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

  Americans were confused by all this. After so many years of “Free China” campaigns, the Communist takeover of China, followed by the outbreak of the Korean War, came as a surprise and a blow. Just as party loyalists wanted someone to take the blame in China, so too did Americans want someone to take the blame for the loss of China. Harking back to the last century, when the railroad was completed and the specter of yellow hordes petrified the Caucasian populace, once again politicians—with Senator Joseph McCarthy just beginning his anti-Communist campaign—dredged up familiar fears.

  But while red-baiting demagogues and their minions ruined reputations, careers, and lives, some senators were passing special bills to bring in individual Chinese people who’d been caught in China when the Bamboo Curtain came down. This had happened to Woo Nguey, the wife of the owner of the Chungking Produce Company in Los Angeles, who got stuck in China during a visit. Senator Richard Nixon came to the family’s aid, passing a special bill so that she could immigrate. To celebrate Mrs. Woo’s return, the family sent the senator a crate of china, which he returned to them with a note saying that it was “wrong to accept a gift for doing right.” In this way, the Woo family became convinced that Senator Nixon was an honest man.

  Fong See had witnessed many changes in his home country during his lifetime—the fall of the Manchus, the Boxer Rebellion, the reign of the warlords, the rise and fall of Chiang Kai-shek. Through all of these struggles, he’d never wavered in his belief that he would one day return to China to live out his final days. This time, however, he knew he was too old to outlast the new regime. For Fong See, who had sent money back to China for seventy years, investing and buying property, this turn of events meant that not only had his family lost most of its land wealth to the Communists, but that he would never be able to follow the old proverb that said, “The fallen leaves return to the root.” Lying on the cot in the back room of his new store, Fong See knew he would never be able to return to the home village, recline in his rooftop pavilion, and listen to Enrico Caruso on the Victrola. Fong See would never be buried in his homeland.

  CHAPTER 19

  ANOTHER MARRIAGE

  1951–57

  ON February 7, 1951, bulldozers, cranes, and steam shovels rolled down Los Angeles Street and began demolishing the nineteen buildings that made up the last block of Old Chinatown, including Jerry’s Joynt, Soochow, the Kong Chow Temple, the Sam Sing Butcher Shop, the F. See On Company, and the F. Suie One Company. Debris and discarded furniture lay beneath piles of brick and shattered siding. The Lugo House, built in the days of hand-wrought square nails, was ripped apart. In structures not quite leveled, pipes and loose wires dangled. Below ground, passages and basements that had once offered a means of escape from police raids were crushed.

  C. G. Byson, who was contracted to wreck the block for a cost of $16,794, personally inspected each broken wall, hoping to find hidden treasure. Instead he found lottery markers, piles of rags and waste paper, and forgotten camphor chests—the Gold Mountain chests of old, packed with quilted jackets, soap, and papers. Richard and Eddy also sifted through the ruins, collecting those hand-wrought nails and picking up shards of Chinese porcelain, ginger jars, and medicinal bottles. Richard found pieces of clothing—shirts with detachable collars—that he added to his wardrobe. Eddy appropriated granite cobblestones and curbstones for the garden on Lantana.

  This demolition meant major changes for the family. The Sees moved the F. Suie One Company over to Ord Street, into one of the last remaining buildings of China City. The Foo dogs that had flanked the entrance to the old store and, before that, the entrance to Dragon’s Den, now guarded China City’s old moon gate, which led into the courtyard of the F. Suie One Company. Inside, the family converted each kiosk and cubbyhole into specialized rooms for merchandise. The central aisle, which had once seen rickshaws loaded with gawking tourists, now became the display area for furniture and knickknacks.

  Just to the left, inside the entrance, was the bronze room. Next came the art room, which held the priceless pieces. In this room, Ming invited special customers to sit around a rosewood barrel table on little pie shaped stools. “I have such a treasure to show you,” he’d say, then slowly bring out his collection of rose quartz. Just past the art room was the porcelain room, followed by a small alcove with an eight-foot carved Shiva. At the back were glassed-in offices for Sissee and Ming, and a large shop area for restorations and custom work. On the right, coming back along the aisle toward the front, was the scroll room, followed by the embroidery room. Next came a vestibule leading to another warehouse area, and an elevator shaft that went to an upstairs workshop.

  Finally, behind Eddy’s jewelry table at the right of the entrance was the true “back,” that area where the family hung out. It was in the back that Stella worked on that confounded coromandel screen and did other restorations. Here the family heated up noodles, nibbled on char siu sandwiches on sourdough bread, brought in tea cakes, or picked up french dip sandwiches from Philippe’s, across the street. In the late afternoons the family entertained their friends, and had a glass of “something stronger” before heading home.

