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

  In a way that Sissee would never fully understand, Gilbert had made his choice when he married her. “Go ahead and check about these barracks,” he said. “Perhaps they’re a good idea after all.”

  In 1948, Sumoy, Fong See’s youngest daughter and Richard’s half-aunt, turned thirteen. She was petite and pretty in an innocent way. All who knew her loved her. “She is so sweet, she was born sweet,” they said. Sumoy was the good daughter, the one who accompanied her father on his Christmas shopping trip to Sears, where she helped him pick out gifts—reindeer sweaters for the boys, Dan River gingham blouses for the girls, a hat and scarf set for Ngon Hung. Sumoy’s father and all her older brothers guarded her for the precious jewel she was. Just as her father wouldn’t let her go on camping trips with the Girl Scouts when she was younger, he now forbade her to go on overnight trips with the church or to the homes of her friends. When she wanted to spend the night at Betty Soo Hoo’s house, Fong See said, “No, she has brothers.” When Betty came over and said she had her own room, Fong See still wasn’t satisfied. “Do you have a lock on the door?” Without a lock, Sumoy wasn’t sleeping anywhere other than her own room. Yet, for all this protection, Fong See didn’t seem to notice that Richard was ga-ga over Sumoy.

  Richard provided excitement to everyone in the extended Fong family. The girls thought he was fascinating. How could he not be fascinating? He was eighteen. He was white, with black hair and skin paler than theirs. Yet he was connected; he was family. When he moved to Chinatown, everyone accepted him as though he’d just returned from a long journey. Richard wasn’t simply another cousin; he was the son of everyone’s absolute favorite uncle/cousin/half-brother. Eddy had never broken the tie. He had given the kids their first radio when Pa had said no. He had taken the boys out to Angeles Forest and cut down Christmas trees to bring back and set up throughout the Fong apartment. (Stella had shown the girls how to make ornaments out of toilet paper.) He was the ideal older brother, so it was only natural that in a family where blood truly was thicker than water, they embraced Richard completely.

  Richard and Sumoy were like Romeo and Juliet—impossible, doomed, the stuff of stories. The other teenagers were bewitched by the pair’s shy looks, their sudden blushes, their eyes locking onto each other, then just as quickly glancing away. “It was so beautiful,” one cousin recalled. “It was love. I could cry when I think about how beautiful it was.”

  Part of the suspense was watching the energy flow between these two—the girl just out of puberty, the boy just graduating from high school. The other part was not knowing if it was real or imagined, because surely, if it was true, wouldn’t one of the adults have done something? But not once did Fong See, Ngon Hung, Eddy, or Stella say anything directly. Rather, Fong See told his wife, “Keep an eye on Sumoy. Don’t let her get out of hand. Don’t let her do anything that will embarrass the family.” Ngon Hung, who, when most girls are experiencing their first crush, was already married and a mother, counseled her daughter, “Men always have time to run around town. Society doesn’t put a brand on them.”

  What none of them appreciated was that Sumoy had a brain. Even though she was a good Chinese daughter who might be expected to follow an inevitable course through a life of childbirth, chores, and early old age like her mother’s, Sumoy wanted desperately to break the pattern, which seemed as immutable as granite. After a day at junior high school she went to the store, sat at a table in the back, and did her homework. Her father ignored her when she complained that it was too dark. Sumoy knew her requests were pointless. It was dark because they didn’t want anyone to see the dust. Having finished her homework, she picked up a feather duster and worked her way from one end of the store to the other.

  “What do you need school for?” her father asked. “If you have to work, be something like a secretary or an office assistant.”

  Her mother shook her head in confusion. “You know about the past, but you care more about the future.”

  Only Richard understood.

  “I can’t go on like this,” Sumoy confided to him with an air of sophistication that belied her years. “I don’t want to spend my life in the store. I want something different. Besides, they’ll never let me in the store. Chuen and Yun are being groomed to take over, not me, not a girl. They’re the ones out delivering furniture, driving the car, helping Father.”

