On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family Page 45

  Ray used these theories to create a new furniture line—Calinese. Actually, his wife, Leona, had come up with the name. “It will be a little bit of California and a little bit of China,” she said. “Use something cheap, like myrtle wood. People will think it’s exotic and innovative.” Taking her advice, he’d incorporated myrtle and lauan, a mahogany from Luzon in the Pacific. He designed small cigarette tables in light and dark finishes, which could be placed around a room separately or together to make one large coffee table. He combined a chest and a bookcase to make a modern version of an old-fashioned hutch or china cabinet. And he still designed lamps—especially the table/lamp combinations. All of his ideas were turned into reality by Bennie and the other men and women who worked on the assembly lines.

  Ray loved the pace: getting out new designs each season; setting up showrooms in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Grand Rapids; wining and dining the buyers. He hadn’t met a furniture man or a carpet man yet who didn’t like to drink. Martinis and steaks and parties and women willing to spread their legs. People behaving outrageously at night and coming in the next morning to buy. Simply paradise, as far as Ray could see.

  He especially loved the way it paid off. Baker, Knapp & Tubbs had been the first to take the Calinese line, filling their front windows with it. By 1950, Calinese could be found across the country. Frederick & Nelson in Seattle stocked it, calling Calinese “modern but not severe.” James A. Cullimore & Company in Oklahoma noted the “richness of detail and softly rounded corners of the Orient.” Stower’s Furniture in Houston celebrated its golden anniversary by highlighting Calinese as perfect for “those just-married budgets.” W. & J. Sloane in San Francisco promoted Calinese as “high modern at low prices.” Even The New York Times had carried the news of Calinese.

  Ray was at the height of his career and everyone knew it. The year before, in 1949, not satisfied with just Calinese, Ray had started designing fabrics again for D. N. & E. Walter, which had been in business in San Francisco since the building of the railroad. Ray had recently been feted by the company as the country’s “eminent textile and furniture designer.” His affiliation with Walter had also resulted in a documentary called “The Art of Handscreen Painting,” in which Ray had the opportunity to show off his designs. His outsized, brightly dyed prints had names evoking the natural beauty of the state and the Orient: Giant Cactus (“as beautiful as a western sunset”), Flower Window (“from a latticework window in San Francisco’s Chinatown”), Oahu (“a popular pattern for people who enjoy a Polynesian atmosphere”), Chungking (“distinctive as China herself and as modern as the moment”). All of them, as the narrator explained, utilized a “subtle new color combination and a trace of Chinese influence to create new designs lovely as a Ming vase and refreshing as the outdoors.”

  The people at D. N. & E. Walter talked about these new prints as a method of boasting about California to the entire country. “We’re proud of our state and the way we live out here,” the narrator said. “We try to get that across. With Walter handprints, everybody can have California sunshine right in their home.” Ray’s job, as the narrator explained, was to “combine Oriental mysticism, philosophy and charm with the vigorous beauty of the outdoors.”

  The new decade had begun auspiciously for Ray. Fifteen thousand Angelenos had passed through the doors of a “Calinese Touch-Plate” home in Santa Monica. The two-bedroom house had been furnished by Barker Brothers. Cocoa wall-to-wall carpeting flowed from room to room. Cocoa, turquoise, and tangerine had been used in the draperies and upholstery, with lemon yellow and lime green accents. The “Touch-Plate,” an innovative remote-control lighting system, ran throughout the house and was served by four panels. Billed as the “House of Tomorrow,” the home boasted the latest in modern inventions: exterior Venetian blinds; ceiling-mounted glass panels that emitted infrared rays (a new method to heat a bedroom and “do away with cold sheets”); an automatic garage-door opener; an indoor incinerator (“smog-proof and odorless”); and retractable hose reels and clotheslines.

