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

by Lisa See

  The profits on antiques were clearly better. “You see, Suie,” Ticie said, “Americans aren’t that familiar with old Chinese things, but when they see them they want them.” Ticie knew the merchandise. She knew how to talk to the customers. What was it Mr. White had said? “Your wife has a nice personality, and people want to buy from her.” This was no way for a proper Chinese wife to act. But Fong See just couldn’t seem to win an argument with her, because her logic was too clever.

  When he wanted the children to go to the Methodist Chinese-language school run by Mrs. Leong, Ticie said, “Absolutely not! We’re in America. We should do as Americans. Our children are American. They must learn the ways of our country.” Ticie saw no reason for her children to learn Chinese. In fact, she thought that all the children in Chinatown would be better off spending their time learning English rather than losing their few free childhood hours to the study of calligraphy and classics.

  He couldn’t completely fault his wife. The children were half Caucasian, after all, but he was angry nevertheless. A man should be the boss. A man is the king, and he was the king of Chinatown. He wanted to rule “with an iron hand.” Marriage should be a simple thing: the wife makes requests and the husband either grants them or doesn’t.

  Last week his wife had said, “The children need shoes again.”

  He answered, “All they do is drag their toes on the ground.”

  “Suie, the streets aren’t paved in Chinatown. Shoes are going to wear out faster than if we lived in a house in a neighborhood that had sidewalks.”

  That made him mad. He wasn’t going to build a house in La Habra or Long Beach. Those properties were too far away, and they were in Letticie’s name. He loved and trusted his wife, but why should he take the risk? But whenever he sent money back to Dimtao to help the villagers, or whenever he purchased another mou of land, she started again. “What good will land or houses in Dimtao do us? You help everyone in your family, but you won’t help our family. Why is that, Suie? Why?”

  He could have said, “The people in the village have no opportunity for education, so I started a school. When they have famine, I send money to buy food.”

  Instead he said, “I don’t want grass. I don’t want flowers. I don’t want trees. That’s crap.” What he meant was that white neighborhoods could be unpredictable.

  “Suie, it’s not right to have all the boys and Sissee in one room. Besides, we should have a place where people can visit, not just the store. …”

  He thought of an old saying from his village: “Waste no time quarreling with a woman.” Ticie made him so crazy that his mind looped and looped in all this nonsense. Finally, he had gone back to her original question. “No shoes, final word,” he said sternly.

  He did triumph in other matters. He insisted that all the boys come home from school to work. He could control them that way, keep track of them, make sure they did as he said. Sissee, on the other hand, was not allowed to work, except to help her mother decorate baskets and do her embroidery. “You stay in the store,” he told his daughter. “You be quiet. A girl must do needlework. Go do your embroidery! That’s women’s work. That’s girl’s work.” He checked his daughter’s progress daily. He knew that sometimes she cried over her needlework, but in this matter he would not yield. No man would marry a Chinese girl if she didn’t master the womanly arts.

  All this thinking had put him in a foul mood by the time he disembarked from the streetcar and climbed the stairs to his family’s apartment above the store at 510 Los Angeles Street. When he walked in, he immediately questioned the two older boys about their day. By not sending his sons to Chinese school, he was able to send them door to door selling curtain rods, tassels, and jade rings. The ladies in Los Angeles’s finer homes like to tie the rings with silk ribbon or cord and use them as handles or pulls on draperies, or on bells to call their houseboys.

  “You do good selling today?” he asked, knowing what their answers would be. Milton would have come home with a pocket full of money and Ray would be empty-handed.

  “No,” Ray answered sullenly.

  “What you do? Go for sleep? You no good boy. You good for nothing.” When Ray didn’t bother to answer or even look at him, Fong See spat out, “Phaa! No good.”

  He turned his attention to the others. Fong See noticed the rosy cheeks of his two youngest children and realized grimly that they had been out roller-skating. Knowing he wouldn’t get anywhere if he mentioned that, he asked, “Where did you get those new shoes? Did your mother buy those for you?”

