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

  “Okay,” George Stanley answered, pulling up a chair and sitting down.

  Eddy smiled. He should have been the one doing the inviting, not Tyrus, but what the hell. What mattered was they were down in the basement of the store, hanging out and putting together a cheap meal. Over the last few months, Eddy had become good friends with Tyrus Wong and Benji Okubo, two students from Otis Art School who’d originally come down to the store to look at art. Tonight they’d brought along George Stanley, an aspiring sculptor. He’d been standing around looking dignified and nervous. Tyrus had been cajoling him to stay, but George couldn’t make up his mind.

  Tyrus cracked a salted egg to separate the white from the hard yolk. He squeezed a little too hard, and the yolk flipped up into the air, landed, and rolled across the dirty cement floor. Tyrus picked up the yolk and carried it over to the sink to wash it off. George abruptly stood up again, and said, “Oh, I just thought of something. I have an engagement. I have to leave.”

  As soon as George left, they fell over laughing.

  “The way the egg went flit!” Tyrus giggled. “It’s like a gold ball rolling across the floor.”

  “I have an engagement,” Eddy hooted.

  The more they replayed the scene, the funnier it got.

  Eddy loved being back in Chinatown. There was something about it that you just didn’t get out in the other world. Of course, everyone interpreted Chinatown through their own eyes. Reporters got a kick out of it. They weren’t just satisfied with tong wars, opium smuggling, prostitution, and gambling. One reporter in town for The New York Times had called Chinatown “a dark, crowded section, hot and thick, as full of mysterious ingredients as chili con carne, and as quick to burn.” The old Plaza, which lay directly across the street from the store, was “a hotbed of vivid, violent life, as fertile as Hollywood is sterile.”

  This wasn’t the world Eddy saw every day. He felt more like Louise Leung, the daughter of one of the city’s most respected herbalists, who’d gone to USC and was the only Chinese working as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Recently she’d written an article titled “Please, What Am I? Chinese or American?” She described how she ate toast and eggs and coffee for breakfast, and rice, fried tofu, and spareribs for dinner; how she wore western clothes, but her friends at the paper thought she should wear Chinese clothes; how her parents had never tasted cheese or butter, considering these dairy products an abomination. Eddy thought that Louise had done a good job of illustrating the delicate balance between the two cultures. Like Louise, Eddy also wondered how a person could place himself.

  So many of the old traditions and prejudices still held true. Sure, a guy could graduate from college, but no American company was going to hire a Chinese. A few were polite about it, but most weren’t. It was like those restaurants that posted signs that read “No dogs, Orientals, or colored allowed,” or the movie theaters where the cashiers hung up Sold Out signs when a Chinese walked up to the window.

  Eddy knew he didn’t belong out there. But did he belong here? He was happiest in Chinatown, hanging out with Benji and Tyrus, and yet …

  Eddy also had friends like George Wong. He’d come down from San Francisco in 1929, opened a fish and poultry store east of Alameda, then moved up to Spring Street after the demolition. He had an attitude about Caucasians that was different from the prevailing view when Eddy was growing up. “Caucasians are always coming into Chinatown to steal and rob,” George would say. “They come down here and take our pictures without asking us. I don’t like that. Then the Caucausian says, “Who in the hell do you think you are?’ I say, ‘I told you once. Don’t do it. Don’t do it! You do it one more time, you better get out of Chinatown—fast!’ Then they send us their policemen. There’s one who’s too sassy. He’s always looking down at us and calling us ‘yellow.’”

  Sometimes George would act out what he wanted to say to the policeman, brandishing an imaginary knife: “You want to start a fight? Come on. I’ll change your mind.” After some Chinese guys had gotten together and attacked the policeman, George scoffed, “The only difference between that policeman and us is that he wears a badge. If he were here today, I’d say, ‘Don’t call me “Chinaman.” Don’t say anything about my straight black hair. My hair is the same as your hair. Don’t say anything bad about Chinese people, or don’t come back to Chinatown.’ That policeman was lucky that day he got beat up. When in America, you follow American law, but if you insult me, don’t come to Chinatown!”

