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

When we get to Angel Island, I go one way and my father goes another. My father already has his papers. He can go ashore, but I have to stay on Angel Island. The women were in one place, the men in another. I was with the men. The guards give you three meals a day. They open the gate and blow a whistle, wernk, and you run down these long steps and eat as fast as you can. Otherwise the food would be gone. Lunch, the same thing. Dinner, the same thing. They have that choy—that Chinese green—and maybe some meat, and a great big pan of rice. Eat as fast as you can, run back up those long stairs, and they close the gates like a jail until the next day.

  For a pastime I had chewing gum, American chewing gum that the guards gave me. You know how you chew, chew, chew. We had these steam-heat radiators. I’d stick the gum in there and let it run down. I’d sit there and watch it, then chew, chew, and let it run down there again. It was a way to pass the time. I didn’t play cards or write poetry like the grownups.

  I was a kid, so they made me take the top bunk. They had one, two, three, you know? All that steam heat up there? It was hotter than hell. You could almost touch the ceiling. From up there I could watch the men writing their poetry on the walls. Some people did beautiful calligraphy. They were real educated, but a lot of them died in there. Maybe they had problems with the questioning and answering. Sometimes if they stayed inside too long they would commit suicide. They would never get out and they couldn’t go home. Too much disgrace. The officials asked the women embarrassing questions. How many times do you sleep with your husband? How many times in a night? Some of them just can’t stand it. The Americans didn’t do that to any other nationality, not even the Japanese, because they were a stronger nation in those days. My father sent me a note and a man slips it to me under the table. It says, “If they ask you such-and-such, you be sure to answer like this.” They never did ask me that question. They knew that the answered questions were fake, but it was all for red tape. I was there for two weeks but it felt like two months. That’s Angel Island.

  Then we are in Sacramento. Right next door is a man who paints landscapes copied from postcards. My father would say, “You take lessons from him.” At the time we thought he was pretty good, but now I look back and think, geez, he was just copying postcards. A couple of Caucasian ladies live on the other side of us. Old, old ladies. All night long they are hacking and coughing. One lady, her hair is all white like a ghost. She never goes into the sun at all. Her hair is long like a witch. She scared the hell out of me.

  My father is a cobbler for a while. He is a partner with this Caucasian guy. My father, what did he know about fixing shoes? He would come home and his fingers would be all cut up. That Caucasian man cheated him out of the business. What could my father do? I felt sorry for him. He got a raw deal.

  So he comes here to Los Angeles for more opportunity, and I’m alone in Sacramento, sharing a room with four men. I helped in a store during the day. At night they had a restaurant. I bring bean sprouts over there from the basement where they had these big cockroaches. It was pretty bad, but I learn how to cook there.

  Did I say I went to McKinley Grammar School? Most of the kids were Caucasian. I remember one time we had this spelling bee, and the boy in front of me kept twitching around. If you did that, they’d take a credit off your line. I got so mad I said, “For Christ’s sake, George, sit still.” Only I don’t say “for Christ’s sake.” I say “for crysake,” because I think it is one word. I didn’t know that “for crysake” was bad. I didn’t think it was a dirty word, not a cussword like a four-letter word. Miss Lockhart makes me stay after school for three days. I didn’t know about that. For Christ’s sake! I knew a four-letter word that was a bad word. But “For Christ’s sake, George, sit still” was bad too? The teacher says, “Don’t you ever do that again, Ty.” I’m crying, going a-woo-a-woo. But then she is shaking me and her wig is coming down lower and lower. I burst out laughing. That makes it worse, but it’s not my fault.

  When you look at this face it’s kind of an angelical face, but I was a bad kid. To tell you the truth, it was the language barrier. I was cute when I was small, but I didn’t speak much English. I still don’t speak much English. I remember a song we used to sing, “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.” But I thought it was, “Columbus, Jump in the Ocean.” If we had a fight, they’d send me to the principal and I’d point and say, “Him. Him.” It was an action thing to prove that a boy hit me. If the teacher says, “Tomorrow I want you to bring in a current event and make a report to the class,” I don’t know what she means. What’s a current event? I don’t have a newspaper. In Sacramento, I’d buy the Sunday paper, read the comics, wrap it back up, and sell it again. That’s what I’d do. Most immigrant kids are good in arithmetic because everywhere the numbers are the same. Everyone was good except for yours truly. I wasn’t any good at all.

