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

  But when Stella saw that note in Eddy’s pocket, all of the signs that she’d ignored suddenly coalesced. One memory in particular gnawed at her. Though Dragon’s Den had only been open two weeks, the Smiths were already regular customers. One night when Stella was down at the restaurant, Helen had had too much to drink. Stella had taken her upstairs to the store and let her lie down on a cot in the back. As Stella slipped off Helen’s high heels, the woman had made the strangest comment: “Why does your husband always have holes in his socks?”

  Stella had passed it off as too much alcohol, and had gone back downstairs to get Mr. Smith. On the way back upstairs he had goosed Stella, which had completely startled her. Still, she’d stayed with Helen until she felt better. Now, sitting with her sister- and mother-in-law, Stella poured out all of this. “How could I have been so stupid? How could I have taken care of that woman while all the time she was fooling around with Eddy?”

  “We’re going over there right now,” Sissee said. “We’ll tell that Mrs. Smith what’s what.”

  They drove to the Smith house, which perched on a hillside sheltered by eucalyptus and hedged by lantana. Helen Smith must have seen them drive up, for she stood at the top of the stairs and ordered them not to come any farther. “Mr. Smith is sick,” she said. “Don’t make any noise. Go away.”

  Stella screamed, “I don’t care if he’s sick, you bitch!” She wanted to run up the stairs and, in the phrase of the day, “scratch Helen’s eyes out.”

  But with Helen standing above them like that—so in control—and cowed by the thought that there was a man in the house, Sissee held Stella back. “Come on,” she said, “we’d better get out of here.” Stella continued to yell and struggled against Sissee as Helen Smith disappeared back into the house. Finally, Sissee dragged Stella back to the car.

  The house on Maplewood Drive must surely have seemed small that night. Ticie and Sissee in one room; Richard, not yet five, in another; and Stella and Eddy having it out in the living room. He promised he would never see Helen again if Stella forgave him. Soon after, Helen Smith—rather indiscreetly, it must be assumed—went to the store. Bennie chased her out, yelling, “And don’t you ever come back!”

  In those first few weeks after discovering the affair, Stella didn’t know what to do, except she knew she didn’t want to have her baby. She went to Ticie and Sissee, and told them, “I don’t want Eddy to think I’m having the baby just so I can keep him.” Her regular doctor wouldn’t perform an abortion, but he told her where to go. It was a desperate move, but Stella made it.

  For all of them—especially Tyrus—Dragon’s Den combined art with money. After graduating from Otis, he’d worked for the WPA, doing paintings in public places, and got the odd commission, but that was it. At Dragon’s Den, he’d been able to work on the murals and design the menus and matchbook covers. Though Eddy didn’t pay him for that, Tyrus did earn money as a waiter. He always seemed to take a light-hearted view of things.

  As customers came and went, Tyrus saw stories unfolding, most of them funny—like the time when, while bringing a pot of soup to a customer, he looked up to see a rat running across one of the ceiling pipes. Just as the thought passed through his mind—If that rat falls in the soup, that will be really something!—the creature disappeared. Tyrus began ladling the soup. The customer suddenly screamed, “A rat just ran across my foot!” Tyrus looked at her calmly and said, “No, we don’t have any rats here. But we do have a nice little kitty. That’s why we don’t have rats.” And even as he said it, he knew it would make a good story.

  But Tyrus was lonely.

  One day Eddy said to Tyrus, “We’re running a little short of help. Didn’t that Ruth work over at Soochow for a while? Do you think she’d be interested?”

  Tyrus practically beamed. “I’ll find out.”

  Tyrus went up the street, climbed the stairs to Soochow, and asked Mrs. Leong if he could speak with Gilbert. When his friend came out, Tyrus asked, “Do you have Ruth’s phone number?”

  He called her up and asked if she’d like a job. “Sure,” Ruth said. “I’ll come down.” Then Ruth, too, became part of the gang. Tyrus could be with her every night without having to ask her out. He could joke with her about customers without trying to impress her with “intelligent” conversation. Between them, they got good tips, which they split.

  One night after closing, Tyrus finally got up his nerve. “Would you like to see David Copperfield?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Afterwards they stopped for a bite to eat. He told her his best stories. Ruth laughed at all the right parts, then it was her turn. Back in China, her grandfather, a woodcarver for temples, couldn’t make a living during the famine. “One day he walked my mother to the harbor,” Ruth began. “He told her, ‘You’re going to the Gold Mountain with your auntie. She’ll take care of you, and you’ll have rice every day.’ When she got on board, she didn’t see her auntie anywhere, and when my mother arrived in San Francisco, she heard the broker say, ‘She’s too small. We can’t use her.’”

  Ruth recounted how her mother, instead of a life of prostitution, found shelter at the Cameron House, where she learned needlework and English. She stayed there until she married a preacher who interpreted for people hiring Chinese laborers. “She was seventeen and my father was thirty-four,” Ruth continued. After the San Francisco earthquake, the family packed up a wagon and moved south to Santa Barbara, then to Bakersfield, where Ruth’s father became a farmer.