  Even though George didn’t like Caucasians, he got along with the See family. “You’re half and half,” he said. “You don’t cause trouble.” George was hot-tempered but a good guy.

  To Eddy, coming back to Chinatown had also meant seeing more of his father. This year, 1934, Fong See had bought all of the children from the first family matching four-door Plymouths. These were hardly the low-slung beauties that Ming and Ray had grown up with, but Eddy had read the gifts as a kind of peace offering. Then Pa had invited Sissee and Eddy to drive him and his son, Chuen, first to the Chicago World’s Fair then on to New York. It had been like the old days. Eddy and Chuen—so many years apart—had ogled a robot that spouted smoke, moved, and talked. In New York they’d gone to Macy’s and bought matching Lindbergh jackets and goggles.

  But Eddy was at loose ends. His job at the factory hadn’t worked out. His mind drifted when he spent the day running wood through a table saw. It drifted so much, in fact, that he’d lost a few fingers. Now, at twenty-eight, Eddy was making jewelry, learning from the man who owned the Jin Hing Jewelry Store, and spending the rest of his time in the store with his mother and Ming.

  Business at the F. Suie One Company had changed. Merchandise now settled into three categories: one-third for collectors, one-third for movie rentals, and one-third that the family planned to keep forever. Movie rentals were currently the most lucrative aspect of the business—if anything could be considered lucrative these days. Since the release of Broken Blossoms in 1919, the F. Suie One and F. See On companies had rented steadily to the studios. The films Shanghai Express, in 1932, and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, in 1933, had recently brought in particularly good revenue. Ma didn’t like to deal with the set decorators, because they were, according to her, “a rough-and-tumble lot.” So it fell to the boys to deal with the studios. But Eddy, as the youngest son, was consistently left out of these business dealings.

  How could a man fill time? Drink. Women. Work. As for drink—he couldn’t stand it. It made Eddy heartsick to see his mother drinking now. He felt powerless when his mother sent Pollyanne down to the corner store to pick up a bottle, or when she was too drunk to function. There’d been that night when Mary Louie, who worked in the store, had been invited over for Sunday dinner. Ma had started the day just fine, walking to the market, selecting a leg of lamb, bringing it home, and rubbing it with spices before putting it in the oven with peeled and sliced potatoes tucked around the edges. Ming and Ray were there that night, and kept filling Ma’s glass. Soon the roast was completely forgotten. Mary asked aloud why the brothers were trying to get Ticie drunk. Stella answered that it was because Dorothy and Leona didn’t like to be at the house. But Eddy thought that his mother just felt left out of things.

  Then there were women. Eddy had been married to Stella for six years and had known her for ten. Some days he just couldn’t stand the way she nagged him, the way she always complained about how hard things were, as if they weren’t hard for all of them. He couldn’t stand the way she followed him around, dreary and reproachful. So, with time on his hands, Eddy had discovered the pleasures of a dalliance. The woman he chose was a friend of Ming’s. Helen Smith had been coming into the store, covering up her flirtation with inexpensive purchases: twelve nut cups for a dollar, a chop suey bowl for forty cents, a tablecloth and napkins for eighty-seven cents. Eddy thought the affair with Helen was harmless. Besides, Ray and Ming did it all the time and no one seemed to make a fuss.

  As far as work was conce
rned, everyone talked about Ray’s dreams, Ming’s dreams, but no one ever thought about Eddy that way. He had dreams. He often fantasized about the life he could have had if he’d stayed in China in 1919. He’d be wealthy, powerful, always in touch with his father instead of just seeing him walk past the store every day and watching his mother pretend to be on the lookout for the mailman while everyone—and he meant everyone in Chinatown—knew that she was pining for him. Eddy had a vision of life that involved art and beauty, but Eddy wasn’t an artist. Oh, he was handy, all right. Everyone in Chinatown knew they could come to him to fix a broken lamp or make a picture frame, but that wasn’t the same as actually creating something.