  So pretty soon I take one day a week to be “sick.” I go fishing in the park. I think that fishing’s pretty good. Then I play hookey for two days, then four days in a row. Finally, what am I going to say for an excuse? That I had an ulcer? That I had a headache? Finally I was absent for about a month. Miss Hansen, my new teacher, says, “Ty, you are a very bright boy, but I can’t teach you if you’re going to be absent every day.” She’s crying about not promoting me. Father got her report in Los Angeles and had it translated. Right away a letter comes with money and instructions to come to Los Angeles. When I got off the train, my father hit me for doing so badly.

  Then I am maybe eleven or twelve years old and we are living in Chinatown in a community house for single men on Ferguson Alley. The men come and go. When they find a good job, they leave. We are all sharing one bathroom and one sink, with cold water only. We have a tiny room and gas heat which is always hissing like this—sssssssss. We have one lightbulb. We have one wash pan. To get water you go down to the bathroom.

  My father is working in a gambling house. He’s a dealer—four, four, four. Fan-tan all day, all night. There are maybe two or three gambling houses in Chinatown at that time. Hardly any Caucasians in there—just Chinese people and some Filipinos. It’s not like in the movies, with hatchetmen.

  We’re right next door to a house of ill repute with about three Chinese girls. There are even some Caucasian girls. Can you imagine that? When those girls get old, they’re out of business. What do you think happens to them? Sometimes a customer would refuse to pay and the girls would chase them out in the street, cussing them.

  We’re sharing a room with a lot of other men. We all slept on these cots, only the bedbugs are so bad that they put the legs of our cots in little pans of kerosene to keep them from crawling up. When that doesn’t work, you take the bugs and squish them between your fingers and thumbnail. All that blood? That’s your blood, see? You pull back the sheets in the morning and see streaks of blood. That’s your blood. They eat you alive.

  My father sends me to Pasadena, to the Methodist school. We have a whole bunch of foreign students—from China, from Russia, from Mexico. I’m also working. My first job is working as a houseboy for a buyer at I. Magnin. She’s a nice lady. Well, I only met her once. She left five pieces of chocolate and fifty cents on the mantel and says, “All you have to do is dust the furniture and sweep up.” I think, This is a nice job. Fifty cents. Five pieces of chocolate. I start getting lazy. What happened? I sweep everything under the carpet and spend the rest of the time looking at a magazine. Then I take my fifty cents and go home. She says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think you can do the work. I have to let you go.” I feel like a heel.

  Then I read in the paper that a family is looking for a schoolboy to help on weekends. The lady lives on Belle Fontaine. I remember this clearly because I used to call it Belly Fontaine. “I want you to help me with the breakfast and so forth,” the lady says. Then she asks, “Do you iron?” “Yeah, well, I know a certain amount of it,” I say. She brings out a basket. I swear it was this big and it was full of sheets. I had to iron, iron, iron. I thought, this is awfully hard for fifty
cents.

  At night the son comes in and says, “I’ll show you to your room.” He takes me to this room and says, “This was my brother’s room. My parents left everything the way it was.” I say, “What happened to your brother?” “He died.” “He died?” I ask. He says, “I want you to stay in this room and be comfortable.” But Chinese people believe in ghosts. I pull the covers over my head. I won’t put my hands on my chest because I’m afraid there’ll be a ghost. In the backyard they have some pigeons, and they’re cooing all night long. Boy! I sweat, sweat, sweat. This is a good thing, because if I didn’t sweat I might have wet the bed. Anyway, the next morning the lady gives me toast and eggs and a glass of milk and I think, Now it’s time to take it easy. Then she brings in another basket of clean laundry. Iron, iron, iron. I say, “This is Sunday. I have to meet my father. Can I go and meet him?” “Be sure and come back now,” she says. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be back.” I never went back. Not for fifty cents.

