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

by Lisa See

  On the days when the steamers chugged upriver from San Francisco with a new supply of girls, a crowd always turned out for the auctions. Each girl could look forward to a different destiny. A few fortunates were purchased for marriage, just as they would have been in their home villages. Some might be purchased to be so-called high-class prostitutes. The least fortunate, the ones born with bad luck over their heads, would spend the rest of their short lives in tiny rooms called “cribs,” with a bed as their only furniture and a barred window as their only light on the outside world.

  Fong Dun Shung had a vested interest in these goings-on. He saw men before and after: those who first wanted sexual prowess, and then returned to get something to cure the disease that threatened to rot away their manhood. He saw the women too, when they suffered from those problems that could affect their lives and livelihoods—venereal disease, pregnancy, tuberculosis.

  Fong Dun Shung prospered, for there was much business to be had. He still gambled, but now he won more frequently. He had only one problem. He was lonely for a woman’s companionship. He did what he saw the prosperous men around him do. He married a louh geui—one who always holds her legs up—and tried not to think of his family in China.

  Even to the tiny village of Dimtao, word eventually came that the Great Railroad had been completed. Still, Fong See’s mother had not heard from his father. Every day she seemed to get older, but Fong See knew that life was not as hard for her as it had been after his father first left, and he had searched through the fields looking for grass to cut and sell to farmers who fed it to the fish kept in village ponds. It was a hard job, and he had received little money for his efforts. But because of this work, he knew where all the villages had their fishponds. When the rains came and the ponds overflowed their banks and flooded the rice-fields, Fong See waded out into the murky water and caught fish with his bare hands. On those occasions, he and his mother would have a good meal—whole fish steamed with spring onion, ginger, and soy sauce.

  An old Chinese proverb says that when one family is without rice, a hundred families will come to its aid. Like many proverbs, this one expressed more wishful thinking than reality. But in the case of Fong See, one family did step forward to help. In 1871, an aunt and uncle—not true relatives, but good people from the village—saw Fong See working hard and not earning much money.

  “Would you like to go to America?” the old uncle asked him.

  “Of course,” Fong See answered, knowing he had no money for such a trip.

  “I will loan you the money and you can pay me back,” said the uncle.

  Everything began to move quickly for Fong See. His mother saw the wisdom in the old uncle’s offer. Her youngest son had shown himself to be enterprising and responsible. She felt confident that if he went to the Gold Mountain, he would search out his father, earn money, and remember to send both home to her. In a few days, Fong See—the fourth son of Fong Dun Shung—would look one last time upon the small village of Dimtao. Then he would walk south toward Hong Kong and board a ship that would take him across the sea on a journey at the end of which he hoped he would find his father and brothers, and encourage them to retrace their steps and return to the home village. But first, Fong See had to complete his role as groom.

  Marriage festivities were always something to look forward to in the village. This time, many of the usual traditions had been passed over or hurried along. Fong See’s mother and the go-between, who arranged marriages for couples from neighboring villages, had selected and bought for him a girl, named Yong, from a family even poorer than his own. Fong See still had not seen Yong, though the go-between had promised that she had good health and was from sturdy country peasants who had always had male children to bless them until this one unfortunate daughter. Yong would work hard and know her place. Was she pretty? Fong See did not know.

  His mother had gone to a fortune-teller, and a propitious day had been selected to accommodate his pending departure. Negotiations between the two families had followed the prescribed rules, but again were settled quickly. These were both poor families, so the only real bargaining had been over the bride-price. Shue-ying had sent only one basket of bride cakes and, instead of a whole roast pig, just a few slices.

  The purpose of the marriage was to ensure filial ties to China and the home village of Dimtao. In his weeks, months, and possibly years away, Yong would beckon to her husband in his day thoughts and haunt him in his dreams. He would not forget her—or his mother—and would eventually return home. During his absence, Yong, aged ten when he left, would be little more than a servant girl.

  Now, as Fong See waited for the bearers to bring his betrothed to Dimtao, he considered what she had been doing in these last days and hours at her home. She would have taken a bath in pomelo leaves gathered by a close female cousin, and sat in her family’s rice-drying tray while her female relatives combed her hair and braided it into a style appropriate for a married woman. She would have prostrated herself before the family’s ancestral tablets, then again before her mother and father, whom she would never see again. If she was lucky, a few of the peasants from her village might slip her some lai see—good-luck money that would always be hers and hers alone.

  Fong See allowed his mind to consider what this evening might hold. There would be no banquet, for his mother did not have money for that kind of celebration. There would be no wedding chamber, just his straw-covered pallet in the corner of his mother’s one-room house. There would be no consummation, for little Yong was just that—little.

