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  When Carolyn was eleven years old, her father left, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and remarried. Carolyn’s mother, as Richard heard it, was an alcoholic bitch who hated her daughter. From the time George walked out until Carolyn was sixteen, her mother would say, ten or twenty times a week, “If you don’t like it the way it is around here, then you can go and live with your father.” Kate seemed to spend the rest of her time drinking Hill & Hill Blend or crying in her room.

  Through it all, George came around every week, no matter what hell Kate had in store for him. Even when he didn’t have a job, he’d get his girlfriends to help pay child support. So, as Carolyn saw it, her father kicked in money, kicked in attention, and braved Kate’s tantrums when many dads would have disappeared entirely.

  In 1949, Carolyn’s mother married a drunk named Jim Daly, got pregnant, and had a baby girl. When Kate came home from the hospital, she kicked Carolyn out of the house, although she was only sixteen at the time. Carolyn went to live with her father and her new stepmother in a one-bedroom apartment. Carolyn slept on the couch while her father and stepmother took the Murphy bed.

  All of this material was absolutely new to Richard. At the very least, he’d never met anyone whose parents were divorced; this was as “exotic” in the fifties as a Eurasian family. And despite, or maybe because of, her childhood, Carolyn Laws really did seem to know what was what. She was very popular and had never missed a dance or failed to go out on a Saturday night throughout high school. She had the lead role in the senior play. She got straight A’s, because she wanted to go to college and become a writer or a teacher or possibly both. She had tremendous ambition and focus. In other words, strange as she was for that time and place, to Richard’s eyes she was “making it” in the regular world.

  Carolyn and her friend Jackie Joseph liked Richard, but he was completely different from anyone they’d ever seen in their lives. He wasn’t like those boys with the stuffed argyle socks hanging from their rearview mirrors, or like those Valley boys in their leather jackets—smoking reefers and crashing parties. Richard wore collarless shirts that his mother made for him or that he’d found in Chinatown. He was unbelievably cute: black hair, a darling smile, high cheekbones. Though he was only one-quarter Chinese, his eyelids had epicanthic folds, which Carolyn found extremely attractive. The Caucasian part of his background came out in the color of his eyes—green. What this meant was that Richard looked just enough Chinese to be positively beautiful but not too foreign. Richard was shy, but in another way he wasn’t. Some days he was goofy and silly, and would say anything to anybody. On other days he’d say nothing. The girls decided he was just “struggling with his shyness.”

  He drove a beat-up car—his dad’s old 1936 Plymouth—that was filled with junk and listed to one side. Carolyn and Jackie always needed a ride somewhere, and Richard was always happy to oblige. “I’m always driving you hither and thither,” he bemoaned jokingly. “I’m like Saint Joseph, the eternal chauffeur.”

  One day Richard invited Carolyn, Jackie, and a guy named Jack Hensey over to his house on Lantana Street. The kids lined up on two couches that faced each other in the musty darkness. They saw all this stuff—strange and beautiful things—but couldn’t make any sense of it, because it was in a house that hadn’t been “finished.” Foundations snaked about the perimeter of the house, seeming to wait for the next century for construction to continue. The kitchen had no finished walls, just dried plaster oozing out between lath strips. The tiny bathroom was only half hung with plywood, and the door didn’t close all the way. The living-room wall had been knocked down but never completed, so that the guts of the house hung out. Right where they’d taken down the wall was Richard’s parents’ bed for all the world to see.

  As they sat there, Richard told them about how his parents celebrated Christmas. “We go out on Christmas Eve and buy five or six trees,” he said. “We bring them home, stick them in old soy-sauce cans, and put them all over the house. Some we even hang from the ceiling.”

  The high school students—as conventional as the times dictated—couldn’t look at each other for fear of laughing, or blurting out, “Jesus, will you look at this place? Will you listen to this guy?” They were impressed, horrified, appalled. Richard See was either the coolest boy who had ever lived, or the spookiest creature who had ever come down the pike.

