend my money on that. The girl’s strong. She’ll get better.”

  Back in Los Angeles, Ray fretted over reports of an outbreak of diphtheria. “What if Stella has it? What if she’s given it to Pollyanne?”

  The baby seemed fine, but Ticie worried about Stella—the way she’d barely been able to talk, the way she’d been so embarrassed about leaving, the way her freckles had stood out on her pale skin. “Did Stella say anything more to you about how she was feeling?” Ticie asked Sissee and Eddy.

  “No,” Eddy answered.

  “She said her throat hurt like … well, it was hurting her a lot,” Sissee said. “She let me look in there once, and the back of her throat was really red.”

  “Eddy, I want you to go out and get her,” Ticie said. “We don’t know much about her people, but I want to make sure a decent doctor sees her.”

  By the time Eddy got to Redlands, Stella was delirious. Still, he had no trouble talking her parents into letting him take her. The mother seemed relieved; the father was too drunk to care. Eddy packed Stella in the car and listened to her harsh breathing during the long, dusty drive back down to the store.

  “Open your mouth, Stella. I need to see your throat,” Ticie ordered the girl after she’d been tucked into bed.

  Stella opened her eyes and looked up into that beautiful face. She would do anything Ticie asked. She opened her mouth and watched as Ticie involuntarily recoiled. That morning Stella had seen it herself in the bathroom mirror—great globs of green pus clinging to her inflamed throat like moss on a rock.

  “Get Dr. Lovejoy,” Ticie said calmly, recovering her composure. “Sissee, you take the baby over to Ray’s. Stay there until I come for you. Hurry along, both of you.”

  Later, the doctor came, burned away the pus from Stella’s tonsils, then said, “I’ll have to put her in the pesthouse.”

  Stella began to weep, but she knew there was nothing anyone could do about it. She needed to be quarantined.

  She never remembered much from the pesthouse, except for one time when she felt someone moving next to her in the bed. “Stop moving so much,” she cried out. “Stop that. It hurts me when you move like that.” Then she felt herself lifting up out of the bed and looking down to see not an empty bed, not just herself lying there, but two of her—one the wiggler, the other the complainer. She was twenty-three and had almost passed from this world again.

  After she had recovered, Stella helped Ticie, Eddy, and Sissee move into a house out west, on Maplewood Drive. Stella acted enthusiastic about Ticie and Sissee moving into what they called “a real house”—one without a store attached to it. But Stella didn’t really understand their excitement. What difference did it make if the family lived above the store? To Stella, the Sees had more, and lived better, than anyone she had ever met. But in keeping Ticie company and listening to her stories, Stella learned why the Maplewood house was so important. Fong See would never buy the family one, even when Ticie had begged and begged. When she talked, Stella could see that Ticie still carried a torch for Fong See.

  In late 1928, Stella’s persistence finally paid off. Eddy proposed. Stella couldn’t remember how it happened, so maybe he hadn’t proposed at all. Maybe it was just that they’d been on this track from the first moment he’d taken her down to the F. Suie One Company for dinner. All she knew was that one day she and Eddy were driving out to Redlands to talk to her mother and father and Grandma Huggins. No one seemed to mind that she was marrying a Chinese. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Grandma Huggins said a couple of things, but as soon as she met Eddy she decided he was a nice person. Besides, why would any of them object? They’d never really cared what happened to her. Ticie certainly didn’t object, and no one asked Fong See anything about it, although he did send over an immense pair of carved doors of red lacquer and gold leaf for a wedding present.

  On November 17, 1928, Stella, Eddy, Ticie, Sissee, and Mr. Preston (Eddy’s friend, the principal from Polytechnic High, to stand up for the groom) piled in the car and drove south to Tijuana, where they found a justice of the peace. It was a good thing that Ticie always carried money with her, because it turned out that Stella and Eddy were supposed to have lived in Mexico for so long and have health certificates and other documents. After Ticie paid a bribe, the justice of the peace asked, “Do you want the ceremony in Spanish or English? In English it will cost more.”

  Sissee said, “I took Spanish in high school. I’ll translate, if that’s all right.”

  So Stella listened to the justice rattle off his words while Sissee did her best to translate. Then they were all back in the car and driving north again. That night in the house on Maplewood, Ticie pulled Stella aside. She thought her mother-in-law was going to tell her about the facts. Instead, Ticie looked at her with those sad, kind eyes and said, “I don’t know, Stella. I love my son very much, but you should always keep a little money for yourself.” With that, Ticie kissed Stella, who then went into Eddy’s room for her long-awaited wedding night.

  CHAPTER 10

  DEPRESSION

  1929–34

  THE Chinese had known hard times for so long that the Crash, at first, didn’t seem significant. Those who were poor—the laundrymen and vegetable peddlers—kept at their jobs, working fourteen-hour days the same as they had since they’d first come to the Gold Mountain. To the more prosperous Chinese—who never would have gambled in the stock market—the Depression was something out there in the Caucasian world that could have no effect on Chinatown or their prosperity. For that reason, in the early years of the Depression, many risked opening new enterprises in the Caucasian parts of town, believing that the time must surely be right.

  Leong Jeung—the vegetable-peddling husband of Mrs. Leong, the Chinese-language teacher—had wearied of the hours required to keep a stall in the City Market. With money he’d saved, and a little borrowed from other local Leongs, he opened the Chinese Garden Café, two doors west of the intersection of Hollywood and Vine. Leong Jeung envisioned a dine-and-dan
ce place. He hired a four-piece orchestra, a woman singer, and cooks who could turn out steaks and chops as easily as chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo yung. His elder son acted as the maitre d’. His younger son, Gilbert, who’d just entered USC, wore a tuxedo and waited on tables.

  In the beginning, the Chinese Garden Café enjoyed fairly good patronage, but very quickly business fell off. At night, Leong Jeung watched as his wife counted out small change to make up Gilbert’s $350 tuition. Finally business got so poor that Gilbert had to drop out of school, and Leong Jeung had to close the restaurant and move back to Chinatown. Stories like these began to cast a pall on the neighborhood.

  The elder See boys also had minds and hearts filled with big dreams. Undaunted by their failure to push through the deal for the building at the corner of Bixel and Seventh, Milton and Ray found another building, on Wilshire at Berendo, almost directly across the street from the new Bullock’s Wilshire department store—one of the first big businesses to set the trend for the city’s westward migration. While Ticie continued to run the Pasadena store, the boys closed the Seventh Street venue and signed a climbing lease for the new space on Wilshire, which, at the beginning of 1929, seemed harmless enough. It was a beautiful building, with two stories and a sweeping staircase. Milton and Ray opened a store downstairs, then immediately got to work drawing up plans for a nightclub upstairs.