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

  Everyone in the Leong family worked in the stall. Gilbert’s father and older brother stacked the fruit and vegetable crates five or six high. Gilbert’s mother helped sort the produce. Gilbert dressed the fruit, putting the best on top. As with the See family, all the money the children earned went into a family pot and was doled out as necessary by Gilbert’s mother.

  After so many years of eighteen-hour days, Leong Jeung had tired of produce, and opened his restaurant in Hollywood. Gilbert had worked as a waiter there, earning more tips when he spoke pidgin English than when he spoke his college English. After the failed Chinese Garden Cafe, the family had opened Soochow in Chinatown. Soochow had been the third restaurant in the city to serve cha nau, tea cakes. Gilbert’s mother insisted on stocking a wide variety of teas—chrysanthemum, Sixth Happiness, oolong, jasmine, and poney with its strong musty flavor—which were always set on the table first. Then the waiters brought out steamers filled with char siu bao (steamed buns stuffed with roast pork) and other dumplings shaped like an ear or a pocketbook or an old man’s scrotum. When the customers finished, the waiter figured the bill by counting up the empty plates. Any dumplings left on the table were taken back to the kitchen and steamed up again.

  In 1936, with the success of Soochow, the Leongs moved away from the City Market area to the Italian neighborhood of Cypress Park, at the base of Mount Washington, just east of downtown. The house looked like a Southern plantation house, with two stories, big columns in the front, ten rooms, and plenty of land. Gilbert had heard all kinds of stories about the house—that it had once been a speakeasy, the home of a bootlegger, or the home of Jim Jeffries, the former heavyweight champ. Despite the house’s rather unseemly past, the neighbors had balked at the possibility of a Chinese family moving in. But after the local minister spoke to the neighbors and introduced the Leongs, there hadn’t been any trouble.

  Gilbert was a proper Chinese son and an excellent student. He had grown up listening to his mother say, “Don’t embarrass the Chinese people.” His mother was strict in this sense: Gilbert and his brothers and sister knew their English and they knew their Chinese. They grew up speaking Chinese at home. “When I speak to you in Chinese,” his mother had said when he was a boy, “I expect you to answer me in Chinese. Don’t ever answer me in English. In the first place, I won’t understand you. In the second place, we won’t be able to develop a dialogue. Besides, how would it be for the sons and daughter of the Chinese teacher not to be proficient in Chinese?”

  Gilbert started learning Chinese as a small boy, but not from his mother. His mother didn’t have time to do the normal things—darn socks or cook—never mind give private lessons to her son. She was too busy—teaching her classes, traveling up to San Francisco to buy textbooks, brushes, and ink, and working in the produce stall—for things like that. Instead, they brought over Gilbert’s grandmother. After her home chores, she sat with Gilbert at the kitchen table and taught him simple words and phrases.

  When it came time for high school, Gilbert’s parents decided that he should go across town to Lincoln, which meant that he’d be passing right through Chinatown after school and could go to his mother’s class. He remembered walking up the dark stairwell and into the room, which faced out onto the corner of Marchessault and Los Angeles streets. He had known all twenty-five students—aged five to eighteen—who were divided into roughly five groups for their recitations. As for his primary lessons, they were indelibly etched in his brain.

  “Each lesson will have thirty words,” his mother instructed the new students. “You will pay attention and you will memorize.” Gilbert learned quickly enough that those who didn’t follow his mother’s rules found their hands whacked with the punishing end of a bamboo feather duster.

  “The Chinese language was invented by a ruler who watched how worms crawl,” his mother explained. “The worms turn left. The worms turn right. Our language has gone through many centuries of change and evolution. Scholars revise it, throw it out, reinvent it.”

  Day. Sun. Earth. Moon. Those were his first characters. Combine sun and moon, and the meaning changed to tomorrow. The next characters in the primer were Heaven and Earth. Then Father. Mother. Son. Daughter. As he grew older he saw how the characters built upon each other. Add a stroke to the character for door and it became home. Add another and it became marriage. One stroke for boy, add another for son, double that to get boy twins. With every stroke the meaning evolved and became more complex.

  “You must study so that you can fulfill your filial obligation and write letters to your grandparents in your home villages,” his mother lectured. From their workbooks the students carefully copied out characters, then inserted the names of their grandparents. How are you? We are fine. I am studying in school. When they reached the third and fourth levels, they received new workbooks that taught the geography and history of China. The shape of China is like a mulberry leaf. Gilbert could still remember the indigo primers, which had been hand-sewn together in China. Somehow the smell of China had sunk into the wood-block prints and thin paper, so that Gilbert thought they were learning about China through their noses as well as their ears and mouths and fingers.

  Gilbert needed to be the best student. It was expected not just by his mother, but by all the students in the mission school. Even so, of the thousands of Chinese ideograms, he learned perhaps a thousand requiring mostly four or five strokes, with a few of up to ten strokes. The characters with twenty-five or thirty strokes were rare words, with rich meaning for scholars of deep understanding.