  The family would stay in this store on Ord Street for the next thirty years. Business would change. Rentals to movie companies would gradually be superseded by rentals to television productions, and back again. With China closed, the Sees looked to other sources for merchandise. Old customers—some of them major collectors—would come in, wishing to sell. Grace Nicholson, who had learned about Asian art from Fong See when they were neighbors out in Pasadena in the teens and twenties, sold her Chinese antiques to the F. See On and F. Suie One companies when the trend seemed to ebb. When the Bernheimers—famous in Los Angeles for their Japanese gardens—decided to hold an auction to liquidate their estate, Ming, Eddy, and Richard attended to buy large bronzes and big stone pieces. The most spectacular purchase was a nineteenth-century freestanding Chinese conjugal bed designed for a house where all the relatives—aunts, uncles, in-laws, and children—lived together. In China the bed had served as private quarters—with an anteroom, then the bed itself—encased in panels of boxwood, fruitwood, and rosewood. In Los Angeles the bed became a playroom for the See grandchildren and great-grandchildren who came to visit the store.

  Fong See, now in his late nineties, found all this change strange indeed. In his new shop in New Chinatown, he felt removed from everything and everyone he knew. Old Chinatown had been conservative and stuck in the old ways. New Chinatown was just the opposite—new, modern, all junk. It shocked him. His new neighbors seemed like strangers, and he felt too old to start new friendships. His children sensed his withdrawal. They seemed liberated somehow, and were always off skiing or some other foolish thing.

  Just as Sissee took her mother up to Oregon for one last visit, Chuen now took his father to Sacramento. That Chinatown was completely gone now. They looked for the brewery where Fong See had worked as a teenager. He remembered the way, telling Chuen how he had walked five or ten miles a day just to get there. The brewery was long gone, too. The people—his landlord, the rancher, his neighbors, the man who had helped him import his first curios—were all dead.

  Fong See slowly gave up. All the timeworn sayings honoring old age—“Your good fortune is like the eastern sea,” “your longevity is as great as the south mountain,” “may you have this same day every year”—didn’t mean much to him now. He would spend his last days in the F. See On Company, performing for customers, telling far-fetched stories in his put-on pidgin English as he always had. He would spend his nights in the downstairs room behind the store—too sick, too tired, to walk up the flight of stairs to the family apartment.

  As Fong See was coming to the end of his life, his grandson Richard was taking a few tentative steps into adulthood. To his Chinese pals, Richard seemed outspoken. He appeared strong. He drank boilermakers and made fun of his cousins and half-uncles when they couldn’t hold down a beer. He would walk in with a stolen street sign o
r a light from the railroad yards, and blithely say, “Look what I got.” If a guy was worrying about whether or not he should ask out a white girl or a Mexican girl, Richard would say, “Go after her.” Since he’d spent two years at City College, he was meeting people who’d been to war, people who went out of their way to be different instead of conforming. He had conscientiously developed an “exotic persona”—a little bit beatnik, a touch of Chinese, and a tad swashbuckling in his attitudes, dress, and speech. To his friends and relatives in Chinatown, Richard seemed very Caucasian. He seemed as if he knew what was up, what was cool in the world outside Chinatown.

  But Richard knew little more than his cousins and half-uncles. This boy who talked with so much bravado about taking out white girls had only been on two real “dates” in his life, both of them in junior high school. (He still had a crush on Sumoy, but that certainly wasn’t going to go anywhere.) Now, like countless Chinese bachelors before him, he wanted to find out about “normal” American life; he wanted to find out about girls. But to Richard, dating seemed artificial: dressing up, going to the movies or a dance, trying to talk to someone you didn’t know. It wasn’t natural, but he’d turned twenty and knew he had to try.

  Richard heard about a writer who had said that the only reason he wrote was to meet girls, not for marriage or sex, but just to learn how to deal with girls. In 1951, taking this advice to heart, Richard wrote a play and decided he would try to get it produced at John Marshall High, his old school. He knew that drama kids were a little off the wall. He also knew that the girls wouldn’t be total dogs. Once he got to the drama department, he saw that all the girls looked basically alike in their angora sweaters, detachable Peter Pan collars, and straight skirts. He found that he physically loved the smell of greasepaint, so he was attracted to Carolyn Laws, who wore pancake makeup to cover a birthmark on her right cheek. She had light brown hair that curled delicately around her face, deep brown eyes, and an engaging smile, and she liked to laugh.

  Carolyn had a wildly “American” family. In 1853, Carolyn’s greatgrandfather, George Washington Laws, had left Tennessee and become a pioneer farmer near Dallas. Her paternal grandmother was a Bowlin, descended from Sir John Bowlin, who was one of the earliest settlers in Virginia and who had supposedly married the daughter of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. (Carolyn said she didn’t believe it.) The Bowlins, having lost almost everything in the Civil War, had made their way southwest to the Grapevine Prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth. Carolyn’s father, George Laws, had grown up in Texas, then moved to Los Angeles to become a newspaperman. It was there that George met Kate Sullivan, who could trace her family back to New York State before the Revolutionary War. They fell in love and got married. Then the Depression hit and Carolyn was born.

  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 whic
h 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.