  “I was in the third grade when my best friend stopped talking to me because I was Chinese,” Ruth told Tyrus. After college, and before working in the drugstore and at Dragon’s Den, she’d been a secretary for Y. C. Hong, the lawyer. “He told me you can fight discrimination in a diplomatic way. When you do things in a soft way, you make the other people believe they’ve thought up something to do for you, when actually you’re directing them.”

  Later, Ruth discussed the role of a wife. “I grew up in a family of women who worked,” she said. “My mother was a midwife and took care of the children of people who worked in the fields, and my sisters have always helped their husbands at their jobs.”

  After this first official date, things moved quickly. Tyrus visited Ruth’s family in Bakersfield, where he sometimes helped them pick vegetables. They seemed to like Tyrus even though he was penniless and appeared to be without a future. They gave him a tiny duckling for Easter, raised it for him, and slaughtered it to make a fine meal. But when Ruth’s sister presented the dish, Tyrus grew glum. “I can’t eat it, you know? It would be like eating my own baby.” They may have thought him foolish and sentimental. But they liked him just the same.

  Ruth decided their wedding should be a family affair. Eddy, Sissee, and all the rest of the Dragon’s Den gang weren’t invited. Instead of moping with hurt feelings (of which there were plenty), Benji and Eddy drove out to Bakersfield in the middle of the night and banged on the windows of the wedding chamber. Finally, Tyrus came out. “Of all the goddamn nerve!” he said in usual movie-dialogue way. “You could wait a day or two. Geez!” Benji and Eddy just laughed and kept up their raucous noise.

  In June, 1935, Stella received an anonymous typed letter at the bungalow on Maplewood: “Do you know your husband and girlfriend have been and are still seeing each other? They will deny it and lie as they did before, but I know this for a fact. It may not make any difference to you, for you seem to put up with most anything.”

  Stella had not survived rheumatic fever, smallpox, and diphtheria to let her life be ruined by an unfaithful man. Stella was a survivor. She got on a streetcar and went to the home of Helen Smith’s parents. “Please tell your daughter to leave my husband alone,” Stella said. “I love my husband very much, and we have a son. We need Eddy, and Helen already has a husband.” Helen’s parents listened, and she went home feeling that she had done something positive. Of course Eddy went through the roof when he heard about it.

  As summer wore on,
Stella took comfort from Elsie Robinson’s “Listen World” column in the paper, marking sentences that seemed pertinent. “We can spend our days in the midst of excitement—have countless things happen to us and all around us—and yet remain as ignorant as turnips,” Elsie wrote. “Turnips also are born, live and die, yet remain total dumbbells; and many humans remain equally dumb, for the same reason as the turnip…. You can’t learn about living unless you live. You can’t live unless you take a chance; and your living is limited by the chances you take.” On another day, Elsie seemed to be writing directly to Stella: “Love is always worthwhile, no matter what it costs…. Hate is never worthwhile, no matter what it costs. …”

  Just as Stella cut out pictures for Richard, she snipped helpful advice from the newspaper for herself. “Your husband may be one of the men who simply isn’t [sic] going to be faithful; that may be your slice of the trouble of life. Don’t try to dodge it when it comes. Face it as you would sickness, poverty, war, with spirit and courage. Remember, in the matter of your husband’s affection, no woman takes anything from you. You lost it before she found it.” Stella pored over these words, trying to glean from them a way to win Eddy back.

  She told anyone who would listen about Mrs. Smith. She told the family. She told customers when she was in the store. She told her friends. She felt that if she said it enough, Eddy might give Helen up. All the while, the anonymous letters kept coming. On August 13, 1935, Stella received the longest one yet.

  Don’t you think you’re carrying this too far? From all indications you are the one that’s stirring up trouble and not herself….

  I believe you show very poor taste in telling people how little you’ve always had and how you’ve sometimes not had enough to eat. Anyone knowing the family knows better than that. You should consider yourself lucky to have your husband’s family treat you as kind as they do. It’s been said that you have more since your marriage than you ever had before….

  I don’t believe I would air my personal affairs to outsiders to the point of telling them you had to live sometimes on five dollars a week and about all the privations you’ve had to con tend with…. You say you are capable enough to get a job. Why don’t you do so instead of being so sore and envious of what others have….

  It’s unfair of you to keep saying the friend ran after your husband for after all you know very little about the affair. If you had used good sense that Sunday instead of getting so wild perhaps you would have learned more. I can assure you it was a mutual affair and you on the outside looking in know so little. Do you think for one minute he will be so dumb as to tell you the truth when he has to live with you? I happen to know a lot about it all and he was as foolish over her as she was over him….

  You had best forget it all and continue slaving and depriving yourself or get out and make yourself useful. You should be able to make as much money as she (Helen) is making since you consider yourself such a helpmate. The trouble is you are lazy and you know if you gave him up no one else would have you. I’ve heard how you cry and carry on. If you’re smart you wouldn’t check on your husband so. The girlfriend said once your husband said you followed him around like a leech.