  Fong See tried to concentrate on the future, his journey, his search, but his thoughts kept drawing him to the past. He had been born in the auspicious month of August in 1857 in the village of Dimtao in the district of Nam Hoi in the Pearl River delta of Kwangtung Province of the Middle Kingdom. His village was located a half-day’s walk from Fatsan, a commercial city to the north, and a full day’s walk from Canton. He knew every corner of his village and everyone who lived there, for they were all related to him in one way or another.

  Fong See was fourteen years old, certainly old enough to take a wife. Although he had no formal education, he was enterprising and clever. Before his tenth birthday he had gone to Canton, where he had sold peanuts—a symbol of prosperity—on the streets. Life in Canton was different from that in the village. Even time itself seemed more important there, as hour-callers walked the streets, calling out the time throughout the day. In Canton he saw thousands of people living on boats along the riverbanks. He had heard that some of them lived and died on those boats without ever setting foot on shore.

  He had seen girls even younger than he was, going to silk factories before dawn and returning home after sunset. Sometimes, as he walked from his favorite streetcorner for selling his wares to his boardinghouse, he would peek inside the wooden slats covering factory windows to see the girls sitting before steaming woks, their hands in boiling water as they unwound the silk cocoons. Other girls in other factories lost their eyesight from days and nights spent embroidering phoenixes and dragons in the forbidden stitch.

  He had witnessed many amazing things in the southern city—puppet shows, snake charmers, acrobats balancing bowls on long bamboo poles. He had seen professional beggars waiting in line outside the great compounds—how he longed to know what lay behind those heavily carved doors—hoping for a little rice or the leftovers from a banquet to fill the wooden bowls they held in their hands. Some were gaunt, barely more than skeletons; others—whole families of professional beggars—were a fright to the eye, with their self-inflicted wounds.

  He had seen men punished for breaking the law by having their heads put in cangues—huge wooden platforms fastened around their necks like a collar. Fong See recognized this for the clever punishment that it was. A man could not sleep, for he could not rest his head. He could not eat, for he could not reach his hands to his mouth. He could not bat away a fly or a mosquito that tormented his ears or eyes, but he could continue to work wi
th his hands. As a man struggled with the weight and the humiliation, characters written on the wooden frame told the world of the man’s offense.

  Fong See had seen other men sitting for days on end with their hands locked into wooden stocks. What better punishment for a robber than to lock his evil hands in wood for all his neighbors to see? In Fong See’s village, the punishment was more severe. If someone stole a chicken, he would have to go before everyone in the village. The village guard would bang a gong, and everyone would take a turn to whip that robber one time. The physical punishment was bad, but the loss of face in front of the whole village was even worse.

  Fong See stood as a crackling burst of firecrackers announced the arrival of the sedan chair. All around him villagers pushed forward to watch as the two bearers came to a stop and held steady the red-draped sedan chair. As little Yong stepped down he saw the red veil that covered her face quiver slightly. With his fan, he tapped Yong’s head, raised the veil, and looked down into the pale face of his child bride.

  Several months later, as his countrymen jostled past him and went be-lowdecks, Fong See gripped the railing of the riverboat that slowly glided from San Francisco Bay up the yellowish river toward Sacramento. He had heard that most of these trips went overnight, but since he had been on the Gold Mountain, he had tried to see and experience as much as possible. For months in the Big City of San Francisco, he had walked the streets of Chinatown, stopping at every herbal shop and visiting every acupuncturist’s office, inquiring if anyone knew his father or brothers. When Fong See turned up nothing, he decided to try Sacramento, the Second City.

  “Little Brother, you and I must be of the same mind.”

  At the sound of his dialect, Fong See turned to see an older man with baskets and rope-wrapped packages at his feet.

  “You must be wise indeed to stay out here while our countrymen go belowdecks to possible death. Do they not think? Do they not remember?”

  “Old Uncle,” Fong See responded, using the customary honorific, “I am traveling to Yee Fow, the Second City. I do not understand.”

  The older man thrust his chin forward, pointing at the young man. “You are new here?”

  At Fong See’s nod, the older man explained. “The fan gway call these boats ‘floating palaces.’ I call them death houses. Do you remember your mother telling you never to lift the top off the rice pot? Not only will this ruin the rice, but you could get a bad burn. This boat is like that pot. It runs on steam. Below, there are great boilers that explode when the white devils forget to attend to them. When I was a young man, only a few years ago, a boat called Yosemite exploded just after leaving a place called Rio Vista. We will pass there later today. When the explosion came, bodies flew through the air. One hundred died in the first burst, another fifty died in the second. Only Tang Men perished from the explosion, or from drowning when the boat sank. I saw their bodies floating in the water. Their skin had scalded and split. The fan gway buried our countrymen in one grave. You could not blame them. Our countrymen were nameless pieces of boiled flesh. The fan gway, what do they care about human beings? They saved the gold, not the people. Later they brought that death ship back to the surface. They cut it up and made it into a new boat that even today plies these waters. I saw these things, and they turned me into the old man you see before you.”

