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

by Lisa See

  Ray was a long way from the Chinese antique business. While what he made wasn’t junk, you couldn’t call it art either. “Nothing wrong in no-good product so long you make money,” his father used to say, ordering the boys to bury brand-new ginger jars in manure to “age” them quickly. His father had been a genius when it came to fooling customers, Ray had to give that to him. He remembered how his mother and sister had spent afternoons “antiquing” baskets fresh off the boat with that smelly mixture of asphalt and turpentine. Those “antiques” had made a tidy profit, just as the lamps were easy money. When his salesgirls talked about teak and ginger finishes, Ray knew that a finish was all they were. Using cheap wood, he had incorporated marble, latticework, and walnut-burl overlays to create what many interior decorators were calling “unique surprises.” Make a handsome product from inexpensive materials, and it will always sell. And his did—to Barker Brothers, Widdicomb, Stickley Brothers, and Lord & Taylor.

  Anna May came back holding a newspaper. She looked sober, too sober. He hoped she’d done nothing embarrassing. When she reached him, she flipped open the paper to a headline that read, FIRE RAZES L.A. FURNITURE PLANT, WATCHMAN KILLED. Her pale skin and trembling hands told him who owned that factory.

  Ray didn’t read the full story until he was on the plane heading back for Los Angeles. Eleven fire companies, with twenty-one pieces of equipment, had battled the blaze for hours. After the flames had been extinguished, firefighters had found the body of the night watchman. Ray looked at the photograph of the ruined building and shuddered. The article estimated a $25,000 loss on the structure alone. Ray knew the real value lay inside. From what he could see, all the machinery, as well as the plant-lamps, chess-lamps, table/lamp combos, and all their matching shades, had been reduced to ashes, as had all of the occasional pieces. He pulled out a pad of paper, made some quick calculations, and tallied the figures. The loss looked to be in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars.

  Ray began making plans. Today was October 10, 1947. If they could lease space quickly, they might be able to get in new equipment by the end of the week. If they got to work right away, he might be able to ship in sixty days. If the new line could be out the door by December 10, he could still take advantage of the Christmas rush. No one ever bought furniture in December, but shoppers—fatigued and loaded down with packages—often sought refuge in the furniture sections of department stores to rest on sofas, chairs, and ottomans. They would come back after the holidays to buy for themselves. All he had to do was get the merchandise made and shipped. If everything went well, See-Mar would end up bigger and better than ever. These were, Ray acknowledged, a lot of ifs.

  From Los Angeles airport he took a cab down to the industrial section of town. From the outside, the building didn’t look badly damaged. The brick walls still stood, although they were smoke-stained and the windows had blown out. Ray heard someone approach and stop next to him. He turned to see an old Chinese man as frail as a dried leaf, wearing a gown down to the pavement. His hands were tucked up into voluminous sleeves. It took Ray a few moments to recognize the wizened stranger as his father. They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in years.

  “What are you doing here?” Ray asked.

  “Now you borrow money from me,” Fong See said.

  Ray appraised the old man who’d deserted his mother so long ago. Ray felt himself begin to shake with years of pent-up anger. His voice, when it came, was low and hoarse. “Not from you, not ever.” Ray crossed the street and stepped into the gutted ruins of what had been the first material realization of his freedom. He never spoke to his father again.

  On January 21, 1948, just three months after the fire that gutted Ray and Bennie’s factory, another tragedy struck the family. While Ming was off spending the night with Sunny Rockwell, the woman who sculpted in the alley behind the store, his wife, Dorothy, probably drunk, fell asleep in bed with a cigarette. The house caught fire and burned to the ground, killing Dorothy. Unable to find Ming, the police called Eddy, who went straight over to the house and identified Dorothy’s charred remains. When Ming arrived in the early-morning hours, he “went to pieces.” In shock, he stared blindly, numbly, at the fireplace that still stood in what was otherwise a few inches of ashes. Ming was too upset to answer the questions posed by the firemen and the policemen.

