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

  From San Francisco, some Chinese went to sea as coal heavers, deckhands, cabin servants, and sailors. Others tried making harnesses or bricks. Still others became coachmen or house servants. A few started their own businesses, opening small laundries, keeping a few whores in cribs, or running little chop suey joints, grocery stores, or butcher shops—all catering to the same clientele—the people of Fong See’s home country.

  His countrymen were popular among landowners and factory owners. The Chinese, it was said, were always at their work stations on time. They didn’t lag or loiter; they didn’t gossip like American factory girls. But, to the public at large, these jobs were invisible. No man ever considered who rolled his cigar, cut the wood for his fireplace, or made his underwear. So the importance of the Chinese in supporting the whites’ rising standard of living went largely unappreciated. Still, a few believed that any sudden expulsion of the Chinese would throw the entire state into confusion.

  Fong See had done many of these jobs himself. He constantly tried to improve himself—with work first, then with language, dress, and attitude. When he first arrived, he worked in the potato fields, earning a dollar a day, where he pulled weeds, hoed, then later dug up the tubers. He had never done farm work before, not even in his home village, and it seemed interminable and hot. He decided that he was more suited for indoor work and did whatever jobs he could find for a boy still in his teens. For a short time he worked as a helper in a laundry. Sweeping floors and washing dishes in a restaurant, he learned how to cook, which prepared him for a job as a cook in a brewery and later at a ranch.

  In time he found that the best job was to walk from door to door, selling merchandise. He sold hats, brushes, curtain rods—whatever he thought someone might buy. The white women who answered the door were mostly kind and gracious. Emboldened, he engaged them in conversation beyond his sales pitch. Amazingly, they listened and responded. His English improved and his opportunities expanded. He was only seventeen years old, but he already knew that to get ahead in this country he would have to be his own boss.

  On June 24, 1874, Fong See walked into the office of Sacramento’s city clerk. Although the people with whom he had worked during these past few years had always told him to beware of the white ghosts, Fong See was not afraid. He stepped up to the high counter and carefully said the words, “I want to sign paper to make business.” After just three years in the Gold Mountain, Fong See’s English was still rudi mentary; the man behind the counter could easily have made fun of him, mocking his hesitant English in the quacking tones of the vaudeville Chinaman: “I wantee signee paper makee work-work.” But the clerk had not seen many Chinese pass through this office, and chose to be helpful. He opened the registry of partnerships and wrote in what little information he could ascertain—a name, a date. The columns listing the type of business and the names of the business partners were left blank.

  In celebration of his official papers, Fong See walked to the Conrad Young Photography Studio on J Street. The photographer positioned him and ordered him, “Don’t move. Don’t move,” then disappeared behind his black fabric-draped box. Fong See looked directly into the camera lens. At seventeen years, his skin was smooth and hairless. His mouth was full, his nose flat and wide. His face was fuller than it would be in later years, when its angularity and high planes would seem to drop decades from his years. As usual, his bowler hat was tipped back on his head, his queue rolled up and tucked inside it.

  His clothes were western. Ever since he had observed the Victorian opulence on his first trip upriver, he had sensed that his place was in there among those white men and women in their finery, and not down in the dark, cramped quarters of the “China Hold,” with his countrymen and their fears. Today he wore a three-piece suit and a starched white shirt with a wing-tip collar. A tie pin, with a stone looking much like a diamond, punctured the knot of the western-style white tie that bulged just a bit between neck and vest.

  Fong See left the photographer’s studio and walked along Sacramento’s Front Street toward the intersection of Third and I streets, where Chinatown nestled on the south shore of what had once been called Sutter Lake but was now called China Slough. Front Street bustled with merchants, peddlers, and con men—all those people who catered to weary and susceptible travelers as they stepped off the train. Dust whipped up under the hooves of horses and the wheels of wagons that came to this intersection to pick up or unload goods—barrels of syrup and whiskey, bales of hay and cotton, crates of peaches and plums, burlap bags of wheat and barley. On streetcorners, young boys called out news headlines—the more gruesome the better. Saloons and hotels offered varied entertainments—operas, plays, and balls. It all presented a lively scene, but Fong See knew that the annual floods here were as bad as those in his home village, if not worse, for they not only destroyed buildings and ruined businesses but also brought cholera.