  “You don’t want that anyway,” Richard said. “You can do other things. You could go to college.”

  Sumoy, who was close to her mother and still tied to home, knew she would never overstep any boundaries. She shut her eyes to the lovesick boy before her, preferring to see an understanding brother.

  By late 1948, Gilbert, Sissee, Eddy, and Stella (who had bought a lot on Landa, a street that curved up the back side of Elysian Park and offered a view across the Los Angeles River toward Mount Washington) had made considerable progress in taking apart the barracks. Each weekend they drove out Alameda in a loose convoy: the adults in cars, the boys—Richard and Ted (who was between stints with the merchant marine and the army)—in a pickup truck. Along the way, the group stopped at a farm to buy fresh-picked corn. When they reached Long Beach, they crossed over the drawbridge to Terminal Island, where they drove the short distance to the barracks. There were about twenty barracks in all, and each had been sold to a family motivated by the same sort of wishful thinking as inspired the Sees and the Leongs. Tyrus and Ruth usually came along for the picnic and the jokes.

  The barracks stood two stories high. Each floor had a latrine with several toilets, all hooked up to a single flush, a point that Tyrus couldn’t let alone. “What are you going to do with these?” he jibed Gil and Eddy. “They have one flush, for Christ’s sake.” The toilets were also connected to the same water source—a huge tank, totally impractical for domestic use. The communal urinals took even more ribbing. Other things—like the two-story water heater and all its accessories—seemed to defy comprehension. But plenty of other stuff—wood, wiring, nails, electrical circuitry, faucets, and spigots—was usable.

  The process was like constructing a building in reverse. The men—since much of it was designated “men’s work”—started on the roof and slowly worked their way down. First they pulled off the roofing material and scraped off the tar. Then, very slowly, they extracted the nails and lifted out the wood planks, passing them down from person to person to be stacked in the back of the truck. As the roof and the walls came off the second floor, the men worked like spiders across the webbing of remaining joists and beams. On the ground, the women sat together and talked as they straightened nails and packed them in wooden barrels, wound up balls of electrical wire, wrapped windows in blankets, and stored fixtures in boxes.

  They enjoyed being out here—the camaraderie with the other groups, the time spent with their families. They were middle-aged now. Ruth was still extraordinarily beautiful, with her jet black hair. Her eyes sparkled with an inside humor. Although Sissee was the youngest—if only by a few months—she looked the oldest, with her hair threaded by gray. Stella had undergone an amazing transformation in the last year. On Eddy’s birthday in 1947 she had begun going to a diet clinic on North Broadway. After years of being overweight, she now weighed 112 pounds. The weight had settled into voluptuous curves on top and bottom, tapering in to a twenty-two-inch waist. Her hair was still fiery red, with tendrils that frizzed in the sea air.

  Time had treated each of the men differently. With each passing year, Gilbert would become skinnier and ever more ramrod-straight. Tyrus would never change. He was thin, energetic, and funny, the most successful of them all. He’d left Disney and gone to Warner Brothers, where he worked on storyboards for John Wayne, George Raft, and Frank Sinatra movies. “I have a lot of freedom,” he told his friends. “I don’t have to punch a time clock, and when it’s slow I can take time off and do my own work.”

  Since being cut out of the family partnership, Eddy had drifted—making jewelry, doing minor repairs on appliances for frien
ds, visiting his father. Eddy still had his “December seventh beard” and was a bit wider through the middle, but these were just physical characteristics. He was an incorrigible goofball. Holding up a length of salami, he might widen his eyes and say, “How would you like to have this between your legs?” And every time he said something along those lines, Tyrus would laugh: “That’s the trouble with you. Everything is always below the belt.”

  After the work was done, the three couples sat in a ragged circle around the fire. Richard and Ted sat slightly apart, talking in low voices. The four little girls—Leslee, and Tyrus and Ruth’s three daughters—pedaled their tricycles in wide, noisy circles. This was the time they all enjoyed the most, when the work was finished and they could cook a pot of corn over a fire, drink coffee, and nibble on sandwiches and cold noodles.