  Ming had to stay somewhere. There wasn’t enough room at Dragon’s Den for another person, and he wasn’t close enough to Bennie or Ray to be taken in by them. Sissee was the best choice, the only choice, Eddy reasoned, because Ming was going to need a woman’s compassion to get him through his mourning. So Eddy drove his older brother to the Leong house on Ivadel, where Sissee and Gilbert had taken up residence since returning from Memphis. Ming—silent in his grief and guilt—was put to bed in the upstairs sewing room.

  All through that day and night, the family came and went. They tried to talk to Ming, but he wouldn’t speak. They rehashed the history of the See brothers. All but Bennie had strayed from their wives. Ray and Leona had a marriage in name only. Stella and Eddy had patched things up. Ming and Dorothy had been another story. The family knew he was having an affair with Sunny. But he had fooled around for so long that no one had reproached him for it until now. “If Ming had been with her, it never would have happened,” Stella said angrily. “He had a responsibility.” Through all of this, Sissee was a rock—providing coffee, tea, and snacks to her brothers and their wives, shutting off comments such as Stella’s with an abrupt “We’re going to forget about that. We’re going to forget about that for Ming.”

  During the following weeks, Sissee was moved to action in a way she never could have been for herself, insisting that they all work to help Ming erase the fire from his memory, for he truly had fallen apart. His hair seemed to go white overnight. He had the shakes. When he spoke, his normally even voice was broken by a stutter. Close friends tried to comfort him: “No one can blame you. Dorothy treated you like a rat.” Through all this, Mama Leong never questioned the fact that Sissee had moved Ming into the house. Mama Leong never lectured or complained. She simply allowed Sissee to care for her brother.

  On a morning in May—four months after Dorothy’s fiery death—Ming was still living with the Leongs. Sissee and Ming—quiet, as he had been since that night in January—sat together in the kitchen sipping coffee and listening to Bernice, Sissee’s sister-in-law, tell a story from work.

  “My boss said, ‘We have coffee cake and coffee for breakfast. What do you eat?’ I said, ‘Coffee cake and coffee.’ ‘Gee,’ he says, ‘I thought you Chinese just ate rice.’” Bernice, who’d been the first Asian hired by Western Auto, laughed and Sissee giggled along with her. “They’re all Midwesterners,” Bernice went on. “They’ve never seen someone like me before.”

  “I’ll bet they haven’t,” Sissee said.

  “Then they say, ‘Your English is quite good.’ I say ‘Well, it ought to be. I was born here.’” Again they laughed, knowing that they could look at this stuff either as discrimination or just as a joke. Bernice glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go. I don’t want to be late.”

  Sissee walked her sister-in-law to the door. She paused to watch Bernice drive away, then walked down the hall to the kitchen. Ming, without a word, went back upstairs where he would remain until Sissee called him for lunch. She straightened up the kitchen and the butler’s pantry, then poured herself another cup of coffee, went back into the dining room, and picked up the newspaper to peruse the classifieds. Sissee relished these quiet mornings after the other Leongs had left and before she began her daily chores.

  The house on Ivadel was perfect for the extended Leong family. The upstairs had five bedrooms separated by a central hallway. Three of the bedrooms held family units: Mr. and Mrs. Leong in one; Sissee, Gilbert, and Leslee in another; and Elmer and Bernice in yet another. The other two bedrooms were occupied by Gilbert’s single siblings, Margie and Ed. There was also the sewing room, where Ming was staying
, which frequently doubled as an additional bedroom for Leong houseguests.

  Sissee and Gilbert, who was apprenticed to an architecture firm, had little privacy. They shared a common bathroom with the rest of the family; they shared their bedroom with Leslee. Their communication was circumspect. In China, custom would have dictated that all of their conversation be conducted through servants. But in the United States, Sissee and Gilbert had no servants to act as go-betweens. Instead they followed the next level of proper marital etiquette: “Ascend the bed, act like a husband. Descend the bed, act like a gentleman.” During the day and at any time in front of the family, no kissing, no touching of any kind, no sweet words of affection were permitted. It was a careful, impersonal way to live, one that was insisted upon by the ever-righteous Mrs. Leong.