  He reached I Street and turned right, keeping to the south side of the street. An odd combination of smells rose up to meet him as he neared Chinatown between Second and Fourth streets. The air carried the familiar and sweetly pleasing scents of ginger, opium, and incense, mingled with the foul odors that drifted from nearby dairies and slaughterhouses. The air wasn’t the only unpleasant aspect of this place. The water in the China Slough was also foul. From the south, laundries emptied their filthy water and other refuse into the lake. On the north bank, the railroad company dumped its oily debris into the water. The lake was so polluted that on more than one occasion it had caught fire.

  As much as he longed for acceptance in the world outside the confines of I and Third streets, Fong See always felt a wave of relief as he entered this familiar enclave. At this corner stood a wall that had become the center of Chinese life in the city. The five thousand Chinese who lived in Sacramento County came here to peruse the personal messages affixed to the wall: “I am looking for my son, Quan Lee. If you see him, please ask him to contact his father through the Hop Sing Tong.” “Do not work for Farmer Smith. He does not pay his wages and the food is not fit to eat.” Tongs hung notices, written in gaudy calligraphy, of upcoming meetings. Old men, sitting on upturned fruit crates, read the news to those who were illiterate.

  Farther down the street stood a pawnshop where sojourners returning to China might trade their belongings—their matted bedding, a pair of blankets, a sheet, a wooden pillow—for a few dollars. If a traveler returned to the Gold Mountain, he could redeem his belongings. If not, they would be sold to another unfortunate beginning his life of bitter loneliness.

  Chinatown. It was familiar yet unique. It offered Fong See and his fellow sojourners pleasures and diversions unlike anything they had seen in their home villages or in the big city of Canton. In gambling dens, men could of course play the usual fantan, but it was not uncommon to see two merchants dressed as wealthy mandarins, carrying miniature bamboo cages containing beetles or grasshoppers, step down into an underground arena where the insects would battle, and spectators would wager on the outcome.

  There were also opium dens. In the Big City of San Francisco, the dens had long been a tourist attraction for the picturesque tableaux that they presented. Recently, white men and women of means and social standing could be seen in these places, lounging on carved wooden pallets, drawing in smoke from the pipe’s stem, and letting their minds drift away in release. In Sacramento, this white incursion into the dens had caused considerable scandal. Although Fong See scorned opium, there was no escaping its aroma on Chinatown’s streets.

  Fong See walked past shops that had scrolls on either side of their doorways affirming the good wishes of the owners: “Ten thousand customers constantly arriving.” “Profit coming in like rushing waters.” “Customers coming like clouds.” But for most of his countrymen there had been no customers, no rushing waters, no clouds. They lived in poverty, away from their families and ancestors, too poor to save enough money for the return passage, too heartbroken to walk into their home villages old men with empty poc
kets.

  Forgoing the transitory pleasures of opium and gambling, Fong See saved his money. Each month he went to the bank and cabled money to his mother and wife in the home village. He also treated himself—sometimes buying a western-style hat, tie, jacket, or shoes. In just these few short years he had already transformed himself from a brave little peasant boy, who worked for his mother on the streets of Canton, into a young man who eschewed the dress of the poor whites for the elegance of the wealthy ones he had seen on the riverboat. He was training himself not to be a peasant—not just through his clothes and job, but in his mind. He was always thinking, observing, trying to create for himself a context so that he could become a part of the larger world.