  After that, they went over to Jack’s house, where his mother set out lemonade and cookies. It wasn’t just that Richard’s house seemed poor and Jack’s seemed rich, but that the kids were more comfortable in the familiarity of a beautiful, old, Spanish-style house that hung on a palm-covered hill beneath the Hollywood sign, where everything was immaculate, clean, spacious, and run by some screechingly correct mother. Wordlessly they promised themselves they’d never go back to Richard’s.

  Finally, after months of hanging around together, there came a time when Carolyn asked Richard to drive her alone out to her mother’s house in the Valley. As they sped along the back road of Griffith Park, Richard said, “I’m a quarter Chinese.” Then he told her he loved his half-aunt Sumoy. “But there’s nothing I can do about it,” he said. “My heart is taken, isn’t it a shame?” Embedded in all this information—all of which was an entirely different sort of conversation from what Carolyn was accustomed to listening to in the front seat of a boy’s car—was what Richard had told her on the first day they’d met: that he’d played poker with Anna May Wong.

  “She’s my favorite actress ever,” Carolyn had said. To herself she thought, My favorite actress by far. Carolyn had loved Chinese things forever. When she was little, her parents had given her Tales of a Chinese Grandmother and little Chinese teacups. At a deeper level she hoped that Richard might be an agent of change who could bring her dream life and her real life together.

  When they pulled over, Carolyn knew what to expect. He kissed her, pulled away, and asked, “Have you ever listened to ‘Two Sleepy People’? That’s a very cogent song.”

  She was impressed that he could use the word cogent in a sentence. Richard wasn’t some dumb high school student; he was a smart clever college man. And as these thoughts whirled through her brain, she realized that he was her soul mate, because he did her the honor of talking to her like a human being and not as if she were some stupid fifties girl. He listened to her. He cared what she had to say.

  They began going out a little more seriously. Richard took Carolyn to see foreign films, and to see An American Tragedy, with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. He took her down to Chinatown, where he walked her through Union Station to show her the murals and the stenciling on the ceiling. They strolled along Olvera Street, stopping for burritos and taquitos. These weren’t like the usual dates Carolyn had had with nameless, interchangeable high school boys. Dipping her taquito into a mound of guacamole, Carolyn couldn’t help but remember one boy who’d also brought her down here, taken a bite out of a burrito, and spit it out into a trash can. Richard would never do anything gross like that. Instead he would drive her up to his parents’ lot on the backside of Elysian Park, and they’d sit together and talk, talk, talk.

  Richard had something Carolyn craved—not marriage, not a house or even a family, but culture. Richard had culture in spades, because what other boy would take a girl to Union Station instead of a Joan Crawford movie? What other boy would laugh and be goofy? What other boy would listen to her when she talked about wanting to have a career? Who else would meet her halfway in these daydreams by saying that one day they would build a house on the Landa lot and live together forever, even if it was just a fantasy?

  When Carolyn graduated from high school in June of 1951, Richard wrote in her yearbook, “If you have to have this to rember [sic] me by then there is no use of me writing this. I will see you after you graduate. If I do not see you, then you should not want this to remember.” He also sent her a two-page letter. At the top of the first page, its edges ragged where they’d been torn out of a binder, he wrote, “Twenty Y
ears from Now, or Who in the Hell was He?” The letter began, “I am a fool perhaps, but I think there is a possibility that we will marry (each other that is), depending upon yourself, myself, and the millions of other people that influence our lives.” Further down he wrote, “All these things above and below were written by Richard See, God’s gift to the children of broken homes who are seeking, who are seeking perhaps, a father more than a husband, to give them security. Or perhaps they are seeking a child to give security to. I am both, and neither, father and child.” In the event she might get her hopes up, he added, “I don’t know if I’m in love now, but I do know that I’ve never been in love before. I’m not even sure I think I’m in love, but I’m sure that I am almost to the point of making myself believe that I am.” Carolyn guessed that he was still crazy about Sumoy.