  Lamps, fabrics, furniture—Ray was doing them all. Sitting behind his desk, Ray glanced across the showroom floor to where the salesgirl was giving her pitch, echoing the words of a recent press release. “Mr. See has developed these occasional pieces in forms that have roots in the ancient past, yet every one of them reads ‘today’ in its effect. To achieve an Oriental feeling, Mr. See has used finishes in ginger, amber, and teak. Genuine coral and jade are used as color accents. The cloud design is taken from an ancient mandarin coat in Mr. See’s collection.”

  Ray grinned. So much had been made of his “collection” of Oriental antiques. If only they knew how much he hated that stuff—the smell, the look, all the bad associations. After a lifetime of trying to get away from all that, here he was being reminded of it at every turn. It amazed him that the fantastic coverage on the Calinese line had come in large part from the “Chinese pioneer family” crap.

  It was ironic, really. Most of his friends didn’t even know he was Chinese. He never talked about it. His daughter, Pollyanne, knew enough not to ask. He was fairly proud of being Chinese, but he just couldn’t forgive his father for leaving his mother and the rest of the family. He remembered a picture that Pollyanne had painted of a Chinese man. Ray had taken one look at it and wordlessly walked away. The drawing had looked so much like his father that it had made him physically ill.

  As Ray See marveled at how far he had come and how he had built a life for himself, his father, now in his nineties, stood on frail legs outside his store at 510 Los Angeles Street. After all these years, See-bok was moving once again. This time he was going just a few blocks, to New Chinatown, where his son-in-law Gilbert Leong had designed a new showroom for the F. See On Company, as well as a warehouse, and living quarters above the store for See-bok’s family. See-bok supposed he should look at this move as a new start, but he had had so many new starts in his life.

  He watched as his eldest sons from the second family, Chuen and Yun, backed and sidled their way out through the doorway, carrying one end of an altar table. At the other end was Peter, the son of Fong Lai. See-bok barked out a few words—“Don’t bump it! Be careful!”—and thought back to how his own true-life brother had been replaced by a new Fong Lai. When the second Fong Lai had wanted to bring over his son, Fong See had made the arrangements. Peter had originally come over from China to teach Fong See’s children Chinese, but now he worked in the store.

  See-bok looked around. Across the street, the old Spanish Plaza. To his far right, Olvera Street. To his far left, the Pico House and the other buildings that would be saved. But everything in his block was in disarray. Some of the buildings were already deserted: the Sam Sing Butcher Shop had moved over to Spring Street; the Leongs had consolidated Soochow with the branch in New Chinatown. But a few old-timers like him were sadly packing up a lifetime’s worth of possessions and merchandise. Everyone was out or getting out before the bulldozers came.

  See-bok watched his sons and Peter load the table into the moving truck. Inside the store, others—his younger sons and nephews—were up on ladders, prying loose carvings, rolling up scrolls, and carefully bringing down wall hangings. His daughters were packing ceramics and small bronzes.

  He was too old to make this move!

  Over the last few months, Fong See had watched while others tried to fight City Hall, but he knew that the only way to win was through money. It pleased him to know that rumors circulated around Chinatown that he had offered the city $250,000 if they would let him stay in his Los Angeles Street location. He liked it that people said, “He puts his money where his mouth is.” See-bok wouldn’t say what he’d offered, but when the city hadn’t taken the bait, he’d gone to the Union Bank with his Caucasian accountant to see about a loan to move to New Chinatown. When he’d heard he’d have to pay points or cash under the table—he couldn’t remember which—he’d simply refused and ponied up the cash for his new building. These stories kept his reputa
tion alive.

  Chuen and the others came out with more merchandise and loaded it on the truck. “Come on, Pa,” Chuen said. “We’re taking this over to the new place. You’d better come along with us.”

  Fong See’s new store was on Chungking Court in a recently built block of New Chinatown, west of Hill Street. After his son had parked the truck, See-bok shuffled into the dark storefront.

  “Pa, why don’t you rest for a bit?” Chuen said. “We’ll take care of things.”

