by Lisa See
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 wanted 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.�
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“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.
The alley disintegrated into chaos. A city councilman picked up a loose plank from the sidewalk and batted a Chinese over the head with it. Another officer helped things along by handing Chinese over to the mob to “take them to the jail.” Most never made it. Among the latter was a Chinese doctor who was robbed, shot in the mouth, then hanged. Men ransacked apartments and businesses for the gold that the Chinese purportedly hoarded in their dens. Others ran through the streets with stolen sacks of rice, bolts of silk, bottles of wine, even roast geese.
By the end of the night, the bodies of seventeen Chinese men and boys swung from a wooden awning in front of a carriage shop, from the sides of two prairie schooners, and from the crossbeam of a gate in a nearby lumberyard. Within days, another two Chinese died from complications of gunshot wounds. At least five hundred Angelenos—approximately eight percent of the city’s total population—participated in the “night of horrors,” as the popular press dubbed it.
But the riot became an odd boon to the Chinese. During the troubling later years of the Driving Out and the enactment of the exclusion policy, Angelenos maintained a certain cool distance from the hot tempers of the rest of the country. The city’s racists had a difficult time generating enthusiasm for their anti-Chinese clubs, while across the state such clubs flourished. Boycotts against the Chinese and Chinese-employing businesses customarily failed in Los Angeles. In 1877, when the Labor Organization of Los Angeles called for the “peaceful and legal” removal of the Chinese, local papers reminded residents of the “disgrace” of the riot.
So Chinatown grew, paralleling the growth of the larger metropolis. Gold may have been what first brought people to California, but it was the golden warmth of the sun that kept them coming in a steady stream. Railroad wars encouraged this influx, with ticket prices reaching an all-time low in March of 1886, when it was possible for a brief time to buy a cross-country fare for one dollar. What had once been acre upon acre of orchards, vineyards, and grazing land was sucked into urbanization by the great flood of immigrants.
As in other cities around the country, immigrants sought out their own kind. Mexicans, who had been on the scene seemingly forever, had Sonoratown. Italians settled a few blocks away in Little Italy, while the French established another colony nearby. For now the Chinese carved out a small place for themselves bordered on the south by slaughterhouses, on the east by railroad yards and a gas plant, on the north by the fading glory of the old Spanish Plaza, and on the west by the burgeoning Caucasian metropolis.
By 1897, when Fong See and Letticie moved to Los Angeles, Nigger Alley had passed into history. In its place, Los Angeles Street was extended through to the Plaza. Apablasa and Marchessault streets bisected Los Angeles Street. Where they crossed Alameda Street marked the main entrance to Chinatown. Other unpaved streets and alleyways—named for the children and grandchildren of Juan Apablasa—were jammed chockablock with western-style brick buildings and crumbling Spanish adobes painted in brilliant hues of red, yellow, and green.
The interiors presented a different sight altogether. More than half of the rooms had no windows; many others were concealed behind false doors. Some white social workers believed that the interiors had evolved according to Chinese custom, based on the belief that evil spirits didn’t like the darkness or to turn corners, but others knew the secret rooms were a Gold Mountain necessity: they provided a means of hiding illegal residents or facilitating escape from gambling dens. Few buildings had heat or electricty. Bachelors lived in boardinghouses, sleeping in bunks with small ovens wedged between them. In these rooms could be found every type of vermin known to man—ants, fleas, cockroaches, rats. Residents trapped the rats in wire cages and killed them with boiling water.
The city fathers frequently complained about Chinatown’s filth, saying that it created a health hazard for the city at large. The politicians had a point. By 1880, nearly all of the fruits and vegetables consumed by Caucasians were grown by Chinese who had leased small plots of land along Adams, Pico
, and West Washington. But the corrals in Chinatown, which housed the vegetable peddlers’ horses, swarmed with insects. A state commission also found seven privies in the corrals. All this wouldn’t have been such a problem if the peddlers didn’t sleep alongside their horses, if the wagons—loaded with the city’s fresh produce—weren’t kept there all night, and if the produce weren’t washed in the horse troughs in the morning. But as easily as city fathers could get upset, they could also calm down—especially at the thought of having to pay for any improvements—and life would go on as usual.
Upon their arrival in the city, Fong See and Ticie first went to Chinatown, where they saw sights reminiscent of Sacramento’s Chinese quarter. Street vendors offered sugared coconut shavings, rice cakes, and roasted melon seeds. Signboards beckoned customers with tantalizing promises. Men might find a cure at an apothecary with a sign that read BENEVOLENCE AND LONGEVITY HALL, or HALL OF HARMONY AND APRICOT FORESTS. Restaurants along Marchessault Street promised both nourishment and enchantment with their names—Fragrant Tea Chambers, All Fragrance Saloon, Balcony of Joy and Delight. The air itself seemed to beckon with the aromatic odors of roast pork, duck eggs preserved in oil, dried abalone, and cuttlefish.
By then, Chinatown had a weekly newspaper, three temples, and a theater. The ghetto had district associations, family associations, and tongs—which provided arbitration of disputes, helped residents thread their way through the immigration bureaucracy, and offered protection. Eight missionary groups insistently courted converts. The Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian missionaries were by far the most successful, as they tried to meet the worldly needs of immigrants by teaching English and providing job placement.
As in Sacramento, Fong See saw that here again the Chinese preferred to look after themselves. They took care of each other when they were dying. And when they died, relatives or the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association would see to their burial at the Evergreen Cemetery, the only graveyard in Los Angeles willing to take “Orientals.” Later they saw to the digging up and sending back of the bones to China, since the Chinese believed that the only pathway to the spirit world was through the soil of China. As in most things, the white press embellished the more gruesome aspects of this custom, reporting on the rotting human flesh, the scraping clean of fleshy remnants, the open and smelly coffins, and queues left lying about the gravesites with bits of scalp still attached.