  All this time, I’m going to school. But I told you I’m not good at school. I’m only good at one thing. Art. I like to draw cowboys and things like that. Even when I’m in China, they had a drawing class and the teacher would put a thing like a turnip on the blackboard. I wasn’t in that level, but I would draw the turnip anyway. So I’m at Ben Franklin Junior High and drawing all the posters for the school. The principal noticed, and said he would try to get me a scholarship to art school. “What’s a scholarship?” I ask. “They give you money,” he says. So I get a scholarship to Otis for one summer. I’m the youngest one there. From the window I can see my father waiting for me across the street in Westlake Park. The other students are laughing all day. “Who’s that man? Who’s that funny Chinese man?” I don’t say that’s my father, but at lunch I go over there and he gives me a pork sandwich from See Yuen.

  I love art. Sometimes after class, when I’m walking back to Chinatown, I stop at the library. I look at the Japanese sumi-e painters. I learn if you put down just what’s necessary to make a point, you will have a great painting. If you can do a painting with five strokes instead of ten, you can make your painting sing. I look up the Chinese brush painters of the Sung Period. I learn that nature is always greater than man. It is the balance and harmony between man and nature that is important.

  All this time my father is trying to help me. He had been well educated in China. He could recite poetry, stories, legends. My father is not an artist, but he appreciates fine calligraphy and makes me practice my calligraphy every day. We don’t have enough money for ink. I use water on newsprint so I can use it again and again. Sometimes my father sees art on the street. I don’t know, something like a sign for spaghetti. He says, “See how the steam is painted? See how it looks like it’s real? That is good art. You make it look like that.”

  Sometimes I think I hate my father. He is so strict. You remember that playground down on Apablasa? My father’s doing bootlegging down there in a little shack. For fifty cents or a quarter my father will sell you a jigger of his stuff. It’s real rotgut. Anyway, I used to sneak down there and play baseball. If I saw him coming, I had to drop everything and run like hell. When he caught me, he would yell, “Look, you got two hands. Suppose you break one of your fingers. You’ll ruin your whole life.” Or sometimes he says, “You’re very skinny. You have to do something that will fit you physically.” When you’re a kid you don’t think about things like that. You just think about ditching school and fishing in Westlake Park.

  One time he takes me to meet this man who does buckeye painting. You know buckeye painting? Well, it’s a formula. The sky is a certain blue. The mountain has a little snow on it. Down here in this corner is the same old tree. There’s a pond with a reflection. Maybe you get paid twenty-five cents and the man sells it for five dollars. It’s not a work of art at all—just a quick thing you do. You do half a dozen, then go home. My father introduces me to this man, Ingerholt, who does buckeye painting. My father says to me, “He’s good.” My father says to Ingerholt, “Will you teach my boy to paint like that?” You know what that guy said? “You don’t want to paint this shit. You go to art school and learn the real thing. You learn how to draw and paint real well.”

  When the scholarship was up, it was time to go back to regular school. I didn’t want to go back. My father says, “Is this what you really want to do?” I say, “Yes.” So he borrowed the money—ninety dollars. That was a lot of money! Later I got a five-year scholarship. I never finished regular school. That’s why my English is so bad.

  But I earn some money while I’m in school. There’s this movie producer who likes to go to Africa and hunt animals. He asks me to come over to Reseda and do a painting job. He has these animal skins everywhere. The seats at the bar have zebra skin. There’s a lion on the floor. He says, “I want you to paint some monkeys on this panel.” So I paint some monkeys. They’re hanging from their tails and look like a bunch of grapes. That man comes in and looks at it. “Very good. Nice job. But tell me, Wong, I’ve seen thousands of monkeys. What type is this?” I don’t know what to say. I’m using my imagination. Finally, he says, “Well, I like it,” and he pays me one hundred dollars.