  See-bok nodded, and wandered back past the packing crates and larger pieces of furniture left helter-skelter on the floor, to a back room where a cot had been set up. He sat down slowly, sighed, then lay down. He stared at the ceiling. He didn’t worry about business. My customers will follow me, he thought. He would let his sons wait on clients from Beverly Hills and Pasadena, as well as the movie stars from Hollywood—Yvonne De Carlo, Anne Baxter, and Walter Pidgeon. It would be good practice for the boys, but Fong See himself would still wait on important customers like Charles Eames and Frank Lloyd Wright. (That old man! That Frank Lloyd Wright! He drove Fong See crazy! The way he came into the shop and tap-tapped at the merchandise with his cane! Fong See had shown him! “Get out! Get out!” he’d shouted until Wright fled. For years that story alone had made people wonder and come in to see if it was true. They would come to his new store to hear that tale again.)

  Fong See was old, but he’d never lost his vision of life in America. He always thought ahead. He knew people wondered why he didn’t take this opportunity to leave Chinatown altogether, but when the new City Hall had been built, he had seen the future. That building was so tall and sound that he became convinced that Los Angeles would always be a place where Caucasians would come first. So he stayed in Chinatown. Now, after sixty-three years in Los Angeles, he had finally bought a store. (It was still in someone else’s name as a precaution.) It was as though Fong See was announcing, “I’m putting my roots down here. I came to America. I did well. Remember me.”

  It was hard for See-bok to think about these things as he lay on the cot in the back room of his new store. It was 1950, and Fong See, at ninety-three, was becoming increasingly disengaged from the world around him. His son Ming had recently married Sunny Rockwell, but Fong See hadn’t gone to the wedding. (He wasn’t invited because he was too old and unpredictable.) Fong See just barely observed the relationship between his sons and his grandson Richard. (That boy had troubles, drinking too much. But he told Chuen, “It’s better to have bad friends than no friends.”) His daughter Jong Oy had moved away, first back East, then to Taiwan, after marrying one of Chiang Kai-shek’s officers. She had met the boy when he’d come over as a trainee. See-bok had already picked out the son of a businessman for her to marry, but she’d insisted on marrying this military man. Fong See had been too old, too weak, to prevent this. Now he supposed he’d never see her again.

  Remember me, he thought.

  He had always kept control over his family in China, but now he was an old man, powerless and ineffectual, totally isolated from his home village. Since he’d married Ngon Hung, all of his work had been geared toward leaving Los Angeles and going back to China, but just when he would have gone home to retire, his home country had thwarted him. He tried to look back and see what he could have done differently.

  He thought back to the Japanese invasion. The Fatsan Grand Hotel had been conscripted by the Japanese to use as their headquarters. In the home village of Dimtao, his fourth wife, Si Ping, whom he had married in the 1920s, had done all right. They had never had children, and she had one hundred mou of land to sustain her. But Uncle’s concubine, Lui Ngan Fa, and her three children had suffered greatly. With only six mou among them, they had been reduced to simple meals of jook or cabbage rice. Yet people said that no one left empty-handed when they went to her for money or food. No one realized then that Lui Ngan Fa’s acts of generosity when others had nothing to eat but boiled bark would serve her well in the coming dark years.

  When the world war ended, Fong See had gone back to China and seen with his own eyes how furniture had been destroyed, how his house had been torn asunder, how his land had languished. The manager of the hotel claimed that only three hundred U.S. dollars was left in the account. It was reported that Fong See had said, “This is evidence of the cruel act of Imperialist invaders. With this three hundred dollars, I might as well invite all my relatives and friends to a meal.” Maybe he’d said that, maybe not. He couldn’t remember exactly.