  When Gilbert, Sissee, and Leslee had first returned from Memphis and moved into the house on Ivadel, Mrs. Leong hadn’t softened just like that. She’d observed Sissee and made careful calculations of her character. Sissee, who had grown up working in the store and at Dragon’s Den, had had to prove to her mother-in-law what a hard worker she was. When Mrs. Leong bought some rundown apartments on Bunker Hill, Sissee kept them up. Each time a tenant left, Sissee scrubbed down the apartments with ammonia and Clorox until her hands were raw. She never complained, never said a word. The housekeeping chores also fell to Sissee. She did the shopping and cleaning. (Except on Thursdays, when her father-in-law made dinner at home for all of them, Sissee made dinner nightly for her own family unit. And, except on Thursdays, Sissee and Gilbert were already in bed when the rest of the family got home from Soochow.) When she wasn’t cooking, cleaning, or shopping, Sissee went to the F. Suie One Company to do the books. In her spare time she volunteered at the Chinese Women’s Club and visited her mother’s old friend Mrs. Morgan, which showed she honored older people. Sissee always told Mrs. Leong the truth and showed respect. But more than anything else, Sissee gave the appearance of being willing to listen to and adopt her mother-in-law’s advice.

  “If anyone comes to the house, welcome them with a cup of tea,” Mama Leong might suggest, and Sissee would do it.

  “Be careful what you say,” Mama Leong chastised. “In Chinese, a wrong inflection will give a very different meaning.”

  Mama Leong instructed, “At home, we always use serving spoons for the communal dishes. At other houses, or sometimes at banquets at low-class restaurants, people will put their chopsticks into the common bowls. This is not how we do it. But if you are at a place that does it this way, then certainly do the same. To be polite, only pick up what is directly in front of you.”

  Another daughter-in-law might have said, “I know that. I wasn’t born in a barn, you know.” But Sissee kept her mouth shut, allowing her mother-in-law to think that she was docile and obedient.

  The hardest part was having a small child in a house full of adults. Even though Sissee had been raised in Chinatown, there were certain things she could see about the way she’d grown up that were completely different from the Leong style. Sissee had been close to her mother. There had always been hugs and kisses and deeply felt expressions of love. In the Leong family, emotional demonstrations were held in disdain. As a result, Leslee never received hugs and kisses from her grandparents. Presents were not to be played with. Christmases came and went, birthdays came and went. Gifts—dolls and miniature ovens—were to be looked at, admired, then stored in the attic.

  The Leongs loved Leslee, of course. She didn’t make noise, run around, or bang into things in the house. “Best of all,” Sissee had heard Mama Leong say, “Leslee looks like a typical Chinese baby.” Although by all rights Leong Jeung should have given Leslee her Chinese name, Mama Leong had done it herself, giving her beautiful, quiet granddaughter the name of Man Gai En, for the famous musician.

  Now, as Leslee got older, Mrs. Leong sometimes scolded, “Don’t let Leslee forget she’s a girl. She must act like a young lady—in how she walks, how she sits, how she talks.” Another daughter-in-law might have said, “Oh, Mom, you’re so chong hai, so long-winded,” but Sissee simply nodded, and reminded Leslee to be quiet and remember that the house was filled with grownups.

  Where other families might have resisted, argued, or harbored resentments, the nine Leongs—Sissee included—had settled into a comfortable routine shored up by tradition. Ed, Gilbert’s older brother, accepted the responsibility of the family business and obeyed his mother. Margie was a social worker, but her schedule brought her back each night to Soochow, where she was still the hostess.

