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

  Stella also renewed her interest in the F. Suie One Company. As a teenager she had kept Ticie company in the store on Kip Street. When Stella was first married, she had walked over to the location on Wilshire every day to visit her mother-in-law. Stella had done odd jobs—a little polishing, dusting, sweeping. Now that Richard was in high school, Stella once again spent much of her time in the store, where her art background served her well. For years she worked on the restoration of a coromandel screen, pressing filler into the cracks, recarving it, replacing the broken slivers of mother-of-pearl, and laying on fine coats of black lacquer.

  Richard celebrated his sixteenth birthday in the basement of Dragon’s Den. He was one-quarter Chinese, and his looks showed elements from both his Asian and Caucasian blood. He was a sweetly handsome boy, slightly taller than his cousins and uncles and just a touch huskier. His hair was a soft and silky shade of black. He had an endearingly shy smile. But perhaps his most striking feature was his green eyes, of which he was immensely proud.

  Richard began to live a triple life: partly with Benji Okubo, partly in the white world, partly in Chinatown. During the summer and on vacation, Richard worked with Benji—still gruff and wild under the domesticating influence of his wife, Chabo, whom he had married in the internment camp—on landscaping jobs. Benji and Richard would drive out to Ava Gardner’s or Elizabeth Taylor’s house, then trim, cut, shape. When they were done, they’d buy a six-pack of beer, and sit and talk.

  For nine months of the year, Richard was in school. Rather than go to Belmont or Poly with the other kids from Chinatown, Richard enrolled at John Marshall High, near Silverlake, where his friends were the only Jews in a predominately Gentile school. He hung around with a guy who wanted to become a doctor. Their affiliation had less to do with being ethnically different from the others—which they certainly were—than it did with simply being different. They weren’t part of the in-crowd. They weren’t popular. They certainly didn’t date or hang out with girls. Instead they competed against each other for grades and talked about where they wanted to go to college.

  After school, Richard went back down to Chinatown. He worked in the store, doing many of the jobs that his father and uncles had done as teenagers. He drilled holes in the bottoms of porcelain vases and wired them for lamps. He put together furniture when it arrived from Asia. He spent time—as did everyone in the family at one time or another—on the coromandel screen. He became convinced that he didn’t want to spend his life working in the store like his uncle and father.

  For the first time, Richard began hanging out with his cousins (Fong Yun’s children) and his half-aunts and -uncles (the sons and daughters of Fong See), as well as a few of the young men along the block—Albert Wong, the kid from the Sam Sing Butcher Shop, and Allen Mock, the son of a gambler. Although they saw him as definitely Caucasian, they accepted him because he was a relative.

  The boys, Richard included, were like so much hollow bamboo, Chinese on the outside, hollow on the inside. They didn’t fit into the world of their parents. They certainly didn’t fit into the world of their white peers. They didn’t even fit in with girls in Chinatown. The basic philosophies didn’t mesh. The American work ethic—success, occupational prestige, educational attainment, the expenditure of wealth to compete with the Joneses—just didn’t jibe with how these boys had been raised: to save for buying trips and banquets, to work for the family and not for yourself, to think of returning home to China, and not to disgrace yourself in front of Americans or bring harm to the family through your actions.

  Like their fathers and grandfathers before them who had suffered from having their culture belittled, so too did these young men. The larger world spoke loudly and clearly: You are different. What you feel has no value. You are bad. You are dirty. You are unpleasant to live near. Consciously and unconsciously, they had heard, felt, and seen these things since the day they were born. Be careful. Watch out what you say. Don’t make a mistake. Their bodies, which should have been filled with all the hopes and dreams and spunk of young men around the world, were filled instead with a withering combination of insecurity and a what’s-the-use attitude.