  At that moment his wife walked into the room, briefly threw her arms around him, took his sack of oranges, and said, “Of course not, Suie. Mrs. Morgan bought all of the children new shoes. Isn’t she a dear?” He looked into the faces of Eddy and Sissee and knew that his wife was lying.

  At fourteen, Ray, like most boys his age, had nothing but contempt for his parents and family. He hated Chinatown. He hated seeing poverty every day. He hated the smell. He hated his father’s idea of child-rearing: “If you love your boy, apply a stick. If not, stuff him with candy.” He hated the way his father rapped the kids on the knuckles with his chopsticks for not using proper table manners. Most of all, he hated how his father kept them all under his iron fist, as though he were the boss of them all, as though he knew everything there was to know in the world, when all he was was an immigrant who could barely speak English.

  Ray hated his brother, Milton, who got everything—all the love, all the treasures, all the best clothes—just because he was the firstborn. A Chinese custom, when they were all American. For as long as Ray could remember, he had wanted to grow taller than Milton. One day he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he burst out, “I’m going to grow to be six feet tall!” Everyone laughed at him. No Chinese ever grew that tall, they said. So far, at least part of that wish was answered. He grew taller than anyone else in the family, and was still convinced that he would eventually reach six feet because their laughing logic didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t Chinese, couldn’t they see that? Now he was the one who should have been getting clothes first, then passing them on to Milton. Of course, it didn’t happen that way. Milton still got his clothes first, because he was due them as first son.

  Ray was only fourteen, but he had pride. He didn’t like to be some sort of object to be paraded out as a way of getting a sale. He remembered as a tiny boy that whenever the man from the Mission Inn, out in Riverside, came to the store, his father would get all the kids dressed in Chinese getups, like a bunch of Manchu princes. After hours of negotiation, with the deal finally closed, the man from the Mission Inn would ask to take a few snapshots. Milton and Ray would have to stand outside the store with the man’s daughter and have their pictures taken. She would always be placed in front because she was the important one. Milton and Ray were decoration. He hated that. He hated that girl, and once kicked her so hard she cried.

  Sometimes he tried to think if there was anything, just one thing, that he had liked growing up. But there were only stupid memories. He could remember how they’d all walk with his mother to the streetcar and his little brother, Bennie, would be raising Cain. His mother would be soothing and comforting. Then she’d start licking her finger and wiping their faces as the streetcar came rumbling down the street. He hated that. He remembered how when he was really little he’d rested his head on the ceramic water buffalo with the large glass eyes when it was hot. He must have been awfully young, because he knew he’d sometimes napped there. But his father had sold it to the man at the Mission Inn, and that was that.

  He hated them all. (With one exception. He loved his mother, not that he could ever say it. He was too old for that kind of stuff.) He hated the gamblers in the next basement over. He hated that his father was a partner in one of the lotteries. He hated how his father made everyone work hard every day: first uncrate, then straighten the nails. He hated the idea that his father wanted to expand to one store per son—Chinatown, Pasadena, Ocean Park, Lo
ng Beach. He hated it when his father went to China after the revolution of 1911 to scoop up belongings from the fleeing and desperate, just as he had after the Boxer Rebellion.

  Ray hated the damned basket trade. He knew all the vices in Chinatown—the gambling, the opium, the women—but his father had only one vice, baskets. They were like a drug to him. How many could a person use, after all? His father bought them in groups of three, nestled together. First they had to be pulled apart. And the bugs! Ray and the other kids had to pick them out. The fine white dust of bug-shit filled the air, getting in their mouths and nostrils. The biggest baskets were sold off to laundrymen. The medium-sized ones went to merchants for storage. The little ones were, quite simply, the bane of his existence.