  Elmer? Poor Elmer. Sissee could remember how handsome her brother-in-law had been before the war. He had been in military intelligence and had flown over Germany almost every day. Eventually he’d gotten ulcers, and one month before the war ended, the military had brought him home and he’d spent the next year and a half in a hospital. While he was away, he’d also gotten a bad case of acne. Once out of the hospital, he’d gone to a Chinese doctor, who sanded his skin off. Now Elmer was a wastrel. With his skin brutally scarred, he’d moved outward to the next layer, dressing in expensive clothes and shoes. But Bernice provided Elmer’s real armor. She was a strong woman.

  Bernice had been born up north, near Fresno, and had a life that was in many ways typically Chinese American—persistent in the face of hard times combined with the rare stroke of good fortune. Her family was practically the only Chinese family in the area, so Bernice was very westernized, with a modern haircut and makeup. She spoke English at home, and followed American traditions. Her father had owned a restaurant at the country’s first miniature golf course. When the Depression hit, Bernice’s father had moved his wife and five children into Fresno, where he was hired as a cook in a place that had gambling and prostitution. Bernice said he’d hated it because he was straitlaced and religious. He’d taken a chance and opened a little grocery store, then a restaurant in Fresno Chinatown, where he’d gained a reputation for his coconut cream and lemon pies. “People came from miles around to get them,” Bernice told Sissee. “American people, not just Chinese.” Then her father had contracted double pneumonia; soon after, he’d died of a heart attack. Bernice had been eighteen at the time.

  She’d taken a job at Wu’s Cafe, and it was there that she’d met Elmer, passing through Fresno on his way to a football game in San Francisco. In 1940, Bernice had moved to Los Angeles and gone to work for an herbalist. When she’d gotten tired of that, she’d taken a job as a secretary for an actress, Ona Munson, the woman who’d played Belle in Gone With the Wind. Bernice had a cousin, Pearl Luck, who had a gift shop in China City. Pearl, a Methodist, had gotten Bernice to go to the mission, where she’d renewed her acquaintance with Elmer. Then the war had come. Elmer had been sent overseas and Bernice had gone back to Fresno. After Elmer had gotten out of the hospital, he’d asked her to come back down to Los Angeles. Mrs. Leong had tried to discourage this, but the big difference between Gilbert and Elmer was that Elmer did what he wanted.

  Elmer had listened to all of his mother’s talk about Bernice’s inferior family background and immediately taken Bernice and eloped to Las Vegas. Mrs. Leong had pitched a fit, but there was nothing to be done about it except have another marriage ceremony in a church. Afterwards, Mrs. Leong had wanted Bernice to perform the tea-pouring ceremony, but Bernice had refused. “I’m not going to kowtow to them,” she had said. She hadn’t given in then, and she didn’t give in to Mrs. Leong now. But this wasn’t Sissee’s way.

  Since Ming’s arrival in the house, Sissee had enjoyed the truce with her mother-in-law, but she realized there was more to marriage than a good relationship between a wife and a mother-in-law. Sissee wanted desperately to move out of the house, but Gilbert repeatedly forestalled her attempts. For this reason, Sissee had spent much of her early marriage redefining her image of her husband. She had seen Gilbert as a sculptor. She had thought he was creative, romantic, bohemian. She had placed him in the same category as Benji and Tyrus. It had come as the biggest shock of
her life when Gilbert had turned out to be a rigid Chinese man.

  The more Sissee talked about finding their own house, the more she realized her husband wanted to stay with his mother. Still, every day Sissee looked through the classifieds, hoping to find a solution. This morning her eyes caught an advertisement, and she began to envision what might be. That night, when Gilbert came home, she showed him the ad.

  “Army surplus is selling entire barracks,” she said. “We could go in with Stella and Eddy and buy one. They’d like to get out of the basement and have their own place too.”

  “What? You want us to live all together in a barracks?”

  “No, we’ll take it apart and use the materials to build our own home. You’ll be able to express yourself and build exactly what you want.”

  Gilbert laughed. “It sounds ridiculous. It sounds like something Eddy would do. You’re a dreamer, just like him.”

  And without considering the implications, she said, “I want to get out of here. There are just too many people.” Then, echoing her own mother, she added, “I want to have a house of my own. Either we move out of here, or I’ll move out myself.”