  Beyond his studies of Chinese, Gilbert’s parents expected him to excel in the white world. Unlike Fong See, who was from the peasant class, Mrs. Leong had been educated. The family not only believed that the life of the scholar was one of the most pure, but they also believed that education was the only way to break out of Chinatown. Once the Leongs recognized Gilbert’s drive and aptitude, they pulled his older brother, Ed, out of college so that Gilbert could go in his place. Gilbert went to USC and Chouinard to study art and architecture; his sculptures were exhibited in China City, and he was apprenticing with an architect, but his mother still wasn’t satisfied with these accomplishments. He thought that she would only relax her hold on him once he was getting commissions to design his own buildings.

  On an evening in late 1940, after the rest of the family had retired upstairs, Gilbert found himself sitting in the living room, listening to his mother lecture him. “There are other girls in this city,” she said sternly. “Forget this girl, this Florence See. In time you will find someone who’s one hundred percent Chinese. You tell me you like her, and I tell you it is like the sky falling down.” The more Gilbert listened to these never-ending lectures, the more his resolve crumbled. “You’re young,” his mother continued.

  “Mother,” Gilbert interrupted, “I’m thirty.”

  She glared at him for a moment, then went on. “I’m not prejudiced. But I want my son to marry a Chinese girl. I’ll tell you why. Interracial marriages don’t work. You look at Fong See’s family. You look at the Chew family. You will be stared at. You won’t be accepted. And if you have children …”

  Gilbert had never had time for outside activities. As a small boy he hadn’t gone to the homes of other children. He hadn’t had spending money for frivolous things. Instead, he’d been a member of the church’s Epworth League for young people. They’d met once a week to listen to different elders tell of their experiences. Gilbert had never dated in high school. Then, in college, he’d met the Tom Leung family. The father was an herbalist. One daughter was a journalist. Another had married Peter Soo Hoo. After football games, the family had hosted parties with dancing. Gilbert had been to a few of those, had even danced with a couple of girls. That Elsie, for example. He shivered at the memory of her forwardness during a fox trot, when she had pressed her breasts against his chest and babbled about her trip to Shanghai, where she and Anna May Wong’s brother, Jimmy, had, according to her, introduced the
tango not just to the New Asia Hotel but to the whole mainland. “When I was in China, I had maids for everything,” Elsie had whispered in his ear. “Food. Laundry. Cleaning. I didn’t have to do housework, which would dull my hair and ruin my complexion.” He could see that she wasn’t the tanned tomboy who’d left a year ago. Now the pink chiffon of her dress molded across curves that most Chinese girls didn’t have, and her skin was a creamy white. But nothing ever came of Elsie.

  There was the other type of girl. The prostitutes and girls of bad reputation. Off Alameda in the crib section, Chinese girls still leaned over balcony railings and lured lonely bachelors upstairs. These women catered to Chinese men. Only rarely did he see Chinese men with Caucasian girls. They were not the high type of Caucasians. They were the lowest type of blondes; they were prostitutes painted up. Those men wouldn’t walk down Wilshire or Broadway with those girls, but they would take them to Chinatown, where no one would voice their scorn. Even in Soochow there were men who brought in a certain type of girl, some of them quite famous. Like Johnny Weismuller with that Lupe Velez. She was a firecracker, hot, and with a body. But Gilbert agreed with his mother. Women of that sort were disgusting.

  The fact was, Gilbert didn’t know much about sex. He could joke with Tyrus and Eddy about the time he’d been delivering tea cakes to a winner at one of the gambling houses, and an ambulance had pulled up in front of one of the cribs and the attendants had brought out a man and a woman—both naked—stuck together like two dogs. “Too much Spanish fly,” Gilbert had heard on the street.

  When he told the story, Eddy had laughed: “He died with a smile on his face.” But Tyrus had guessed Gilbert’s confusion. “Didn’t your father tell you about the birds and the bees?” Tyrus asked. “My father didn’t tell me, either. I tell you what, if you go down to the herbalist you can find anything for below the belt. Believe me. Men’s potency. Women’s fertility. You say you’ve got a headache, they can’t do anything for you!” Gilbert’s friends thought it was all one big joke.

  As much as he fought against his feelings, Gilbert only cared for one girl. How could he explain that to his mother? How could he explain who he was? I am a sculptor. With my hands I take marble and form it into beauty. I make the stone yield to my desires. I am an architect. I want to take my visions and turn them into structures for life and for the living. Gilbert longed to break free, but he knew he was the one chosen to get ahead, to be the scholar who would bring honor to his family.

  Gilbert looked into his hands, bowed his head in submission, and said nothing. He knew—and he hated himself for it—that he would break off with Sissee as soon as possible.

  One day in 1941, Ticie stepped out of the car, her shoes crunching on the gravel, and looked down the driveway of what had been her childhood home in Central Point, Oregon. The sky shone a rich, deep blue and the air was hotter than hell, just as she remembered. Otherwise, the whole place was different.

  “What do you think, Ma?”

  Ticie turned and looked at her daughter.

  “There used to be a little pond over there.” Ticie pointed. “And see the cook shed? A tobacco plant used to grow up onto the roof. It’s dead now.”

  Sissee, sensing her mother’s distress, said, “Come on, let’s look around.”