  A year later, in 1949, although the barracks was completely dismantled and all of the wood, electrical wiring, faucets, and spigots were stored in family warehouses and backyards, no dream houses were under construction. Gilbert said he was “too busy” with his own work to design a house. Instead of building the house on Landa, Stella, Eddy, and Richard moved into Stella’s grandmother Huggins’s house on Lantana Street in Glassell Park—close to downtown, and around the corner from Stella’s cousins Ida and Vernon. (Stella had inherited the house on her grandmother’s death.) From here, Richard enrolled at City College and began taking classes. The lot on Landa grew wild with patches of sumac, poison oak, and rye grass.

  Eddy began several home-improvement projects that he never completed. He tore out the ceiling, exposing the rafters. He chiseled plaster off walls. He built a foundation for an addition, but lost interest. He took out windows to make a lanai, lost interest again, and replaced the glass with “temporary” sheets of plastic.

  The garden, on the other hand, flourished under such neglect. Stella and Eddy—with help from Benji—planted bodhi trees, giant bamboo, tamarind, pittosporum, walnuts, apricots, and avocados. Abandoned projects proliferated into a thick jungle highlighted here and there with things scavenged from a Los Angeles that was being systematically “improved.” Eddy tipped over a Chinese street vendor’s cart and spread out leftover rice to attract birds. Against a wall he propped bamboo rakes, and leaf gatherers made from sheared-off five-gallon soy-sauce cans. The overall effect was wild, untamed, yet aesthetically pleasing.

  A year after moving into the house on Lantana, Eddy became galvanized with the idea of preserving and honoring the history of the Chinese and other pioneers in Los Angeles. Part of what motivated him was that yet another fire had destroyed another portion of China City. Fong Yun’s store hadn’t been damaged, but many others had. Several shopkeepers simply gave up, and as they left, business dwindled. By 1950, China City was nearly a ghost town. At this same time, the city fathers decided to tear down the last block of Old Chinatown—the 500 block of Los Angeles Street that Fong See and Ticie had used as their home base since 1906.

  Eddy proposed that the residents of Los Angeles Street create an “International Settlement,” a $500,000 development that would include shops and restaurants. The International Settlement would represent all the different cultures that had come to Los Angeles and, simultaneously, save the last block of Old Chinatown from destruction. “You attract people through their stomachs,” Eddy said. “Then they’ll stay to buy souvenirs. All we have to do is get our neighbors to invest and im prove upon what we already have.” The Lugo House—built by a Spanish land-grant family of the same name, and then the first home of Loyola University, and for years after that a boardinghouse for Chinese bachelors—would be converted to a museum. Tyrus drew up renderings of the Lugo House fixed up as the International Settlement. The Los Angeles Mirror sent out a reporter and a photographer.

  At first the City Council seemed receptive to the idea, then Mrs. Sterling, who’d been instrumental in the founding of Olvera Street and China City, decided she didn’t want anything to conflict with her enterprises. She had the ear of the Los Angeles Times, which, in turn, owned the souls of several councilmen, or at least that’s how Eddy saw it.

  On September 28,1950, all factions appeared before the City Council. Proposals ranged from turning Los Angeles Street into a parking lot to a German beer garden. Several argued that the International Settlement posed the threat of tong wars with café owners from China City. But all debates came to a halt when Mrs. Sterling arrived with a delegation from Olvera Street. Wearing flowers in her hair, pearls, and a dress with flowers appliquéd on the shoulders, Mrs. Sterling urged that the entire Plaza be renovated. “The Plaza should be cleaned up and commercialism eliminated or else everything should be torn down and the property used for a parking lot.” She emphasized that the International Settlement was a purely “commercial” enterprise. (Amazingly, no one pointed out that both Olvera Street and China City had operated as commercial enterprises for years.)