  In early April of 1877, Luscinda Pruett lay dying. Her mind wandered over her life in Oregon, her children, her husband, and God, whom she knew she’d be meeting soon. She’d had fever for weeks, and now the pneumonia had grabbed hold of her body and wouldn’t let go. Not that it wasn’t peaceful lying here, as Mrs. Peterson sponged her forehead with cool cloths and the Reverend Peterson gave a discourse on the second commission of Christ to his Apostles. Or was he reading from the tenth chapter of First Corinthians? Maybe that wasn’t it at all. She knew she’d heard him give these sermons before, at their Sunday meetings. No matter. The Petersons lived a few farms over. Reverend Peterson had made quite a name for himself in these parts—working all day on his farm, then rewarding himself by riding on horseback throughout the county to preach the Word to small congregations and gatherings in the valley. When he wasn’t preaching, he was ministering to the sick and dying. Why, nearly every week he had a burial to attend to in this county alone.

  Luscinda tried to focus her mind to track the course of her illness. She had five sons—Irvin, Loren, Charles, Rodelwin, and little John. The last had been born their first season out here. They had all survived, and all were strapping. A year ago, in 1876, the same year that the Lord had decided in His wisdom to let Custer die at the Little Big Horn, He had finally blessed the Pruetts with the birth of a daughter, Letticie.

  This sixth pregnancy and birth had been particularly hard on Luscinda. She was forty-one and sometimes so tired her bones ached and her mind ached until she couldn’t stand it anymore. Her days were full of chores punctuated by breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the eight people in her household. She baked all her own bread, pies, and cakes. In summer she put up all her own preserves and vegetables to see the family through the winter. Sometimes she wished that she could stop scrubbing and washing and cleaning and scalding, that she could put off milking the cows and feeding the chickens and minding the kitchen garden.

  Luscinda had been taken ill at the end of February. At first she worked through it, because a farm didn’t wait for people to be well and strong. A farm went on, no matter what. Finally she’d gone to bed, and even in her delirium she’d been aware of the consternation around her when a neighbor’s demented son fell in a tub of boiling soap and died. She remembered another boy who’d fallen into the chaparral and cut himself so badly that he’d bled to death as his parents watched. Women died of consumption or in childbirth or of cancer. Men were run over by plows or trampled by horses, or accidentally shot themselves with the guns they always carried. It wasn’t that life was necessarily harder here. Even back in Pennsylvania, Luscinda had borne babies and worked the farm. But she’d been younger then, stronger maybe, and not so worn-out lonely.

  March had been corn-planting season. John had plowed; the boys had planted. Letticie had played near Luscinda’s bedside. As she lay there, she’d thought about their time in the valley. Central Point marked the actual center of the valley; from their farm the Pruetts could see in every direction across vast fields to the surrounding pine-covered mountains. In the foothills, homesteaders who had come to this land twenty years before the Pruetts had planted orchards. In summer, under blazing heat, the fruit ripened and brought in plentiful crops. Sometimes John traded a pig or a few sides of bacon for so many lugs of peaches, which she, in turn, peeled by evening and put up by sundown the next day.

  From her kitchen window, if the fog that plagued the Big Sticky lifted, Luscinda could see Table Rock and McLoughlin Peak. Somewhere up there in the mountains lay Crater Lake. She had hoped that one day the boys would be able to manage the farm while she and John traveled the eighty miles for a vacation. Now she thought that that possibility was about as likely as their soil turning into fertile loam overnight.

  In late March she’d taken a bad turn. John had sent Irvin over to the Petersons’ house for dried beef and a bottle of the Reverend’s homemade cough syrup, for which Irvin paid one dollar. Even with her fever she’d been pretty mad. “No point in wasting money on me,” she’d said. But John wouldn’t listen to “that nonsense,” as he called it.

