by Lisa See
Despite this one momentary lapse, Mr. Putnam wrote a flattering letter back to San Francisco, stating that he had visited the Main Street store—noting that it was in the American part of the city and not in Chinatown—and found it to be a legitimate mercantile establishment.
Meanwhile, on January 23, Inspector Thompson reported that he had interviewed Mr. Davis and found his testimony unsatisfactory. Three days later, Thompson once again interviewed Fong Quong in the detention shed. This time the questioning was short and to the point. Was there any other white man in Sacramento who Quong thought might remember him? “There are many that I know,” he answered, “but I cannot recall their names. I do not know of any particular names now, but there are people in firms there who would know me if they saw my photograph or saw me in person.”
A full month later, Israel Luce’s son was located in Sacramento and interviewed. The inspector asked him to identify a photograph. “That is the brother of Suie On,” Luce answered.
“Do you know this man’s Chinese name?”
Mr. Luce hesitated. There were three or four of those Fongs, and he never could match them up with their names, except that Suie On was the man in charge and the one who paid the rent. The inspector asked if he was sure that this was a photograph of his father’s neighbor. “Yes,” Mr. Luce assured him. “I could go and pick him out among ten thousand Chinamen now.”
On February 25, after fifty-four days in custody either on board the Coptic or in the Immigration Services detention shed, Fong Quong was released. But his problems were far from over. In Los Angeles he had to obey his two younger brothers. Fong See had been running things forever. Now he had chosen Fong Yun, who was educated, to be the bookkeeper and assistant manager. After a little over a year in Los Angeles, Fong Quong finally understood—just as the inspectors knew from experience—that not every man could rise above the mass of Chinese laborers. Fong See had done it. Fong Yun might do it. Fong Quong didn’t have a chance. He packed his Gold Mountain basket and returned to China, where he died a few years later, leaving his “share” in the F. Suie One Company to his son.
Throughout this period, the See family continued to reside above the Main Street store. In 1905, Letticie found out she was expecting another child. It seemed a logical time to move. But where? Letticie wanted a house. Her husband refused. Although both of them liked Pasadena, they felt that the city wasn’t ready for a Chinese family to move there.
At the beginning of 1906, the family moved to 510 North Los Angeles Street, in Chinatown. Fong See felt—correctly, as it turned out—that with his reputation his customers would follow him anywhere, even to Chinatown. One month later, on February 19, 1906, the German midwife delivered Leo, whose Chinese was Ming Quan. Neither of these names would take hold. Instead, Ticie called her fourth son Eddy, for Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science Church.
If there was a high-class part of Chinatown, Los Angeles Street had to be it, distanced as it was from the filth east of Alameda Street. Directly in front of the store lay the old Spanish Plaza, and beyond that the city’s first church. Next door to the F. Suie One Company stood the Lugo House—the homestead of a Spanish land-grant family long disappeared from the area. Now it housed the Hop Sing Tong, where bachelors rented rooms. This block of Los Angeles Street sloped down toward Alameda, giving the stores deep basements, some of which ran all the way through to Alameda. For some entrepreneurs, this expansive underground area provided an ideal location for gambling dens. For Fong See, it became one long, dark warehouse.
The family still lived above the store, but most days they could be found down in the cool, musty confines of the F. Suie One Company. With the new merchandise from China, the store settled into what it would always be. Inspectors would no longer find men bent over sewing machines and needlework. (Ticie, never one to let things go to waste, used the leftover silk for making lampshades.) By now the family had found its primary product in Chinese antiques.
The store was long and narrow, measuring 26 by 150 feet. Oil lamps were kept low to cast shadows and hide dust. The farther customers walked into the store, the better the merchandise—or “stuff,” as it was called by the family. If the customers were obnoxious or just tourists, they wouldn’t get past the first few feet of curios. If customers knew what they were looking at, they might be invited in a few more steps. Enticed by section after section of new surprises, they would travel back to areas redolent of teak and age. Finally, Fong See might say, “You are a very special customer. Come with me. I show you something very special.” By this time a customer would be so dizzy with titillation that the deepest, darkest warehouse became the ultimate treasure trove. No customer, if he or she ever wished to be invited again, would leave this final warehouse empty-handed.
The success of the branch stores in Los Angeles and Pasadena, followed by a third in Long Beach, cemented Fong See’s reputation among the Chinese. He was the only one among them who had the courage and strength to deal with Caucasians. The white devils looked up to him, they listened to him, they bought from him. Fong See was able to hold his own as a man with them.