  Richard’s letter wasn’t the only ambiguous thing to happen to Carolyn after graduation. Within days, all that had been so tenuous slipped away. Carolyn’s dad didn’t exactly kick her out, but he didn’t invite her to stay, either. In this limbo state, Carolyn was taken to Barney’s Beanery by her friend Jackie Joseph. “I don’t want you to be sad,” Jackie said, “because we’re going to have a good time. We’re going to be okay.” By the end of the day, Carolyn had moved out of her dad’s apartment—with George promising to pay ten dollars a week for her upkeep—and into a one-room apartment in Atwater, near the Los Angeles River, with Jackie and her mother, Belle. Jackie and Carolyn shared one twin bed; Belle got the other.

  Belle was hardly a typical fifties mom. She was gone most of the time, at the liquor store she owned down on Skid Row. She never cooked or cleaned. Jackie could only remember two things that her mother had ever cooked. Once, Belle had put a rabbit in the oven to bake. Months later, motivated by idle curiosity, someone had opened the oven and discovered the rabbit still in there, covered with so much mold that Belle had remarked, “Well, look at that. The bunny’s grown back his fur.” The other time, Jackie had come home to find her mother—dressed in black net hose, black patent-leather high heels, and a black bat-wing sweater—rolling out bread dough, twisting it into interesting bow ties and question marks. But again, Belle’s interest flagged and the bread was never baked. Meals were always of the open-the-can-and-eat-the-contents-cold-right-out-of-the-container variety. When it came time to clean up, Belle, who’d seen A Streetcar Named Desire one too many times, cleared dinner off the table by sweeping it off onto the floor like Marlon Brando. This lack of traditional domesticity translated as well into a vague detachment about who her daughter and her friend were seeing. Never once did Belle ask the girls of the many boys who came to pick them up for dates, “What are his intentions?” or even “Who is this bozo, anyway?”

  All through that summer, Richard hung around. Carolyn and Richard even set up Jackie and Chuen for what would be a disastrous double date. Both Richard and Chuen were slight, small-boned, and shy. But where Richard was funny, Chuen was deadly serious. Where Richard knew a little something about Chinese furniture, Chuen was already fluent—trained as he was to take over his father’s store. Chuen had nothing to talk about with Jackie, and she had nothing to say to him.

  But mostly Richard came over to Belle’s. The girls would heat him up a can of soup, and he’d say, “Do you have any Chinese soup spoons? I can’t possibly eat soup with these tin things.”

  And Jackie would say, “This is an American house. Take it or leave it.”

  He would shrug, then suck up his soup from the brim of the bowl. “This is how the Chinese do it,” he’d say. The girls would look at each other and think, How weird, how exotic.

  Or he would come in with a pile of books—by H. Allen Smith or Max Shulman—and sit on the couch and read. Occasionally he’d slap his thigh and laugh, but never—not once—did he look up and say, “Hey, you guys should hear this.” Again, the girls would look at him, then at each other, and think, What a lunatic, too cool.

  It was part of the American courtship ritual to drive a car, loaded down with your friends for moral support, over to some girl’s house and stand around on her lawn. Just like the white boys, Richard drove his car up onto Belle’s lawn. His Chinese buddies—the sleeves of their white Tshirts rolled up—piled out and stood around. This was the one time Belle drew the line. The woman who would permit nearly anything, who slept in her dress, who had bunnies “growing” in her oven and hundreds of chinchillas dying from neglect in her garage, said, “I can’t have this!” and “There goes the neighborhood!” and finally, “They’ve got to go!” Even Carolyn had to agree, because who were all those guys, anyway? They all had names like Haw and Maw and things she simply couldn’t understand.

  Not long after this incident, Richard wrote the first of what would become many twelve-page letters, saying that Carolyn was a wonderful person, but that she would never understand the nature of love because she was too frivolous. He’s just thinking about Sumoy, Carolyn thought. If he doesn’t appreciate me, then I’ll find someone who does.

  City College, 1952. Everything that had seemed strange and bizarre in high school now seemed absolutely normal. Carolyn, as had all her girlfriends, sheared off her curls to just a few cropped inches for a more “vogue-y” look. She eschewed her Peter Pan collars for black turtlenecks—important for making a statement about alienation and conformity, and practical because they didn’t require ironing. Men? Carolyn found plenty of new and different men to go around with, but she still liked Richard, who’d transferred to UCLA, where he was studying anthropology. Although Richard wasn’t around, Carolyn was reminded of him every time she saw Sumoy, who had also enrolled at City College.