  Luscinda often worried about money. They owed Magruder’s over in Central Point for syrup, starch, candles, matches, castor oil, and salt, and W. C. Leever’s Hardware for washtubs, chamber pots, watering cans, and washboards. The family tried to barter goods and services as much as possible, trading three cans of lard for three gallons of blackberries, or lard for dried fruit, or lard for envelopes, or equal trades of lard for butter. Sometimes the older boys, Irvin and Loren, did hauling for neighbors, and had once been paid the grand sum of seventy dollars for hauling freight for the Emaline Mining Company. This year the Pruetts’ oats had sold at fifty cents a bushel. When these good times came, they’d go into town and get the horses and themselves shod. If there was money left over, Luscinda might splurge—fifty cents at Magruder’s for coffee or tea, or for half a pound of tobacco for her husband, or maybe even a dollar for twelve yards of printed cotton and some hairpins.

  This last week, it had stormed. She had listened to the rain hit the roof and trickle down the windows, knowing in her heart that she might never hear it again, never live to see another spring. Of course, after five years living on the Sticky, she thought she’d seen all there was to see. All year long, John battled the soil using Reverend Peterson’s clod masher when he could, or just going out with the boys and tilling by hand, trying to make some sense of the land. They’d put in corn and squash, alfalfa and wheat. They raised a few cows and chickens, and always tried a few shoats come spring. Sheep were tricky, since eagles like to swoop down and disembowel the lambs, but they kept a few anyway.

  These last two days she’d been fighting the pneumonia hard. But the fight was so peaceful somehow, just lying here and listening to the voices around her, all the people she loved. Once she’d heard someone say, “We’ve been trying to catch that counterfeiter who’s been running around somewhere between here and Bear Creek.” But then she thought that couldn’t be what they were talking about, because then she heard someone say, “On the point of death …” Only it didn’t worry her, because Reverend Peterson and his wife were there with their soothing words about the Hereafter and Faith and Jesus and God. No, that wasn’t it at all, he was whispering in a soothing voice, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”

  Then it was very quiet and it seemed that all the neighbors had gone home. Now only John sat by her bedside, holding her hand. He had always been a good man—a good father and husband. She wanted him to say something, to say he loved her, but she knew that wasn’t his way, wasn’t their way.

  The time is here, she thought. What about my baby girl? Who will show her how to be a good woman? Who will love her like a mother? Who will teach her about duty, hard work, religion? Who will make sure she finds a proper husband? If only I could keep Letticie with me.

  The next morning a light dusting of snow lay on the surrounding mountains, and the ground was sticky from the rain of the previous evening. John Pruett paid six dollars for a coffin, two dollars to a man to dig the grave, and another couple of dollars to have his wife carried to her final resting place on McHenry’s land, down the road from the farm, about halfway to Central Point. In the late morning, all of the neighbors on both sides
of the Sticky flat attended the funeral of Luscinda Pruett, who had lived not quite five years in Oregon. As Mrs. Peterson tried to calm baby Letticie, John thought of the words he would have chiseled on the gravestone:

  LUSCINDA J. PRUETT

  DIED

  APRIL 9, 1877

  AGED

  41 YEARS, 6 MONTHS

  Jesus loves the pure and holy

  “Sister Pruett died in full assurance of Faith,” Reverend Peterson began. Soon it was over and the neighbors went home. That night Martin Peterson wrote in his diary, “Morning cloudy, day sunny at times then cool and cloudy with a little sprinkle of rain. We with near all the neighbors on both sides of the Sticky flat attended Sister Pruett’s funeral this forenoon. I preached a short Discourse at the grave, according to her request which she made before she died. The family are very much afflicted over her leaving them.” For his final entry, he added, “W. W. Gage and Gilbert and others arrested the counterfeiter over on that side of the flat yesterday evening.”

  The next morning was clear, frosty, and a little hazy. The newest widower along the Sticky spent the day harrowing. Irvin sheared a few sheep. Loren mucked out the barn and fixed a fence. Charles and Rodelwin walked into Central Point to go to school, came home, and did their chores. Little John, who was just four, fed the chickens, gathered the eggs, and watched over his baby sister.