  But Richard didn’t think about these things when he climbed the stairs from Dragon’s Den to his grandfather’s apartment and a world that seemed purely Chinese. Straight-backed chairs lined the four walls of the main room. The old organ of the Methodist Mission still stood on its raised platform, and sometimes the younger kids pumped the pedals, creating horrible wheezing moans. Even without the organ, the noise level was always high. Nine people lived in this apartment: Richard’s grandfather, his wife, and their seven children, ranging in age from infancy to their early twenties. They were often joined by what seemed like half the population of Chinatown, who came over unannounced to sit and gape before the new television set—the first in the neighborhood. Over the cacophony of voices—babies crying, teenagers giggling and roughhousing, old folks calling out to each other in high-pitched tones—the set blared out wrestling or newscasts.

  Richard didn’t pay much attention to his grandfather or Ngon Hung. His grandfather seemed fossilized. His step-grandmother—though just a couple of years older than his aunt Sissee—appeared ancient, with her crooked back and her shuffling steps. Carrying, birthing, and caring for seven babies had taken a toll. Following ghetto tradition, all of her children had been born at home—some easily, as when she went to the bathroom and the baby simply slipped out, and some—according to family story—with difficulty, as when she was home alone, in pain, and pushing for hours.

  Richard grew familiar with the routine in this bustling household. Each month his grandfather called his children together to dole out ten dollars or fifteen dollars—their portion of Fong See’s family pot, now called an allowance in keeping with contemporary times. To May Oy, who was quiet and home-loving like her mother, Fong See might say, “Go out and buy something for yourself.” To his eldest son, Chuen, he would say, “You did a good job this week in the store.” He might compliment Yun on his efforts in putting together a piece of furniture. To Sumoy he would say, “I understand you did a good job in school.” Other times he subtracted dollars, saying, “I heard you were mean to your sister,” or “You didn’t help your mother make joang.” To Jong Oy he might rail, “You think I don’t know when you sneak out at night to be with that military man? This is not the right type of person for my daughter. You will get nothing this month.” He was always sterner with the girls, hoping to control their modern ways with less money and harsh words.

  Once they were older, Richard and the other guys went out. Chuen and Yun had a car—a World War II Jeep bought from army surplus—and they’d all pile in and roam about town for siu yeh, “midnight snack.” They drove to Van de Kamp’s on San Fernando Road for hamburgers, fries, and malts, or out west to Ocean Park for a pastrami-and-cole-slaw sandwich at Zucky’s, or to Micelli’s in Hollywood, where the Italian waiters treated Richard like a movie star, or simply down to Ninth Street by the City Market for noodles, dumplings, or a bowl of jook (rice gruel) seasoned with salted fish.

  They visited Anna May Wong in her Chinese-style house with its moon gate, courtyard, and tall, narrow doors. These social calls—often with Sissee, Gilbert, Stella, and Eddy—brought out the very best in them all, as they remembered good times at Dragon’s Den. Sometimes others showed up—Tyrus and Ruth; Dorothy Jeakins (an old friend from art-school days and now an Academy Award winner for her costume designs); Norman Foster (the film director); James Wong Howe and Sanora Babb; and Katherine DeMille (the niece of Cecil B. DeMille). Anna May’s younger brother, Richard, would also be there, watching over his sister as he had done for so many years.

  When it was just Anna May and the boys, they’d play poker, drink, and tell dumb stories. Sometime during the evening, Anna May—dressed in black slacks and black sweater, her bangs just as black as when she’d danced as the slave girl in The Thief of Bagdad—would look over and mutter, “You know, fifty mil
lion Chinamen can’t be Wong,” and they’d all laugh as though it were the funniest joke on earth.

  In the summer, the boys ventured even farther afield—camping in Yosemite, Mammoth, and Yellowstone parks. Sometimes they went to San Diego to hunt and fish. Over time, Richard understood how unusual he was, compared to others. Sure, Chong and Gai, Uncle’s sons, were on the tennis team. Sure, Chuen had been in the service and Yun, Chuen’s younger brother, was doing auto shop. These were things Richard could relate to. But in other ways they’d been raised very differently. Uncle had never allowed his sons to join the Boy Scouts, because he didn’t trust uniforms. He hadn’t let them try out for team sports, because he’d grown up with rickshaw races and thought running was low-class. But the biggest discrepancy was that Chuen and Yun had to work, because they were being prepared to take over their father’s business. Uncle’s sons had to work, because they wanted to open their own shop in New Chinatown. Albert Wong worked hardest of all, delivering, bookkeeping, managing property, cutting meat, and shining shoes at the City Market on Saturdays and Sundays. No one really expected Richard to work. He was the family scholar; his parents simply wanted him to go to school, get good grades, putter around the store, and help Benji during the summers.