  Then he’d met up with Benji and this whole art group. Benji Okubo was a Japanese guy—strange, loony, bohemian. He’d grown up in Riverside, then studied art at Otis on scholarship, earning his keep as a busboy in the cafeteria, mopping the floors and taking home leftovers for dinner. He wore long sideburns that he twisted into spit curls. He liked to tuck his collar under, and wear his shirt open down to his navel. Sometimes he wore an ankle-length overcoat, and stood with his arms crossed, looking foreboding. Now he divided his time between the Art Students’ League and a barn off Alvarado where he taught painting.

  Tyrus was born in China but had been around Chinatown for a long time. He was a scrawny little guy and talked like a character in a movie. He was funny, and a great artist. Tyrus lived with his father—a lookout for a gambling den—in one of the boardinghouses for single men. Tyrus had started dropping by the store, and soon Ma had begun asking him, “Have you eaten yet?” Tyrus had stayed, and they’d become fast friends.

  Then there was Eddy. He had a loose way about him. He liked his clothes on the baggy side to allow for expansive gestures and to have the freedom to perform whatever task someone asked of him. He was certainly huskier than Tyrus. Eddy’s hair was unruly and long, but hardly the wild cut that Benji preferred. And while Benji had those spit curls, Eddy had grown a goatee.

  If anything tied them together, it was their admiration for the artist Stanton MacDonald-Wright, who had founded the school of Synchromy in Paris with his friend Morgan Russell. MacDonald-Wright had eventually abandoned Synchromy, claiming it had become stultifying to him, and moved back to California to take over the Art Students’ League. The artist—who was now using Chinese and Japanese motifs in his own work—encouraged his Asian students to look to their roots for inspiration. But when Eddy looked at the work, he wondered who was influencing whom—MacDonald-Wright his students, or the students their teacher.

  So here were all of these Asian artists and artists inspired by Asian art, and no one paid attention to them. Sure, some of them, like Tyrus, worked for the WPA. But it wasn’t the same as acknowledging them. This was where Eddy’s idea of work came in. Eddy talked to his mother and Milton. “We have the mezzanine,” he said. “Customers don’t go up there. It’s not a great place to show merchandise. We could open a gallery.”

  The first exhibit featured Tyrus’s work—lithographs, prints, and paintings. Then Eddy mounted a combined show with Benji, Tyrus, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, and three other artists, Hideo Date, Jake Zeitlin, and Jimmy Redmond. The show had been so successful that the Community Arts Association, Public Library and Art Gallery of Palos Verdes Estates had sponsored another. The gang had all snickered over that show’s brochure, which praised Tyrus as an “ardent admirer of Michael Angelo [sic], El Greco and the Chinese masters of old.” Next April, Hideo, Benji, and Tyrus would have an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

  But they were all still stone broke, which was why most nights—like tonight—the gang came to the store and went downstairs to the basement to hang out and eat. Most evenings they only had enough money to make fan jiu, crusty rice boiled in water, flavored with a little “bug juice,” Benji’s name for soy sauce.

  “Hey, Benji, you know that girl, that Caucasian girl, who went to Otis for a while?” Tyrus asked. “She tells me she wants to be seduced by Wright. Why not? All the girls want to go to bed with him. She goes over to the Art Students’ League. You know what happens?”

  “We’re going to hear about it whether we like it or not,” Benji said.

  “That guy’s so smooth. He says to her, ‘God created millions and millions of little girls. Will this one little girl be a little bit naughty?’”

  Everyone laughed, and Tyrus went on, “I say to her, ‘What’s the highlight?’ She says, ‘He wore silk stockings.’“

  “Silk stockings?” Eddy asked.