  The kids took turns staining the small baskets with asphalt. It killed the bug eggs and gave the baskets a rich, aged brown color. (The asphalt mixture—a stew of gasoline and pitch—had been so successful that his father now had them “aging” coins and beads too.) Then his mother decided that the baskets still looked too plain. They’d begun attaching beads, tassels, and Peking glass rings. Ma—who’d learned how to do fancy knotting from the neighbor women—and the other kids would sit around the kitchen table and pull big needles through those baskets until their fingers were numb with fatigue. When Ma said, “This is a darn good business,” Ray cringed.

  It was all so embarrassing, he thought. But nothing was as bad as his father. He sometimes heard customers talking about his father: “Oh, he’s such a character.” “Oh, he’s such a charmer.” “Oh, Charlie, I just love the glint in that Chinaman’s eye. He’s so different from the rest.” He saw his father as—he didn’t know exactly—a barker in a sideshow? “Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen.” The way he’d draw them farther and farther into the store, like they’d get to a naked lady in the last room. Most weren’t that lucky. His father had a way of sizing people up. Often a customer would come in, and he’d say, as clear as a bell, in perfect English, “You can’t afford this. If you want something, go down that way. Mr. Kwok has what you want.” Only there wasn’t a store down that way for miles, and there certainly wasn’t any Mr. Kwok. Ray wanted out of the family and out of Chinatown.

  In the summer of 1916, approximately a thousand miles north of Los Angeles, in the Big Bend area of Washington State, an eleven-year-old girl, Stella Adele Copeland, looked out across sloping hills covered in golden wheat to where a huge combine harvester with its thirty-two horses and mules slowly mauled its way across the earth. She listened to the rhythmic sounds of the slicing of the wheat by the header, the ripping and trickling of the separator, and the shush-shush as the straw blew back out into the stubble of the field. It was another hot, dry harvest day.

  Stella wiggled her toes in the warm earth, enjoying the feel of the dirt and kicking at it until little motes of dust blossomed up around her ankles. Dust was everywhere this time of year. During the wheat harvest, the horses, threshing machines, and binders tossed dust straight up into the air, creating huge brown clouds that drifted across the fields. For miles in every direction along the roads, dust billowed behind the endless stream of wheat haulers.

  For years, Stella—an only child—and her parents had followed Charlie Slusser’s machines from farm to farm. First he’d only had a Mc-Cormick header, but then he’d gotten the combine harvester. No one else in the county could afford to buy one of his own, so, when fields turned golden with ripe wheat, Slusser’s machines were called to service. Itinerant workers—mostly men, but some women—followed in the combine’s wake to do the manual labor. But Stella’s mama, Jessie, was a good cook, and everyone knew that farmhands stayed where the food was decent. So for the last couple of summers Stella and her parents had stayed at this place.

  Stella glanced over to the cook wagon where her mother prepared the afternoon meal. Mama looked so beautiful, with her copper-colored hair, that Stella always felt like an abandoned cat next to her. Stella had red hair too—but it was fiery red, cropped short, and always straggly after these days out in the sun and wind. And, while Mama had skin as smooth as satin, freckles sprinkled Stella’s face and arms.

  Soon she and Mama would pack up the sandwiches and walk out to the big machine to deliver lunch. Stella never liked to get too close to the combine. Some kids, who also accompanied their parents to the local farms during harvest time, liked to drop mice or kittens down into the separator. But Stella had heard the story about the boy who kept bothering the header tender until the man dangled the boy over the separator. The boy had somehow slipped from his grasp and gone clean through. The men on that farm had been so angry that they didn’t wait for the law. They hanged that header tender right from his machine.

  Still, Stella loved being out on this farm. Town worries drifted away, and the earth, the sun, and the seas of wheat soothed her feelings of hurt, abandonment, and shame. Out here, life was pretty simple. She went barefoot the whole time, and didn’t have to worry about wearing out her shoes so badly that Grandma Copeland would have to take them to the shoemaker for steel toe guards. She hated how the town children made fun of her for those, hated how poor they all knew she was.

