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

by Lisa See

  The next morning she was waiting across the street when he arrived. He promised himself he would ignore her completely, which he did until Madame Matilde came into the shop. “Ready for a business transaction today?” she asked.

  Just as he was about to speak, he heard the bells on the door and looked up to see the girl with the rosewood-colored hair step into the shop.

  “Good morning, Madame Matilde,” Letticie said. “What can we do for you today?”

  “I’m thinking maybe two dozen,” the woman said, looking first to Fong, then back at the girl. “But only if I can get a good price. Bulk discount.”

  Letticie turned to the Chinese man, looked him square in the eye, considered, then stepped behind the counter. “Now let’s see what we have …”

  Fong See stood aside as the girl took over, pulling open drawers until she found what she wanted. He watched as her neck and cheeks turned red as she displayed the garments. But she was nothing if not determined. “I hope you’ll notice this fine needlework, ma’am,” she said. “Just look at these pleats. Why, we both know there aren’t many seamstresses in the world who can compete with this fine craftsmanship.”

  A half hour later, as the madam left with her brown-paper-wrapped parcel, the girl turned and gazed at him in her intent and somber way. “As I said before, I’ve been all over this city. I can’t get a job, because I don’t have experience. And I’m not about to join Madame Matilde’s establishment, although I’ve certainly received enough offers of that kind since I arrived. But you can see I’m not like that.”

  “You still want job?” Fong asked.

  “I’ve been watching your shop,” she continued. “I’ve watched you lose customers.”

  “I no lose customers. They just don’t want to buy.”

  “You’re wrong. People come to your shop because you have a …” She groped for the words. “You have a unique product. People come here because they want to buy. That’s why you need someone like me. I’m a woman. I can help you with those …” Again she stumbled around for the right words. She straightened her shoulders, and said, “I can help you with those special women. I speak good English, so I can help you with English-speaking customers. If you pay me a decent wage, you won’t be sorry.”

  Fong See stared at the girl. Didn’t she realize that he was Chinese?

  “You could get in trouble working here,” he said.

  For the first time, he heard her laugh. “Don’t you think I could get in more trouble working for Madame Matilde?”

  He wasn’t worried about that. He was worried about what would happen if someone decided to take offense that he had hired a white woman. This girl didn’t seem to care.

  The young woman stepped forward and extended her hand. “I told you before, my name is Letticie Pruett. You’ll be happy you hired me.”

  *

  In the following weeks and months, Fong See continued to be amazed by the auburn-haired apparition who appeared at his front door each morning. She was so different from the other Caucasian women that he had met in his years on the Gold Mountain. She didn’t wear feathers or satin or lace. She was practically and simply dressed—maybe a cotton ruffle here or there. She didn’t stink of perfume or men. Instead, she exuded an intoxicating odor of soap, powder, and lavender water. And while she was in no way like the prostitutes who came to him for their underwear, she was always kind to them, almost respectful.

  “That is not a job I would want to have,” she once said. “But I can understand how circumstances could lead a person into becoming a fancy lady.”

  See, it was things like that. “If you don’t mind,” she’d said tentatively one day, “I think we should say we’re selling fancy underwear for fancy ladies. It sounds so much nicer. Our ladies will appreciate it too.”

  Half the time he didn’t know what she was talking about, but in this she’d been right. At first the girls had laughed. “Fancy underwear for fancy ladies. That’s us! You bet.” But they’d grown to like it. Where just a few months ago they’d have come in and said, “Give me some of that crotchless underwear,” now they asked for “fancy underwear.” And it was selling. Selling so well that Letticie had begun keeping the books. He smiled to himself as he recalled the look on her face when she’d realized that he didn’t keep real books, just the fake ones for the immigration inspectors.

  “You keep books to know how much you have—what’s selling, what’s not, your profits, your losses,” she’d explained.

  “I keep those in here,” he’d said, pointing to his temple.

  She’d shaken her head. “No, the business is too big now.”

  “You want, you do,” he’d answered, not knowing how to tell her that he could neither read nor write in Chinese, let alone English.

  A few months later she’d come to Fong See again. “I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m interfering, but I think you should ask the men to make up some regular underwear. Plenty of women would buy it if that certain part was just sewed shut.”

  He had put the men to work on it immediately. They were happy with Ticie’s presence. Since she’d arrived, their good luck had blossomed. Each of them sent home more money each month. But it was more than just money. Ticie showed them a respect such as many of them had not felt since leaving their home villages. She communicated as best she could—using sign language, gesturing, smiling at them, sometimes patting their shoulders. For many, it was the first time they had been touched by a white woman. She didn’t seem afraid to sit down at the work table and companionably sip a cup of tea. Lately she’d even begun to share their pot of noodles, sometimes looking over Fong Lai’s shoulder to watch how he cooked them.

