by Lisa See
In all these years she had made it her business not to associate with the white woman who ran the F. Suie One Company with her half-Caucasian sons. When the mission had moved to New High Street, Mrs. Leong had thought she would never have to deal with Mrs. See. Now See-bok was renting the mission’s old space and living there with his new wife—a clear lapse in decency, even if it was part of Chinese tradition.
If anyone had asked Mrs. Leong about her seemingly un-Christian stance on multiple wives, she would have answered hotly, “In China, we have multiple wives for many reasons. Sometimes a family cannot have sons. Sometimes a poor family has girls. Before you know it, there are concubines. That’s been done for thousands of years! This is a Chinese tradition that does not conflict with my belief in Christianity.” But no one had asked her, so she supposed people thought she was against the impending marriage between Gilbert and Sissee simply because See-bok had more than one wife.
There were so many things the people of Chinatown didn’t understand about her. Her family celebrated Christmas and New Year’s—with a combination of American and Chinese dishes—because they were Christians, but she insisted they also celebrate the Chinese New Year. “Why should we follow the Chinese New Year when we’re here in the United States?” her daughter asked each spring. And each spring, Mrs. Leong answered, “We follow the Chinese calendar because we want to remember we are Chinese.”
But Mrs. Leong always knew where to draw the line. No door guards stood vigilant outside their home to prevent evil spirits from entering. Her children lit no firecrackers to send the kitchen god to heaven to report on the household’s behavior in the past year. She would not have the children worshipping idols. No red paper banners inscribed with pithy sentiments were festooned about the house. If her neighbors were afraid to use scissors or knives on New Year’s Day because they might cut their luck for the coming year, this was not her concern. These things were all superstition. But the Chinese New Year was based on the lunar calendar. That was not pagan. It was a part of the Chinese culture and heritage. Her family could remember their ancestors, thank them for the gift of life, and ask for their blessings.
Similarly, she went to the herbalist for remedies and tonics for her family. She would go and sit in the carved teak chairs at the Gee Ning Tong and wait for her prescription to be presented to her, folded in white paper. She would go home and brew the teas herself, or add them to a chicken dish for extra nourishment, knowing that most of the bachelor customers might still be waiting in the shop while the herbalist brewed their bitter tea, for they had no wives, mothers, or sisters to look after them. It could not be helped if her neighbors and her own children did not understand her thoughts on these traditions.
Now the wedding was just a few days away, and Mrs. Leong still had not met the mother of her future daughter-in-law. Even as the dowry negotiations continued and she and her husband considered how many bride’s cakes—in addition to the whole roast pig—her own family should pay for the bride-price, Mrs. Leong meditated on this turn of events. How could Gilbert marry outside the race, after all she had taught him?
When her children were younger, she had told them, “You’re more or less ambassadors. You represent all other Chinese kids. People are going to watch your conduct and the way you talk. Many of these Caucasians have never had contact with a Chinese person, so do your best.”
“Do you want us to be American?” Gilbert or little Margie might ask.
“No,” she would always respond. “You take the best of Chinese culture, you take the best of American culture, and blend the two. You are American citizens. You were born in this country, so you have to take on American culture too. Do not think everything has to be Chinese. You are Chinese American.”
When they had lived on Ninth Street down by the City Market, and her husband still had the produce stall, she’d had certain rules for the children. Only speak English when you are outside the house. Speak English at school, on the street, even in the yard. The minute you walk inside the door, you must speak Chinese. These were easy rules to obey, and the children had done as she said. But later she had problems with Margie, who wanted to be a modern American girl. Mrs. Leong insisted—no lipstick, no cosmetics. Her daughter was from a good family and should dress properly—”to a T,” Margie often complained reproachfully. This meant no dangling earrings, no silk stockings.
Now Mrs. Leong wondered what use all her rules had been. For eight years she had thought Gilbert would forget about Fong See’s daughter and marry a Chinese girl. Mrs. Leong had kept her eye on Jennie Chan from the time she was five as a possible future wife for Gilbert. Jennie’s family was poor, but she’d been a dedicated student at the mission. Mrs. Leong had often let Jennie teach the younger children their lessons. Jennie liked football, too, and in the old days, she was the only person Mrs. Leong had let come with her to watch the games at USC. All that was a long time ago. Jennie had married that Eddie Lee, had borne three daughters, and had been the first Chinese hired to work at Bullock’s. Hat department, they said. Was that See girl any better? No! She was an old maid, thirty-three.
Mrs. Leong never encouraged an early marriage, hoping that Gilbert would take the time to meet a proper girl. Education should come first, she always said, thinking that he would find an educated girl—someone like Ruth Kimm. Mrs. Leong had often told Gilbert how much she liked Ruth. “Such a handsome girl, gracious, well-brought up, a good family, and her father owns a farm. Good fresh produce. She has a good job working in a pharmacy.” But then Ruth married that artist boy, that friend of the See boys. This was not a good match, anyone could see that.