  Everyone in town—well, at least every kid in Waterville—knew Stella was a toughie. Try anything with her, and you could get in a real bad fight. Stella didn’t like it when people said snotty things to her, when they tried to act better than she was. She knew how the kids gossiped about her, but their parents were even worse. She remembered the day the butcher’s wife had grabbed her daughter’s arm and said, “Oh, don’t play with her. She’s the washerwoman’s granddaughter.” As if being a butcher was so great? Stella couldn’t do anything about the parents, but she could beat the bejesus out of the kids. Anyway, she had red hair, and a quick temper was her birthright.

  Stella didn’t care what the townspeople said; she was proud of her family. On her father’s side, the Copelands had come out to Waterville—which wasn’t too far from Wenatchee—from Ohio. Stella’s grandfather had deserted the family as soon as they reached Washington, and Grandma Copeland had been left alone to take care of her family of seven. She’d bought a little house on the outskirts of town—with its own well, a woodshed, barn, chicken coop, and horse and buggy shed—and then had become the town’s washerwoman and midwife. Her boys took turns pulling water up from the well, which she heated on the stove or over an open fire in the yard—depending on the season. Using Fels Naphtha soap and a washboard, she scrubbed the garments and linens of Waterville’s more prosperous residents until her knuckles were red, cracked, and gnarled. With her sadirons—eight- and nine-pounders from the Sears, Roebuck catalog—Grandma pressed out wrinkles and made perfect pleats. Stella loved Grandma Copeland.

  Harvey, Grandma Copeland’s son and Stella’s father, was “a handsome son of a gun.” Papa had started a dray business with his brothers, but he said, “Hauling a cord of wood ten miles for a dollar seventy-five doesn’t interest me much.” He dreamed of better things. “I’ve got to keep my eyes open for the main chance,” he often said. Stella knew Papa wanted to have adventures, but he was stuck—married and with a kid.

  Stella’s mother, Jessie, was a Huggins. The family had originally lived in Vermont, tried homesteading in South Dakota, then come out to Waterville. Grandpa Huggins had died just as the train crossed the state border, so Grandma Huggins, like Grandma Copeland, had raised her kids alone. Stella wasn’t close to Grandma Huggins. For one thing, the old woman was pretty well-to-do and didn’t think Stella’s dad was good enough for Mama. For another, Grandma Huggins had moved to Los Angeles, and none of them saw her that much.

  Stella didn’t know why Grandma Huggins had gone down south, because Waterville was really a wonderful place, even if the townsfolk weren’t that nice. Surrounded by fields of undulating wheat, Waterville—with its population of one thousand—boasted public schools, a bank, seven churches, a feed mill (with rollers for making both graham and whole wheat flour), four saloons, an electrical plant, a
“cozy little jail,” two five-hose fire carts, a dentist, and two physicians. It also had general merchandise emporiums, wallpaper stores, a furniture manufacturer, a watchmaker, two blacksmiths, and a musical instrument maker. Citizens encountered no hot winds and no cyclones, and though they had to face a four-month winter, they knew that temperatures seldom fell below zero. (During one cold snap, however, Rogers & Howe sold twenty-five fur coats—in cowhide, dog, bear, and calf skin—in just two weeks.) A few Indians inhabited the area, but they were of the peaceful, drunken variety, only occasionally swarming through town to gamble over their stick games or trade a cayuse.

  Out on this farm, Stella was with Mama and Papa only, instead of being left with one relative or other. Her parents always seemed to be putting her on a train to stay with Aunt Eva in Everett, Grandma Copeland in Waterville, or Grandmother Huggins down in Los Angeles. Not that Stella minded making those trips alone. She was pretty big now, so she could go anywhere by herself. When she traveled home and the train conductor asked her where she was headed, Stella invariably chanted in a loud, clear voice, “Waterville, Washington, Douglas County.” The conductor always smiled and made sure she made the right transfers.