  Tyrus moved on in his typical jumpy style, telling a story that they’d heard before. “Everyone knows that it’s the thing to make sketching trips to Mexico. It’s only two or three hours away, and then you’re in a foreign country. The scenery, the colors, everything is different. My friend says, ‘Let’s go to Mexico for the day.’ I think, he’s got a big black Packard, what the hell? So we’re coming back across the border and I don’t have my papers. The immigration man says, ‘You have to go to Mexicali.’ That’s a hell of a long way, you know? My friend, his wife, his daughter—they’re all in the front seat. We’re driving through the desert and I’m as sick as a village dog. We get to Mexicali. They say, ‘No, no, no. You have to go through Tijuana.’ I go back there and wait and wait. I’m there for about a month.”

  “You weren’t incarcerated,” Benji interrupted. “You were free to roam around. Did you sketch?”

  “I couldn’t! I was too scared!”

  “A Chinese family befriended you,” Eddy said. “They took you home.”

  “Yeah,” said Benji, winking. “And they had a daughter.”

  A lot of this badinage was to keep Tyrus from brooding about a Chinese girl who worked in the drugstore down the street. He’d told them how he’d spotted her in a bookstore and been smitten. He’d asked a friend if he knew her.

  “That’s Ruth,” his friend had told him. “She won’t be interested in you. She went to UCLA, and you didn’t even finish junior high.”

  “I’m going to ask her out anyway,” Tyrus had responded. Later he’d gone up to Ruth and said, “Can I buy you an ice cream cone?”

  “No thank you,” was all she’d said, and turned away. Tyrus’s friend was smug: “I told you she wouldn’t be interested in you. I told you, and you wouldn’t listen.”

  Eddy and Benji tried to keep Tyrus off the subject of Ruth, because if she came up he would gloomily repeat over and over again, “Geez, I’m hit with a sledgehammer.” As an artist, you didn’t have to worry too much about fitting in and being American, Eddy thought, but you could still worry about getting the girl.

  Drink? Women? Work? None of these things interested Eddy that much. He loved a dumb joke, preferably a dumb dirty joke. He loved hanging out with his pals and trading silly stories. He loved to have fun. Now all he had to do was figure out a way to have fun and do a job that he liked.

  CHAPTER 11

  MEMORIES: TYRUS TELLS HIS STORY

  SOMETIMES people ask, “Do you miss China?” I don’t know. I don’t remember that much about it. I remember a stove used to be in one corner of the house. I remember we used to hang our food in a basket from a hook in the ceiling, so that rats wouldn’t eat it. I remember a brick sticking out just so in front of our house. One time I fall down there. No, actually, I’m lying in my grandmother’s lap and she drops me and it hit me here like that! Bam! I still have an itty-bitty scar right here, see? We had one family on one side, another family on the other. On one side is an opening and when it rains the water would come down inside. On the other side everyone keeps their pigs. Grunt! Grunt! And chickens too. It wasn’t very sanitary, not like here.

  In China we didn’t have baseball or games like that. We play with flying bats. You take a pole and try to hit them. Oh, we have hundreds of them at night. You whack them and they squeak like this—eek-eek. They show their teeth like this. During the summer we had cicadas. They make a tremendous noise. You get a long pole and that Chi
nese rice tamale, na maw, you know that yellow one? And you pound it and pound it and put it on the end of a pole. You catch the cicada with that sticky rice, see? You put it in a cage and take it home. When it dies you give it a decent burial.

  My father had a job in Sacramento helping out a grocery man. In those days finding a job wasn’t too easy, but my father saved his money and he came to get me. I was nine years old. We went to America on a ship called the China. The Nile was the smallest one. The Nanking was a bigger one—a sister ship to the China—like the one you guys go on. Maybe we see each other at sea, because it was about the same time. That would be a funny thing. There were three of us in one room on the boat—my father, myself, and one other guy. It was the first time I used a toilet. You know how you lift up the lid and then there’s this horseshoe-shaped seat? When I lift the lid up I think, What’s this horseshoe thing? I think, You can’t possibly sit on this. So I swung my leg over it like this. A steward comes and yells at me, “You sit down like this!” He scared the heck out of me. You know how they say “a slow boat to China”? This was a slow boat from China. It took us about a month—not too bad.