  During their sojourns, the boys drove all night, all day, never thinking about discrimination or racism, knowing how easy it was to avoid if they chose not to notice it. They encountered trouble only a few times. Upon arriving at the Canadian border, they weren’t allowed to cross, because they had “too much junk in the car.” Driving from Los Angeles to New York City to visit Jong Oy, who’d run off with her military man, they couldn’t get a room because of “who we were.” When they stopped at a public swimming pool to go swimming, they were stumped by a sign that said WHITES ONLY. Unsure about what they counted as, they just left.

  When they weren’t on the road, they hung out, usually in an area next to Uncle’s store in China City, where the boys built model airplanes, amateur radios, and electric gadgets, and repaired furniture. They tinkered with cars in the alley. They’d put away a few beers or maybe some wine—Richard more than the others—and talk. Just as Fong See had reinvented himself over and over again, they too reinvented his story—elaborating, changing, guessing, simply making it up.

  “How do you think my father met your grandmother?” Chuen might ask Richard.

  “He had that underwear factory …”

  “Do you really think that’s how it happened?”

  “You mean that she just walked in and he gave her the job?” Richard asked.

  The guys looked at each other, considering.

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Maybe he met her when he was out selling door-to-door,” Richard suggested. “Maybe she was a customer. You know what I mean? Maybe he was getting a little on the side.”

  “Knowing my dad, I wouldn’t doubt it,” Chuen said.

  “What about your mom?” Richard asked. “Did he really buy her?”

  “I think my father needed a new wife because he wanted more children,” Chuen speculated. “My mother was scared, but he was kind and gentle. When she was five years old, my mother was on her own. She had to scavenge in the garbage for food, because people wouldn’t feed her.”

  “Our mother always wanted to learn how to speak and write English,” Yun might add. “She wanted a teacher to come in, but my father chased him off.”

  The boys thought they were hot stuff with their hair slicked back and their leather jackets, but they never went out with girls. Not ever. In earlier days, Fong See would have found brides for his sons, but now he was too old. Ngon Hung could have met with other mothers to make a match, but she was too loving of her sons to notice that they needed anyone besides her. The boys were so well cared for that they didn’t have a deep desire to look elsewhere. They would have liked to go on dates, but none of them thought they knew how.

  Their sisters and girl cousins seemed to adapt more easily. While the boys roamed the streets, the girls gathered together, climbed up on a bed, and perused magazines for the latest fashions and hair styles. They permed their hair or curled it into flips. They gave each other American names: Jong Oy became Joan. Sumoy wanted to be called Carol, “without an E.”

  The girls seemed better equipped to handle the conflicts between the imperatives of the American world and the strong traditional styles of their home lives, where it was taboo to show any part of their bodies, have ambition, aspire to more than embroidery and motherhood, or show any disrespect for male family members. Perhaps the American school system exposed them to more opportunities than it did their brothers, who were expected to work in the family business after school. Perhaps, because the girls weren’t “working,” they could do their homework. (A father would have scoffed at a son doing homework: “This is just a devious means of wasting time!”) Perhaps, because the girls weren’t uncrating goods in the back alley, they had more exposure to the western customers who came through the store. Choey Lau found a kai ma, or fairy godmother, in a white customer who took her to the opera, the ballet, and the philharmonic. In turn, Leong-shee scolded her daughter, “You should never have been Chinese.” Choey Lau listened to this with equanimity, and later was to claim, “Because of Mrs. Morrison, I got westernized.”