In 1905 construction began on a new immigrant-processing station on Angel Island, on the Sausalito side of San Francisco Bay. After the 1906 earthquake, builders were temporarily diverted to more pressing needs, but on January 21, 1910, Angel Island finally opened. Immigration officials hailed Angel Island—which, like Alcatraz, was escape-proof—as “the Ellis Island of the West.” The Chinese immigrants who lingered there—from two days to as much as two years—called it by the more lyrical name “Isle of the Immortals.”
Across the country, at Ellis Island, the period between 1900 and 1920 marked the peak years of immigration, with 14 million immigrants entering the United States. Immigrants to the West Coast were far fewer, and a much higher percentage were turned away. Each Chinese who came to the United States for the first time, and any Chinese returning to the United States from a visit home, went through interrogations.
As immigration rules tightened, many Chinese took advantage of the few loopholes in restrictions for entrance to the Gold Mountain. Forming their own hui or partnership, cooks, houseboys, laundrymen, and gardeners became “merchants” and were permitted to bring in a relative or, with any luck, a wife. But the greatest boon to Chinese immigrants came with the San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed most of the city’s records, including birth certificates. Suddenly a Chinese laborer could say that he had been born here and was an American citizen by birth. (It was said that every Chinese woman living in San Francisco would have had to have borne eight hundred sons if each Chinese claiming American citizenship by birth were honest.)
As “citizens,” men could bring in their wives. In 1910, Chinese women numbered only five percent of the total Chinese population in the United States. From 1910 to 1924, one in four Chinese entering the country would be a woman. As “citizens,” the Chinese could also bring over their sons. The law stated that children of Americans were U.S. citizens no matter where in the world they were born. A new and effective scam developed in which an American citizen of Chinese descent falsely reported the birth of a son in the home village. Such “paper sons” were guaranteed entry into the United States, with automatic citizenship. In China, the market in false birth documents skyrocketed.
False papers, however, didn’t guarantee entry. Immigrants still faced the ever tougher questions of interrogators, who were relentless in their efforts to bar common laborers from entering the country: How many trees grow in your home village? Who are your neighbors? How many children do you have? Do you keep a dog? How many steps are there before your doorway? What is the location of the ancestral temple? Each question was designed to induce an immigrant to make a mistake, proving that he was not the son of an American citizen, that he did not come from the village he said he came from, that he wasn’t a merchant, student, teacher, minister, or diplomat. The interrogation process was effective and unforgiving. From 1910 to 1935,
only one in four Chinese immigrants was allowed to remain in the United States.
Where was Fong See during all this? He had formed his partnership long ago, and the names of his “partners” were listed in his business file with the California branch of the Immigration Service. When men died, they left their “partnerships” to their sons. Others sold their partnerships to an uncle or nephew. The fact that Fong See was the sole owner of the business didn’t matter. The partnership established an immigrant’s right to enter the United States.
Fong See was dedicated to helping his relatives and making a profit. The people who came to the United States as partners in the F. Suie One Company worked as clerks and salesmen in his various enterprises. He bankrolled at least two—an herbalist and a butcher. But only one man, Wing Ho, became a real partner. He ran, and eventually owned, the Long Beach branch of the F. Suie One Company. No matter how the “partners” were employed, all of them were beholden to their benefactor, sometimes throughout their lives and the lives of their children.
On the partnership lists, some names fell off, only to be replaced by a roster of new ones: from Kang Sun in 1894 to Kum To in 1919 to Louie Chong as late at 1933. Fong See was hardly alone in his efforts. The Sun Wing Wo Company on Los Angeles Street—which sold goods wholesale to the F. Suie One Company—had twenty “partners” on paper, with each one bringing in his relatives.
Inspectors were diligent and zealous, writing back and forth for additional files to support an immigrant’s case. Some files, such as Fong See’s or Fong Yun’s, were hundreds of pages in length. How closely inspectors read those documents and acted on them is open to question. Certainly some immigrants were harassed relentlessly. But Fong See had few problems bringing in people, as evidenced by the case of Fong Lai.
The Sacramento business record lists “Fong Lie” as an original member of the Suie On Company dating from 1894. In early interrogations, Fong See stated that this person, Fong Lai, was his brother. The next set of business papers lists a Fong Lai, but indicates that he didn’t acquire his partnership until 1896. Subsequent interviews present a very different picture.