  She asked the council members to consider the important role that the Mexican and Spanish civilizations had played in the city’s cultural heritage. Then, with great enthusiasm, she told the assembled crowd that she had brought with her a little surprise. The doors to the council chamber were flung open and in poured a group of Mexican folk dancers dressed in fancy costumes of ribbon and lace, who performed to the accompaniment of a mariachi band.

  The councilmen were enchanted by this sudden, but colorful, display. Then Sissee stood to speak. “We didn’t come in our costumes,” she told the council. “We didn’t bring music. We don’t have to show off. We may be proposing an International Settlement, but we’re Americans first.” Eddy added that, in addition to the Mexicans and Spanish, the city owed much to the Chinese, the French, the Italians, and even—a daring suggestion so soon after the war—the Japanese.

  But it seemed that the council members had already decided in favor of Mrs. Sterling. Still, there was one consideration: the Lugo House—which stood in the center of the 500 block of Los Angeles Street. “To me the idea of this historic building being destroyed is absolutely appalling,” Councilman Ed J. Davenport opined. “This Council has been stymied at many points and not told the complete truth. We were told that it [the block] was needed for freeway purposes and then found out only a small portion was needed.” He proposed saving the Lugo House, the Kong Chow Temple, and a few other buildings in the area.

  Orville Caldwell, the deputy mayor and chairman of the Civic Center Authority, suggested that the Lugo House be moved the short distance to Olvera Street. But in the end, the State Parks Commission decided to turn the Plaza west of Los Angeles Street into a state park. Included in this plan were the Pico House, the Masonic Temple, the Gamier Building, and an old fire station. The Lugo House, the F. Suie One Company, the F. See On Company, Soochow Restaurant, and the other buildings that made up the last block of Old Chinatown would be torn down to make way for freeway ramps. Whatever was left over would be planted with grass. Eddy and Sissee left the meeting knowing that condemnation notices would be arriving soon.

  On a day in October 1950, three years after the fire that had leveled his factory, Ray See strode across his new showroom to give a revision of a design detail to Bennie. As Ray crossed the floor, he overheard one of his salesgirls describing a table/lamp combination to a buyer from one of the big department stores. “While the piece is solid and substantially modern,” she said, her hand arcing around its silhouette, “you will find a feeling of lightness and delicacy reminiscent of eighteenth-century styling. For this reason, Calinese fits perfectly into American Colonial and the more formal eighteenth-century English styles, as well as into most modern room settings.”

  Ray dropped off the drawing, came back through the showroom, eavesdropped again on the salesgirl, and reflected that a man does not become a millionaire by sitting on his haunches like some fool. He was on a roll, and clever enough to take advantage of it. With hard work and determination he had rebuilt his company. Within nine days of the fire, he’d rented space in another factory, while Be
nnie set about cleaning up the salvageable equipment. Samples for January had been made, production started, and orders shipped out within sixty days.

  On July 26, 1948, just nine months after the fire, Ray, Bennie, and Markoff had sent out invitations for the opening of the new factory. The plant took up 26,000 square feet and had been built with a sawtooth roof that brought in natural light, allowing the factory to function as a “total daylight” operation. The showrooms—each paneled in gum wood with a natural stain—were triple the size of the old ones. An immense picture window divided the plant from the showrooms and offices, so that visitors could observe the manufacture of their wares. Through it all, Markoff had gotten on Ray’s nerves—always hogging the attention, always giving interviews, always questioning production schedules. Finally, Ray had asked that the partnership be dissolved. Markoff readily agreed. Ray and Bennie had kept the See-Mar name, and business had started to take off.

  In 1948, Los Angeles had produced $200 million worth of furniture at wholesale prices. Each year, that amount continued to grow. Some said it was because styles by West Coast designers were “fresh and daring.” Others thought the trend reflected the growth of the television industry. In Los Angeles County alone, 456 sets were sold each day. With those sets came a new interest in seating arrangements, TV trays, and TV consoles.