  She helped them with their English, stressing how to pronounce words, make sentences. She’d grown serious when one of the workers had called her a fan gway. When she’d asked what the words meant, and been told that they meant “white ghost,” she’d asked, “Now, why would you want to call me that? I’m not a ghost. I’m flesh and blood, just like you. Surely there is another word you could use.” The men had discussed it heatedly, then finally settled on lo fan, which meant simply “white person.”

  Fong See was probably nineteen years older than Ticie, but tradition said that at least ten years’ difference was good and proper for marriage. He didn’t know why he even allowed himself to think along these lines. He had a wife in China to whom he continued to send a monthly allowance. More important, it was against the law for a Chinese to marry a Caucasian. Still, his mind raced with reasons why marriage was a good idea. Indeed, he did have a wife in China, but he had only seen her once, and they had never consummated their marriage. In his mind—and he realized this was a peculiarly western thought—he and Yong weren’t married at all. Besides, tradition also suggested that a man might have a country wife to care for aged parents and a city wife for home and companionship.

  Ticie didn’t need to know about his first wife in the home village. The men in the factory would never mention her. Instead, they would respect him for having climbed another step on his ladder of importance, for there were few Chinese who had either the courage or the charisma to pursue a white woman. Finally, marriage to Ticie would change him from a sojourner to a resident. If he married her, he would not leave her. He would honor her as his true wife. He loved her.

  Fong See and Ticie Pruett made good partners and that was important in this country. For years he had thought, If only I had an American partner who could see the opportunities that I see. Letticie wasn’t a man, but she was much like him. She had bamboo in her heart. She, too, had a vision of how life should be.

  Letticie Pruett See thought it was funny how things turned out. When she’d left Central Point, she’d been just a girl full of girlish dreams. She’d thought how easy it would be for her to become a city girl with a job and beaux and finally a husband. In her first flush of excitement, she’d marveled at the electric lights, the crowds, the theaters, but it hadn’t taken her long to discover that no one w
anted her. Well, some had wanted her, but she wasn’t going to use her body to muck about with smelly old men.

  Desperate, she’d gone into the Suie On Company. How could she have done such a crazy thing? What had possessed her? Desperation, she thought again. No one—not her teachers, brothers, or sisters-in-law—would have believed how she’d acted. Against all reason, against everything she had ever learned, against her own common sense, Letticie persisted. She pretended to be brave and industrious, knowing that if she didn’t get a job she would have to return to Oregon. Besides, she knew she could help Fong See. He needed her, which was more than she could say for anyone else. Still, she was probably more surprised than Fong See when he hired her.

  She loved the way the boss listened to her ideas. The men made up the new underwear, and she’d been able to sell it to good, honest women like Mrs. Acock, the wife of the real-estate man. It had taken some persuasion on Letticie’s part even to get Mrs. Acock into the store, but now she was a regular customer. If Mrs. Acock didn’t like what they had on hand, Letticie asked the workers to make up something special for her. Mrs. Acock had told her friends, and now several of the merchants’ wives along K Street came in to buy from Letticie.

  She didn’t stop with changes in the underwear. Mr. Solomon, the importer, had been trying to sell Fong See other types of merchandise for years. “Try it,” she told him. “Try it and see if it works. Start with cheap things. If they don’t sell, you won’t be out much.” The next time Mr. Solomon made his quarterly stop at the Suie On Company, Fong See ordered baskets, fans, and some inexpensive porcelain. For an hour they bickered over price and quantity. After the curios sold, Letticie encouraged Fong See to order more from Solomon, and also from Mr. Snedegar at Hale Brothers. Now Mr. Snedegar came in once or twice a week just to write up orders. And the women customers who had begun to come in with Mrs. Acock now bought other things as well. Even Mr. Luce, the landlord, had become a customer, buying all of his Christmas presents in the store this past December.

  Letticie supposed it was natural that one thing would lead to another. Hard work to success. Loneliness to happiness. Friendship to love. On January 15, 1897, Letticie Pruett of Central Point, Oregon, and Fong See, the fourth son of a Chinese herbalist, were wed. They went to a lawyer to draw up the papers for a contract marriage. Their union would be recognized by the state as a contract between two individuals, since California forbade interracial marriages.

  But when Letticie looked at the contract, with its fancy calligraphy and heavy embossing, she thought, What difference does it make, between one piece of paper and another? Fong See had promised allegiance to her for all time; she had promised likewise. She loved him. Who could say why? She knew nothing of the ways of love, except that it defied all logic.

  Letticie wrote her brothers of her marriage, and received a terse letter back, in which her family disowned her. How could she marry a Chinese? It was disgusting, they wrote, and she was no longer their sister. She knew she would never see or hear from any of them ever again.

  But Suie, as she called her husband, was kind, smart, a hard worker. Oh, she knew how popular he was with the ladies. She blushed to think of the practice he’d had! He knew how to butter up women with his sweet words and twinkling eyes. But it didn’t matter, because he treated her like a lady.