  By staying on the deck, instead of going down to the “China Hold,” where hundreds of his countrymen paid a few cents to travel in steerage going up and down the river in search of work, Fong See learned much. As he spoke further with the old man, he learned that the drafts of these ships were so shallow it was said that they could run on land after a rain. He learned that at night or in the fog, the captain rang his bell and waited for an echo to bounce off a building so that he would know which way to go, which way to turn. He heard other stories about captains who didn’t hear the echo or were lazy in their duties, ran aground, and splintered their vessels in the heavy fogs that blanketed the tule marshes.

  Fong See stood by the old man for hours. Looking straight down, he saw turbid water that churned and swirled with each revolution of the paddlewheel. For most of the trip, mud banks kept the river within their gentle embrace, but sometimes they passed high levees like those he knew in China. They had been built by fellow sojourners, the old man told him. The boat chugged past flimsy wooden buildings that clung to the riverbank on stilts—again reminding Fong See of China. He had seen places like that in Canton when he sold peanuts on the street. The boat passed cultivated fields where he saw his countrymen bent in their labors.

  “Come,” the old man said. “I will show you something.”

  Fong See followed as the old man ducked behind a pile of cloth bags, then, checking to make sure that no one was looking, climbed the crew’s stairs to the upper deck. They hunched down low and crept along the deck until they reached a window.

  “Go ahead, Little Brother. Take a look.”

  Fong See raised his head and peered inside. He didn’t care what the old man said—this was a floating palace. The room was huge, unlike anything he had ever seen in his life. It went up two stories, but where the second story should have been, a balcony clung to the walls. The moldings along the railings where white women in full-skirted silk gowns rested their gloved hands were elaborately carved. Other women sat on red plush chairs around marble-topped tables, and sipped from tall-stemmed glasses. A few of the people danced to the strange music that wafted through the window.

  Looking at the floor-to-ceiling mirrors encased in gold frames, Fong See wondered if they could be real gold. He saw bearded men, in fine woolen suits and silk shirts, some with hats that stood straight up or were shaped like bowls, and women with red and gold demon-hair piled high and topped with hats covered in feathers—their images repeated over and over again in the mirrors’ reflections until they nearly made him dizzy. He wanted to be in that room, be a part of that group with their fancy clothes, their effortless talk.

  “Hey, you! Get down from there before I throw you overboard.” Fong See didn’t understand the words, but he understood the sound in the crewman’s voice. His companion said something in the foreigner’s language, grabbed Fong See’s arm, and they went back down to the river level.

  As they sat on their haunches by the railing, the old man said, “The white demon does not like us in his country. We are the ones who make it easy for them to come here. We are the ones who risk our lives and sometimes die to build the railroad that opened this land to them. Now they forget.”

  “But this cannot be,” Fong See said. “There is fortune here for everyone.”

  “You are wrong. For the fan gway only.”

  “But we are Tang People. We are honorable people. Surely they treat us well.”

  “What brought you here, Little Brother?”

  “I come in search of my father,” Fong See said bravely, proudly. “He is an herbalist. I hope to find him in the Second City.”

  “Ah!” the old man spat, then looked at the boy shrewdly. “There is more?”

  “I have come to make my fortune on the Gold Mountain. I have a wife in my home village. I want to make her proud. I wish one day to dress her in the finest silk and give her enough servants so that her feet may never touch the ground and her hands and face will never lose their luster.”

  “You come for money.”

  “Yes, Uncle, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I come with my dreams, but, Little Brother, so does the white demon. He comes across the country on tracks that I and my brothers laid with our own hands. Now he says he wants to work.”

  “But don’t they all work?”

  “In the old days, no. They stand. They talk. They tell us what to do. These new demons, they want our jobs and they want us to go away.”

  “But I just got here.”

  “Listen to me. Be careful. Be wary. If they do something to you, you take it. You don’t let them see you mad. You hide your anger. You look blank, like this, so that
they cannot see inside you.”

  Fong See looked at the older man’s face as he seemed to pack away all that made him alive and human until he was as blank as a wall without paint, without posters, without notices. Then the man grinned and was himself again.

  “People come from the other ocean and they become citizens,” he continued. “But we cannot. If they hit you or steal from you or murder you, there is nothing to be done. They can cheat us out of our wages. They can rape our women. But we are like the Indian or the black man here. No power. No voice. No way to get retribution. It is not like in our home villages, where a man must accept the punishment of the villagers. On the Gold Mountain, a Chinese is not even allowed to testify against a white demon.”

  The old man turned away and looked out across the yellowed water, beyond the levee and fields to the cloudless sky. Fong See realized that the conversation was over. He still had many questions, but then he thought that the old uncle’s words must be wrong. Surely his mind had grown bitter from years alone. It could not be right that his countrymen were not treated as guests in the foreigner’s land.