Still, Mrs. Leong kept wishing that the university held the answer. She told her son, “I do not care how old you are, you must go to school and study. If you do not have the money, I will pay for it.” And she had. She’d paid for his tuition at USC, books, clothes, lunch money, music lessons and car expenses. Then her husband started the Chinese Garden Café in Hollywood. That had been a disaster, and Gilbert had to leave school!
What could they do? They went to Chinatown and opened Soochow right next door to Fong See’s store. In 1933, Soochow was only the seventh restaurant in Chinatown to serve family-style dinners. Fifty cents a person bought chow mein, snow peas and char siu, egg foo yung, fried shrimp, and rice. No Chinese person would ever order this tourist meal! But Caucasians seemed to like it, and Soochow prospered, even during Prohibition. She would never allow her husband to serve liquor, ever, period. If white customers wanted that, they could go to Toey Far Low. That was a tough place! Let them go there! Finally they had earned enough money to send Gilbert back to school, and now even Margie had graduated from USC with a degree in social work. Mrs. Leong liked to tell people, “My son is an architect. He’s working for Harold Harris, the architect. That Mr. Harris, he’s a great admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright and designs avant-garde houses. You know what my Gilbert says? He says, ‘That’s not the usual run of the traffic.’ And my Margie? Oh, she’s a social worker.” Her friends knew enough not to ask about Ed or Elmer.
All these things Gilbert did not understand, just as he did not understand her dedication to the mission. As a girl in China, she had been a “rice Christian”—sent to a Baptist mission school outside Canton to learn the ways of the Lord in exchange for a meal. Over time she forgot about her stomach to excel in her studies—both academic and religious. At seventeen, a go-between arranged for her to be betrothed, and she was married sight unseen to Leong Jeung, a vegetable peddler in the Gold Mountain, who came over for the ceremony. He was much older than she was, but he was a good man, and by the time he went back to America, she had converted him. In 1910, when Ed was less than a year old, she boarded a ship for San Francisco. Aiya! Angel Island—so many months she spent there. All of them she still wanted to forget.
When she finally met her husband again in Los Angeles, she discovered he had become a Methodist. She was a Baptist, but she was Chinese first. Out of respect for Leong Jeun
g, she became a Methodist. She began to learn everything she could about the Methodists in Los Angeles. She learned how, along with the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, the Methodists set up missions after the riot and massacre of 1871; how a mission’s success depended on the clergy speaking at least a smattering of Chinese; and how the missions offered spiritual comfort, lessons in acculturation, and language classes for young and old.
To honor her husband, she concentrated her efforts on the Methodist Mission, but she was hardly the first Chinese to do so. In 1889 several Chinese accepted baptism in the Methodist Mission and were listed in the parish’s register. Among these were Chan Kiu Sing, a merchant on Spring Street, and his wife. He became the first Chinese in the United States to receive a license for preaching from the Methodists. From 1900 until his death in 1923, he was the pastor of the Los Angeles Chinese United Methodist Church.
Even today, Mrs. Leong couldn’t think of his death without sadness. Reverend Chan had done so much for the community. When he hadn’t been serving the church, he’d been working as the city’s first Chinese court interpreter. He’d acted as social worker, minister, elder of the church, and governmental go-between. Many wives in Chinatown relied on Reverend Chan to accompany them to the Sam Sing Butcher Shop to select a piece of roast pork. Often he could be seen walking up Marchessault Street with paper cones filled with the fragrant meat to be personally delivered to the chosen few. (Naturally, Mrs. Leong was among them.)
In her early days on the Gold Mountain, Mrs. Leong had also learned about Caucasian women who left their families as often as three times a week to spend their evening hours teaching English to single men. She heard about and met Mrs. Emma Findlay, a Congregationalist, who never outwardly tried to convert, preferring to make herself indispensable to the women of Chinatown and their friends and relatives in the area around the City Market. Mrs. Findlay taught Chinese women English, bought them embroidery supplies, and took them to American stores to shop for western-style shoes, hats with ostrich feathers, and shirtwaist dresses with lace collars. She taught them how to put up their hair in the pompadour style. She introduced them to the German midwife, supplied baby clothes, and, when the children were old enough, arranged for them to go to American school.
All this Mrs. Leong observed. All this she learned. And one thing she knew for certain. She could do better than any American woman! In time, Mrs. Leong traveled north to San Francisco to take an examination, pledge her allegiance to the United States, and become the first Chinese-language teacher certified by the State of California. She found no “rice Christians” here in America. Most people, even if they were very poor, had enough to eat, not like China. She’d had to figure out another way to save the souls of the children. She could have called them “tongue Christians,” for all parents in Chinatown wanted their children to know the language of their homeland.