  Carolyn looked up Sumoy’s schedule in the admissions office and—as sedately as possible—stalked her rival from English to History to Psych. On nights when Carolyn had nothing better to do—few and far between as these might be, what with dates, studying, and night shifts at Van de Kamp’s—she went to New Chinatown, where she stared at the yellow lights of the upstairs apartment above the F. See On Company and wondered, What does Sumoy have that I haven’t got? Listening to the melodious tinkling of wind chimes hanging from balconies, she thought, Well, Sumoy’s Chinese, and I’ll never figure that one out.

  Carolyn tried to forget about Richard, but Los Angeles was still basically a small town. While out on a double date with Jackie, one of the boys squealed, “Oh my God, will you look at that!” And there was Richard in his wacky car, alone, singing in full voice, “Be My Little Bumblebee.” Three people in the car became hysterical, laughing, crying, hooting. Then Jackie said, “Carolyn’s gone out with that guy!”

  “Yeah, I know him. So?” Carolyn said. Years later she would reflect, “But who knows who those guys were and what ever happened to them, while Richard went on to live in memory.”

  Soon afterward, Carolyn got up her nerve, called the F. Suie One Company, and asked for Richard. A Chinese person answered in words she couldn’t quite understand. It sounded like, “Lichald almy foo-day.” Richard had been drafted, and he hadn’t even told her. That’s that, Carolyn thought. So she took up with a fellow named Stan Guild, which wouldn’t have meant much in the great scheme of things, except that Belle Joseph had her eye on him too. Carolyn was no longer welcomed by Belle. The way Carolyn reckoned it, she was batting 0 for 3. She’d been kicked out of her mother’s house, uninvited to stay with her father after graduation, and now pushed out of Belle’s. From here, Carolyn began living in a series of furnished rooms.

  In 1952, four of Fong Yun’s children—Chong, Gai, Gim, and Choey Lon—decided they would open a little shop, Fong’s, in New Chinatown, just down the promenade from the F. See On Company. A few months later their father finally gave up on China City and moved his store next door to that of his children. This same year, Sissee and Gilbert bought an original Craftsman-style building—formerly a library—atop Mount Washington. They began turning the house into a showplace, with gold-leafed ceilings and exquisite pieces of Asian art. In December they would host
their first Christmas party. (Over time this gathering would become known for its fabulous food, wonderful decorations, and joke gifts.) Ming and Sunny would miss this first Christmas party, because they were living in a small village outside Tokyo. This trip would convince the couple that they should alternate between spending a year abroad and a year at home.

  A million light-years away from year-long trips to Asia, buying a house, or even opening a little shop in New Chinatown, Carolyn Laws continued to struggle and try to build a life for herself. She hooked up with Dick Jones—a Van de Kamp’s customer—and together they took a set of furnished rooms in Hollywood. Since it was 1952 and you were supposed to get married, buy a dishwasher, and have three kids, Carolyn didn’t tell her parents how or where she was living, and they never asked. She never mentioned Dick Jones—who said he was in the process of getting a divorce—and they never asked. Her parents didn’t call her, because that meant the landlady would buzz Carolyn’s room and she’d have to buzz back, then scurry downstairs to use the phone; and she didn’t call them, because, again, that meant going down to the front desk. For fourteen months, Carolyn waited on tables at Van de Kamp’s, played housewife with Dick, took English classes, and studied hard.

  Things went along pretty smoothly—she ate breakfast at a little cafe on the corner, rode the streetcar to school, and went off in the middle of the night to watch Dick solder aquariums—until she developed a crush on a guy who worked the soda fountain at the restaurant. As a lark, a friend wrote in one of Carolyn’s notebooks, “You love Bill. Use your will.” When Dick saw that, he said, “You’re not getting out of this crummy apartment alive.” With his fingers around her throat, Carolyn had the presence of mind to lean on the telephone buzzer until the landlady came up, wanting to know what was going on and demanding that they stop making that infernal noise!