  Her younger sister, Choey Lon, veered away from traditional Anglo cultural manifestations, preferring to sit at her window and listen to the mariachi music that wafted up from nearby bars. When she went shopping, her older sister might select a sedate pink dress. But Choey Lon would opt for, say, white with red stripes; what she really wanted was the one with the glitter and sequins and ruffles like what she saw the Mexican girls wearing on Olvera Street. She also liked to dance. When her family said, “Gee, Lonny, you’ve got rhythm,” she would answer, “Yes, I do, and I’m not afraid to show it.” She experimented with different kinds of food, begging her mother to make tacos and her father to eat them. To all this, Leong-shee just shook her head and said, “I can’t believe you’re from my stomach.”

  For young men, finding a suitable Chinese girl to marry was still difficult. Mothers who had been sold in villages told their sons, “High cheekbones are unlucky.” Fathers, who still longed to return home, spoke frankly to their sons: “Small ears mean a lack of blessing.” Even the old bachelors that every family had around their table, come dinnertime, were requested to advise lovestruck young men: “The world knows that a short underlip means a short life.”

  Interracial relationships were problematic at best. In his book on Los Angeles Chinatown, author Garding Lui tried to explain the perils from the Chinese point of view: “Colored” women were okay, because they were good workers; Mexican girls were bad, because they would bring their families and require too many bedrooms; Japanese girls believed themselves superior. Lui then described an affair between a Chinese man and a white woman. The couple was driving to a picnic in the country, making “dove-eyes” at one another, when a white man stepped up to the car and accused the Chinese man of being a white slaver. The woman interjected, “I have divorced three untrue husbands; I’ve had enough of such guys as you, and now I have a Chinese husband who is kind, and good, and true.” To this, Lui noted, “If that woman had three, or possibly five, husbands who were absolutely worthless and unfaithful ‘guys,’ and then finally met a golden yellow husband who was everything that could be desired; then, boys, give the Chinaman a big hand and don’t be jealous in the matter.”

  This story aside, dating a white girl seemed ludicrous. The younger generation of Chinese men couldn’t muster the unbridled nerve of someone like Fong See. Paradoxically, Chinese girls didn’t seem afraid to date white boys, as long as they could keep the news a secret from their conservative elders. Perhaps this was because Chinese girls were in the enviable (at that time) position of being treated like “China dolls.” White men wanted to go out with Chinese girls; white girls wouldn’t give Chinese men the time of day.

  In th
is atmosphere of all the things that could be wrong or unlucky, Richard developed a crush on someone who would have been taboo for him in any culture—his half-aunt Sumoy.

  Much of the change that was happening in Los Angeles, and indeed across the country, was the result of the sudden exposure of so many GIs to different countries, especially those in Asia, which until the war had remained relatively unknown. For every horror story told of long, treacherous days in the Pacific, there were countless other tales of the beauty of Hawaii, the simplicity of Japan, the richness of China. It all seemed to come together in California, where the influences of Chinese and Japanese immigrants had melded with the state’s climate and landscape. It should come as no surprise, then, that after the war, the so-called California style of living suddenly took hold, capturing the imagination of the entire country. Everyone desired a palm tree, sunshine, a barbecue. They wanted moon gates, upturned eaves, stonework. Ray See saw these trends and recognized that his time had come.

  He had been griping for years about putting his earnings into the family pot. The way Ray saw it, he alone—with a little help from Bennie—had built the See Manufacturing Company. (Ray totally dismissed Eddy’s participation, because his brother had quit so early into the enterprise.) Ray had started in a little hole-in-the-wall down on Ceres Street where he’d done custom work for Hollywood celebrities and socially prominent families in the west. Later he’d done Monterrey-and Mission-style furniture—heavy stuff with thick arms and simple lines, but easy to sell in Los Angeles. Then he’d expanded again, doing lamp groups and Chinese-modern furniture for Stickley and Prevue right through the war. By that time the factory had moved to Eighteenth Street south of downtown, and covered an entire city block.