  He’d had trouble saying her name, Letticie, because of the L. She suggested he call her Ticie, as her father had done. She’d also had trouble with his name. Fong was his last name and See was his first, except that Fong was actually his first name and See was his last. She didn’t want to call her husband See. That didn’t make any sense at all. “It’s a tricky business, trying to settle your name legally,” she cautioned. “We don’t want to attract attention from the authorities. We don’t want them to point a finger at you. They might think you aren’t telling the truth. So we’ll always be Sees.” He agreed, and she’d taken to calling him Suie or Suie On. It was the name of the store, but it seemed more personal somehow—just between the two of them. Besides, it was easier for the customers. They couldn’t be expected to remember so many different things. Let them think the store was named for him. It would place him one more notch above the workers.

  They had only one problem now: this damned underwear business. She sniffed. Fancy underwear for fancy ladies! In a pig’s eye! Even with the addition of curios and undergarments for decent women, Suie was still in the crotchless underwear business. It seemed to Ticie, as a married woman, that it offered simply too many opportunities for straying.

  “Business is drying up,” she told Suie. “We should get out of here before the authorities crack down so hard there won’t be a single bawdy house left in the city.” She hammered away at his pocketbook. “Not enough margin anymore in fancy underwear. Pretty soon we won’t make any money.”

  When he scoffed at her concerns, she retorted, “You’ve spoken of the Driving Out. One day that could happen to us. We might as well go now, while we can plan our own future.”

  “Where?” he asked, jutting his chin at her.

  “Only two Chinatowns remain intact—San Francisco and Los Angeles.”

  “More Chinese in San Francisco,” he said. “Maybe safer for us.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. No place will ever be completely safe for us, Suie. Besides, too many have already gone to San Francisco. Everything’s been grabbed up.”

  “Lo Sang,” her husband said, mulling over the Chinese name for Los Angeles. He had made plenty of money there during his traveling-salesman days.

  “I’ll place my bets on Los Angeles if you will. The City of Angels. We’ll like it there. Not too many Chinese. The people are tolerant. We’ll find more opportunity. We might even become rich.”

  “I am husband. I make decision.”

  “I want you to make the decision. It’s just that Los Angeles is a more progressive city. Sacramento is a pit.”

  Letticie was at least partly right. Despite observations made to the Chinese Bureau by Messrs. Acock, Solomon, Snedegar, and Davis, as well as by Mr. Luce’s son, that the Suie On Company was “well thought of in Sacramento,” the underwear business was indeed dwindling. By the end of the century, the Guild of Bright Colored Clothing would fade into oblivion, while Los Angeles would present a picture of opportunity. No matter what, the Sees were well out of Sacramento. In February of the following year, a fire would sweep through the Oshner Building, wiping out the remains of the Sacramento branch of the Suie On Company.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 4

  LO SANG

  1897–1902

  THE Chinese began trickling into the little pueblo of Los Angeles as early as 1850, settling along the Calle de Los Negros, more popularly known as Nigger Alley. But it wasn’t until the 1870s, when the Southern Pacific began constructing a line to Southern California—a project rife with heavy losses from accidents and injuries—that the Chinese came and stayed. They began leasing land from the old estate of Juan Apablasa, an adventurer from Chile, and Benjamin Wilson, who would later become part of the permanent landscape when a mountain was named in his honor. For the first time on the Gold Mountain, the Chinese had found an area that replicated their South China climate.

  Still, the Chinese continued to suffer. Here, again, they were stoned, vegetable carts were upset, queues pulled. One newspaperman conjured up “a hundred vile opium dens, where Chinese, white prostitutes and fast young men spend night and day smoking opium.” Other reporters kept would-be restaurant patrons at bay by reminding wary readers that the Chinese liked to eat abalone and squirrel, that their chefs roasted chickens alive to remove their feathers. Laws—such as the one forbidding laundrymen “to sprinkle clothes by squirting water from their mouths”—were put into effect to harass and humiliate.

  These smoldering conflicts had raged to the surface on October 23, 1871, twenty-six years before Fong See and Letticie arrived in Los Angeles, when hostilities erupted in Nigger Alley between two rival tongs—the Nin Yung
Company and the Hong Chow Company—over the ownership/marriage of Ya Hit, a girl whose comeliness was only equaled by the profits that both companies hoped to make from her flesh. Attempting to calm things down, a white policeman intervened, and was shot. Shortly thereafter, another white man—a saloonkeeper turned rancher—fired randomly at Chinese houses along Nigger Alley. When his volleys weren’t returned, the rancher strode onto a porch and boldly walked to the door, where he was met by a barrage of bullets. He staggered back, muttering, “I am killed.”

  News quickly traveled through the city that the Chinese were “killing whites wholesale.” A mob of vigilantes, composed of Mexicans and Anglos, descended on the area. Using pickaxes, they chopped holes into the Coronel Building, where many Chinese were hiding; others simply shot at it. Emboldened, men stormed inside, where they found not tong thugs, but respectable Chinese men and women, cowering in fear. Two dead Chinese were dragged outside, where they were kicked, pummeled, and finally hanged for good measure.