  For a few brief years, Ngon Hung’s mother, the business-minded Fong Guai King, had once again taken over the hotel. But this, too, was temporary. As soon as the Japanese were vanquished, the Generalissimo and Mao went right back to their civil war. In 1949, using the same guerrilla tactics they had used against the Japanese, Mao’s troops drove Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland to the island of Taiwan. Soon after, the Communist high command claimed victory and rode into Peking to take up residence at the Forbidden Palace. In South China, lesser troops took over the Fatsan Grand Hotel to use as that city’s Communist Commission Office. Fong See’s town house behind the hotel was razed, with no apology or money paid for the insult. But this was not all! He sent six thousand U.S. dollars to Fong Guai King—not for her, she was too old, nor for Si Ping, his wife here would not allow it—but to help his young cousins and nephews leave China.

  Fong See wasn’t the only one to do this; all through Chinatown, people scrambled to send money back, hoping to get mothers and brothers and cousins and wives out before the Bamboo Curtain came down. When China first closed, families sent “tea money” back to relatives left behind in home villages. But now the risk was too great. In villages and cities across China, retributions were carried out against citizens reputed to have Imperialist relatives in the West. In American Chinatowns, since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the politically powerful Six Companies—the federation of benevolent societies representing districts and counties in China—had mounted virulent anti-Communist campaigns. Spies were allegedly everywhere, and willing to report citizens sympathetic to the Communist regime. In addition to the fear of retribution that Chinese Americans faced from within their own communities, there was the apprehension about Caucasians that had continued unabated since the days of the railroad.

  With the Korean War, Americans were also in the grip of anti-Chinese, anti-Communist propaganda. Chinese students and scholars from the People’s Republic of China attending schools in the United States were barred from returning home. With the detention of Japanese American citizens still fresh in everyone’s mind, there was widespread fear that now Chinese American citizens might face the same fate. (The passage of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which provided for the internment of Communists during a national emergency, certainly didn’t help to quell these anxieties.) All these factors combined to produce a decline in the remittances sent to relatives in China from $7 million in 1948 to just $600,000 a year later. Now, in 1950, very little “tea money” left the United States for China.

  Fong Guai King received the money, but gossips informed on her. She did her best to hide it, even giving some to Lui Ngan Fa to spirit away from inquisitive eyes. But while the Fong family had been able to slip through all the changes that had happened in China in the past, this time they were destined to be victims. Fong Guai King—her feet still bound, her hands still smooth and soft—was dragged to the village square, where she was forced to kneel in broken glass while new village Communists came forward to denounce her.

  “She treated us badly.”

  “She was a bad woman, always selfish.”

  “She was rich, always taking fifty percent of the profits from the Fatsan Grand Hotel.”

  “She never thought of the villagers.”

  “She never worked hard. Look at her hands and you will see.”

  “She is one of the worst of the bad class.”

  On and on they went until Fong Guai King confessed, and no nephews or cousins were
able to escape.

  Though a terrible loss of face, this was just a preface to what would come. Because Fong See owned over one hundred mou of land, he was classified as an evil landlord. Still, the old-timers of Dimtao remembered Gold Mountain See’s good deeds and therefore treated Si Ping well when she was detained. They remembered how she had financed the Arts and Handicrafts Fair every year on the seventh day of the seventh month. They remembered how women and young people from the ninety-six villages of Nam Hoi county had always come to enjoy the popular event. Only the farmers from rival villages were cruel to Fong See’s fourth wife, occasionally beating and cursing her. Not too badly, it was reported. For a time, Uncle’s wife escaped these torments. “She was always kind and humble,” the villagers recalled. But eventually she was hit on the head and made to confess that she had hidden the money for Guai King.

  The Communists were evil, or at least that’s what most people were saying. But it was hard to tell. Many in Chinatown had forgotten what China was like: starvation, drought, pestilence, no opportunities. When Mao said, “Everybody works so everybody eats,” Fong See, who may have been considered a landlord but had grown up as a peasant, recognized the irrefutable logic to those words. When relatives wrote that daughters of not very well-to-do families were being recruited to become orthodontists, doctors, and engineers, it was another sign—a woman could be something more than just a servant. But no one wanted to say these things aloud.