Her work did not end with the children. A few years ago, Mrs. Leong and Mrs. Chan, the Reverend’s widow, started the Win One Circle—the first Chinese women’s religious organization in Los Angeles. They quarreled a long time over that name—Win One. They decided it meant to win somebody over or bring somebody in and then teach them about the Bible. Many of the members were Buddhists and knew nothing about Jesus, but they learned quickly enough. Those women were so lonely. After years of separation, some had finally come to America alone, with small children, staying on Angel Island sometimes for months—as she had done—unable to fathom their interrogators’ questions. Others had come as mail-order brides, meeting their husbands for the first time when they left Angel Island. Some had even been sent here as contraband, crossing the Pacific in sealed wooden crates down in the holds of big ships, living quietly so as not to attract attention, rationing their food, surviving their own horrible human smells. Any way they came, the women arrived in Chinatown knowing no English, having no faith.
The Win One Circle evolved into a personal triumph. Mrs. Leong went herself to meet many of the wives and get permission from their husbands for them to come to her house once a week. In the beginning she had perhaps twelve ladies, but after a few years the group grew to twenty. After a lunch of noodles and tea, they did a Bible reading followed by songs, then lessons on American customs, everyday English sentences, and what to do if you came in contact with an American. During holiday time—and as the women converted, more and more of them celebrated Christmas—Mrs. Leong instructed them on where to find Christmas ornaments, how to select stockings for their children, what a candy cane was, and how to make gingerbread.
She told them which stores were good, always recommending the National Dollar Store on Broadway—“owned by Joe Shoong, who came to San Francisco at age twenty-three and now owns forty department stores.” She told the ladies on which floor to find certain gifts. Men’s socks and ties on the mezzanine, reindeer sweaters on the second floor. They should stop on the ground floor to see the Santa Claus, who would give their children rock candy and a little Christmas book. She taught them how to say “Can you help me, please?” “How much is this?” “I want one [or two, three, or four],” and “Thank you very much.” She told them what to expect. “Look for a woman behind a counter to help you. Keep your money in a purse and count it out carefully. Take your time. The American may get angry, but it is your money.”
Besides the Win One Circle, Mrs. Leong held a monthly tea meeting at the church by the Plaza for the mothers of her Chinese language students. The tea was “attendance required” if the women wanted their children to continue with their lessons, just as it was “attendance required” at Sunday school and church service on Sundays for all the students. The women came—even if they worshiped Kuan Yin or followed the teachings of Confucius—because they wanted their children to learn.
Like so many baby birds, the women begged nonstop: “I want my children to know about the culture and civilization of their homeland,” they chirped. “I’d like my son to study Chinese so that he can read letters from his grandparents,” they peeped. “I will give my child anything as long as he asks me in Chinese.” Mrs. Leong did her best to feed their dreams.
She knew the children often complained to their parents that they had no free time. She held class every weekday from 3:30 to 5:00 P.M. and on Saturdays from 10:00 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. On Sundays, the service went from eight in the morning to eleven, Sunday school from eleven to three. No time was left to play, the children griped. They went to American school, then Chinese school, then to work in laundries, restaurants, or curio shops, and they still had their homework and home chores. She never listened to this nonsense—her Gilbert had to live this way, and had done well—but Reverend Chan did. He changed the whole Sunday schedule to give families free time. “This way,” the Reverend had said, “people can spend the afternoon at the park or the beach.” She hadn’t understood his thinking, or that of Reverend Wong, who had taken over the ministry, but she had to live with it.
Mrs. Leong always found something more to do. Once a month the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists got together for a Union meeting. Each group met at its own church for an early-morning service, then they all spent the afternoon together at a picnic—usually at Lincoln or Brookside Park. On the Fourth of July, children of all denominations piled into the back of the Methodist Mission’s stake-body truck and bumped across town to the ocean, throwing firecrackers at pedestrians and cars along the way. They flew the American flag on one side of the truck and the Chinese flag on the other. Her memories of those noisy days were always of warm potato salad and sandwiches and fried chicken gritty with beach sand.
When she got tired, her husband often grumbled, “You are too tied down to the school. You should give it up. Why are you wasting your time? It’s too much on you.” There was no money in this work, she knew. Twenty-five dollars a month stipend for twenty years, paid by the Methodist Home Office in San Francisco. She was not teaching because she needed the money, she always reminded Leong Jeung. She was doing God’
s work. Wasn’t it true that during the years she’d been teaching, the membership at the Methodist Church had grown to three hundred, surpassing the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians? “Oh, yes, then, that’s all right,” her husband always said, then dropped the subject.
So now this wedding. For eight years she’d told Gilbert no. She saw nothing wrong in this. “I am giving it to you straight,” she had told him. “All Chinese parents—no, not just Chinese parents, but parents of any nationality—Japanese or Italian, I don’t care—they want their children to marry someone of their own race. Florence See is half Chinese, yes. Of course she is Chinese. But she has too much fan yin—too much Caucasian thinking in her.”
In these past years, she and her son had many arguments. He would say, “You only know the old school. You always say you have to be one hundred percent Chinese and know everything Chinese—customs, thinking, everything.”
And she had always answered, “Even if you have only a little bit of a foreign element in you, you are going to sway over to that side. This Florence See—too much fan yin, I tell you.” But in the end, Gilbert did not listen to her. It was because of the war, he said. If he was going to be a soldier, he was going to live his own life.