  They spent the next hour walking around the property. Obviously no one had lived here for a long time. Weeds grew with abandon. The house was deserted. The barn still stood, and with a gentle shove the old door creaked open. The sun’s rays filtered in through the cracks of the exterior planking. Dust motes floated through the streams of light. The barn was empty now, except for a few forgotten bales of hay banked along one wall. With the heat of the day and decades of use, the barn was redolent with the musty odors of farm animals, hay, and wood beams. Looking up, Ticie saw pigeons roosting along the crossbeams. It had been almost fifty years since Ticie had left Oregon, and the barn still seemed the same. She imagined that in another fifty years the barn would still be standing—perhaps a bit more rickety, perhaps even completely empty—but standing nevertheless, because what farmer in his right mind would tear down a perfectly good barn?

  Ticie went back outside, sat against the bumper of the car, and watched as her daughter strode out across the fields. Ticie didn’t know who currently owned the property, so she tried not to blame her brothers for letting the place get so rundown. Besides, who was she to complain, anyway? Ticie was pretty rundown herself, when she thought about it. She’d never been a vain person, but now when she looked in the mirror she couldn’t deny her reflection. She was an old woman. Round. Gray-haired. She wore glasses. She was tired and old in her heart, too. These days she found it an effort to get up, get dressed, be driven downtown, and sit in the store all day.

  As she looked back at her life, she could see that she had created what she had most longed for. A family. In 1919, when Fong See had wanted to leave Eddy in China, thoughts of keeping the family together had forced her to gather up her children and go home. When they’d moved out of Chinatown, she had pushed the children to form the family pot to make them financially secure and to keep them all together. These days they still got together for Sunday dinners, for every holiday, and for all of the grandchildren’s birthdays.

  Sitting there in the hot sun, she allowed herself the sheer pleasure of thinking about her children. Although she was still the titular head of the F. Suie One Company, Ming had taken over the day-to-day affairs. He had grown to be good at business. Ming was able to combine her eye for art with Suie’s business sense. Her second son, Ray, had always been loyal to her and still harbored a grudge against his father for leaving her. She saw the irony in his ambivalence: Ray, of all her children, was the most like Suie—wily and ambitious. She admired her third son’s straightforwardness; Bennie liked woodworking, Bertha, and his children.

  Ticie was perhaps closest to Stella, Eddy, their son, Richard, and Sissee. Ticie saw them every day. Stella had been like a second daughter to her. Ticie was proud of Eddy, proud of his exuberance and his success with Dragon’s Den. She admired the way he made an effort with Suie’s second family. In this, Eddy was most like her: family came first. As for Richard, he was her favorite grandchild. She was delighted with his clever streak, his innate intelligence. She couldn’t help but spoil him.

  Finally, there was her daughter. Sissee was truly one of the most beautiful girls in Chinatown, and it wasn’t just a mother saying that. Her thick, dark hair curled in the style of the day. She had high cheekbones and almond eyes. Her shy, welcoming smile stole people’s hearts. She was a living, breathing, lovely girl with no one to hold her. Ticie acknowledged that she was partly at fault for this. She relied excessively on her daughter. She counted on Sissee to take her shopping, to Chinatown, to the store. Well, look! Sissee had brought her on this trip.

  Now Ticie was dying. The doctor hadn’t said it outright, but she knew it was true. And now that these last—what?—months, years, were upon her she focused on one final goal: to see her daughter married. Ticie needed to know that Sissee would be taken care of. On the trip coming north, Ticie had tried to talk to Sissee about this. “You should have someone in your life. You don’t always have to be responsible for me.” Sissee had laughed lightly and changed the subject. Ticie couldn’t push too hard because she knew the reality as well as she knew her own daughter.

  Sissee was thirty-two years old. She was a half-breed. No lo fan would ever marry her; no Chinese would ever marry her. Most Chinese families wouldn’t even let their sons date an American girl. Ticie had overheard one mother in Chinatown say, “I would not want my son to marry a foreigner. It would be inconvenient to talk to a daughter-in-law like that, and my son would drift away.”

  After living in Chinatown as long as she had, Ticie should have been used to these old-fashioned ideas. This was, after all, the same community where marriages between people of different Chinese districts were discouraged. “Different dialect,” mothers said. “Different customs. Too
much worry for my son.” Even now, marriages in Chinatown were often arranged formally, either through a matchmaker or just by two mothers getting together with photographs of their most perfect children. Many families—like Uncle’s—still preferred to send their sons to China to marry a “proper” girl, one who had been raised with strict customs and didn’t know the silliness of dancing, music, movies, or radio. Most girls were married by the time they were twenty-one. Sissee’s friend Jennie had married and borne three children by that age. Only a few brave girls struggled against tradition and family to marry, as Ticie had, for love.

  Being here at the Pruett homestead couldn’t help but bring back memories of that girl who had carried such hopes for love. Now that Ticie’s life was coming to an end, she looked back on her life with some detachment. She had married for love. She’d separated from her husband for love, too. Ticie had held her head up with pride, walked out the door, and opened her own store. How could she have known that the Depression would come? How could she have known how lonely she would be? Yes, she had held her family together, but at what cost to herself?