  Stella had no idea who this anonymous letter-writer was—perhaps a friend of Helen’s, perhaps Helen herself—but this note, like the ones that had come before it, only strengthened Stella’s resolve. If she left Eddy, she had few options. It was the Depression, and jobs—especially in art, the only thing that Stella was really qualified to do—were practically impossible to find. She couldn’t turn to her parents; she had little in common with them anymore. Her father, Harvey, had owned two barbershops, but the customers had drifted away as his drinking got worse. He’d always been verbally abusive; now he’d taken to beating Stella’s mother. Finally he deserted Jessie once and for all. He was living on “the Nickel,” Fifth Street, better known as Skid Row. Jessie and Ted, Stella’s eight-year-old brother, had left Redlands with nothing more than a suitcase and their parrot, and had gone to stay in Grandma Huggins’s new cottage in Glassell Park—up the street and around the corner from Stella’s cousins Ida and Vernon.

  Stella did what she had done since she’d first met the See family. She hung on tenaciously and waited, for she knew that if she left, she would not only be losing a husband, but also the only real family she had ever known.

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 13

  SNAPSHOTS

  1936–38

  IN 1935, Fong See decided he would return home to China. He ordered Yun to come back to Los Angeles to take care of the business, leaving his wife, Leong-shee, their daughters, and the youngest boys in Dimtao. Kuen, Danny Ho, and Haw—Yun’s older sons—returned to Los Angeles with their father so that they might earn money to bring their newly acquired wives to the Gold Mountain. By early 1936, Fong See and his young family had been living in the mansion in Dimtao for a year. See-bok was nearing his eightieth birthday; Ngon Hung had just passed her thirtieth.

  In China, See-bok’s wealth continued to grow. He owned the Fatsan Grand Hotel, the best hotel in the city. He bought two pawn shops—owning one of these was similar to owning a bank in the United States—where he gathered items similar to those he’d sold in his early days as a merchant—rattan furniture, baskets, and inexpensive clothes. He also expanded his philanthropic activities. Harboring a general concern for the villagers of Dimtao and seeing that the children had no opportunity for formal education, Gold Mountain See provided funds to set up and operate a free private school. Looking at the muddy roads that had long inconvenienced the villagers, See-bok denounced fears of evil spirits and anxiety over bandits. It was time to modernize, he told villagers. He then donated funds for a three-slab-wide road which extended from Dimtao to the outskirts of Fatsan. Their old fears forgotten, the villagers praised the roadway for its convenience.

  See-bok never concerned himself with politics. Because he couldn’t read, he only knew what he heard through gossip. Since conquering Manchuria in 1931, Japan had been mounting periodic raids into China. The Japanese will come and go, but China will stand, he thought. Since 1927, Mao Tse-tung had been promoting communism; beginning in 1932, Chiang Kai-shek had begun “extermination campaigns” against Communist troops. Chiang and Mao will come and go, See-bok thought, but China will stand. The way he saw it, these two men could fight all they wanted and it wouldn’t affect him or his family.

  Free from worries about politics or money, See-bok settled into the mansion and enjoyed watching the goings-on about him. The mansion, known in those days, as it is today, as the gway house—the house of white ghosts, in remembrance of the time that Ticie had spent in the village—had grown more exquisite with time. The mango tree that Fong See had planted years ago in the center of the garden cast a cooling shade. In the courtyard were two kitchens: one for the daily meals, the other for banquets for up to sixty people. During festive times, See-bok hung brightly colored lanterns, ordered good-luck dishes, and hired blind girls to sing for the guests. Outside the compound’s walls, rickshaw boys waited for the guests to leave, and beggars lined up along the cobblestone pathways for leftovers. See-bok also brought in extra guards—who modeled their appearance rather dramatically on an amalgamation of Chiang Kai-shek’s strongmen and Hollywood gangsters. When the inevitable attempt to kidnap Fong See’s sons came, the guards hung on to the running boards of their powerful black cars, shooting their pistols with abandon. This time the kidnappers were shot dead.

  From his favorite spot on the balcony, Fong See could observe Ngon Hung and Leong-shee, who spent each morning sitting by the large marble goldfish bowl that served as the centerpiece of the garden. In Los Angeles, life was lonely for Ngon Hung, but at least she didn’t have to worry about protocol with relatives, narrow-minded gossips, or difficult servants. In China she was too young and inexperienced to exercise much authority. Her children—two sons and three daughters—were young enough that the other village women felt that Ngon Hung needed to hear all
of their best (and usually unwanted) advice.

  “If a pregnant woman dreams of red flowers, she will have a girl,” an old auntie might say.

  “If she dreams of white flowers, she will have a boy,” offered another.

  “Eat a lot of egg whites and your daughter will have fair skin,” opined another.

  Each mother, grandmother or auntie had a theory, but when it came to actual child-rearing, the women became autocratic. Only their way was the right way.

  “Don’t baby your sons or they won’t grow up to be strong.”

  “Give your children sweets and they will have a sweet disposition.”

  “Don’t listen to that auntie. Listen to me.”

  In this arguing, Ngon Hung found an ally in Uncle’s wife. “In China, the aunties always give advice,” Leong-shee said. “If you do something one way, then you’ll satisfy one auntie. But what about the others?”