  Another time, the people at Otis say, “There’s a company on Hollywood Boulevard that wants an artist to do a sign for them. You want to go?” I say, “Sure.” I go over there and the man says, “You see that building way up there? I want a sign ten by twenty feet.” I say, “Sure.” We go back inside and the man says “We manufacture women’s brassieres.” I don’t know what a “woman’s brassiere” is. Chinese people never talk about things like that. My father never tells me things like that. I say, “I don’t know what that thing is. I’ve never seen one.”

  The man looks at me. “You’ve never seen a brassiere?” He says to his secretary, who’s about fifty or sixty and quite chunky, “Why don’t you show the boy what a brassiere is.” She goes away and comes back with the brassiere over her dress. I went back to school and I think, is that to keep their chest warm or what? I look at the model in art class, draw a brassiere over her, and take it back to the man. He says, “Okay, I’ll give you thirty-five bucks for it.” They have someone else to go up and paint the thing. My father takes me down to see it. He stands there and says, “I’m proud of you.”

  CHAPTER 12

  DRAGON’S DEN

  1934–35

  SOMETIMES—perhaps just once in a century, if a family is lucky enough—there comes a time that appears perfect. It lives on in dreams and memories. It’s seductive to children and grandchildren who wish they could have been there. It’s a time filled with exotic and interesting people dressed in exquisite clothes, who speak in the sultry voices of romance and intrigue. It’s a place where people use ivory cigarette holders, drink, and act elegant, and nothing bad ever happens to them. It’s a place that’s mostly found in the movies, but for a few short years it became the domain of Eddy See and his cohorts.

  It began on a night in late 1934, with dinner in the basement of the F. Suie One Company on Los Angeles Street, and a conversation that is as mysterious and elusive as Dragon’s Den itself. Eddy, the youngest son of Ticie and Fong See, probably would have been stirring up some tomato beef on the hot plate. Stella, Eddy’s wife, would have been keeping four-year-old Richard amused. Tyrus Wong and Benji Okubo would have pulled down the table that hung from the ceiling, and Sissee would have gotten out the chopsticks and bowls. Later, as they lingered over fragrant cups of tea, their talk would have turned inevitably to art, dreams, and fortunes not yet made.

  “Eddy, you should have another show upstairs,” Tyrus said.

  “Yeah, it was good for you,” Eddy answered in his teasing way. “I hung the damn thing. I did the work. You guys got the glory.”

  “You did the work?” Benji snorted.

  “It was a great show,” Eddy said. “It was good work. But listen, there’s no money in it.”

  They pondered that for a while. Art was great, but could you make money at it? Benji c
ertainly didn’t have what anyone could call a livelihood. Tyrus had been a prodigy at Otis, but they’d all been entertained by his tales of trying to earn a living as an artist. Sissee was still working at the weather-stripping company for two dollars a day. Stella had given up her fledgling career as a commercial artist to become a full-time mother. And Eddy? The gallery up on the mezzanine wasn’t going to put bread on the table. It was like the store in that way. People still loved art, loved beautiful things, but no one had money to spend on luxuries.

  “We have to figure out what people need,” Eddy said.

  “Sex,” offered Benji. “You take the wife and I’ll take the sex.” They had heard this line from him before.

  “Food,” suggested Tyrus. They all laughed because he’d always been skinny.

  Then Sissee echoed, “Food.”

  There was something in the way she said the word—so soft, so considered—that Eddy said, “Hey, let’s open a restaurant.”

  At first it seemed out of the realm of possibility, but as they talked it began to make sense.

  “What’s the competition?” Eddy asked. “There’s Soochow, Man Gen Low, Tuey Far Low, Grand East and Grand View. Then there’s Yee Yung Gooey—a total disaster as far as an American name for a restaurant.” They all thought about that place. The kitchen was exposed, sawdust lay on the floor, and customers selected their chopsticks from a dirty glass set on the table. No amenities, just a place where single men could get the soup of the house, a single main dish, a bowl of rice, and tea for twenty-five cents.