On July 20, 1912, Fong See told an inspector that his brother, Fong Lai, had died eighteen years earlier, in 1894, leaving behind a widow (a foot-bound woman), a boy, and no girls. On this same date, Richard White testified that Fong Lai was an active partner in the Los Angeles store. It wasn’t until May 1917, however, that “Fong Lai” applied for lawfully domiciled Chinese merchant status so that he might return to China for a visit. He based his request on the partnership records of the F. Suie One Company.
On May 11, 1917, in an interview on Fong Lai’s behalf, Fong See said that Fong Lai would have been fifty-six, but died “a long time ago in China,” and was never in the United States. Realizing his error, he later interrupted the pattern of the questioning: “I want to make a correction,” he said. “My brother, Fong Lai, used to be my partner in my store here in Los Angeles, and went back to China about twenty years ago.” Later he added that Fong Lai was fifty-two years old. If he was fifty-two, then Fong Lai would have been a toddler when he accompanied his father, Fong Dun Shung, to work on the railroad, never mind that he would have been younger than his so-called “younger” brother, even with all the complexities of that date. “Fong Lai’s” own testimony muddies the waters further; in it he states that he was fifty years old, born in Wah Hong village in the Sun Ning district. He also said that he returned to China not in 1897, as earlier reported, but in April 1908, for a year-long visit.
With Fong Lai, the family participated in a clever shell game. Fong Lai, the brother, certainly existed. But this new Fong Lai was really Ing Lai, more commonly referred to as Dai-Dai by the family. This Fong Lai was a friend from China who’d entered the country on the original Fong Lai’s papers. The first Fong Lai went back to China in 1897, apparently returned to the United States, and went back to China again in 1908, where he died. Although the photograph of the Fong Lai of 1917 showed a very different-looking man, immigration officials paid no attention. By this time, Fong See had enough respect in the white community that the officials of the Immigration Service didn’t look very hard.
“There is no doubt that this applicant is now and has been for a number of years a merchant, member of the F. Suie One Co., of this city, which has three separate stores each of which is well stocked with Chinese and Japanese curios and art goods,” wrote Inspector W. A. Brazie. “The testimony of the witnesses shows that he is a bona fide merchant and he is well known to this office as a member of the firm above noted.”
For a man who sometimes aged merchandise in horse manure or coaxed Pasadena matrons into paying more than they should, this scam was easy. Paper sons proved to be trickier, as both Fong See and Fong Yun learned when they tried to establish the existence of new “sons.” In 1910, after a visit to Dimtao, Fong Yun, during the usual holdover at Angel Island, suddenly announced that he had two sons in China—Fong Ming Gong (aged thirteen) and Fong Ming Lung (aged eight). Two years later, Fong See told an inpsector that his first wife, Yong, whom Ticie had met in China, had died—a truth. He went on to say that she had two children—a baby girl who died when she was a few days old, and a son, Fong Hong, who was born in 1881, the very year that Fong See maintained to authorities that he arrived in the United States. Next to the questions and answers regarding Fong See’s so-called children the immigration officer marked each line with a dramatic slash. Realizing his mistake, Fong See never mentioned Hong again. And, by 1917, records show that Yun’s “sons,” Ming Gong and Ming Lung, had “died.”
For many, these post-earthquake interviews served as a means to change life stories. Both Fong See and Fong Yun reported that their Chinese wives, as well as their mother, Shueying, had bound feet. If Fong See and his brother could have wives with bound feet, why not give all the partners’ wives bound feet? Poor as they were, the “partners” hoped that one day the Immigration Service might make allowances and let them bring in these wives of good birth. A small transgression, surely, but one that was telling. Family history and social standing could change with just a few carefully placed words.
By 1910 the F. Suie One Company was the largest store in Chinatown, and Fong See himself was, as Richard White said, “about as near an Americanized Chinaman as can be.” Fong See told officials that he took home seventy-five dollars a month, but this was part of a larger immigration game to give validity to the fact that he paid Fong Yun fifty dollars and the lesser partners only thirty-five dollars a month. All this was as it should be. Fong See was the one who was responsible for the rent—one hundred dollars a month in Pasadena and sixty-five dollars a month paid to the Gee Ning Tong in Chinatown. He was the one ultimately responsible for the partners’ needs: food, lodging, clothes, wives, pastimes.
Fong See had become a man of property, owning three houses in Dimtao. In America, he traded Chinese rugs for forty-four undeveloped acres east of Los Angeles in La Habra. He also bartered merchandise in exchange for property near Signal Hill in Long Beach, named optimistically Athens on the Hill. For years this property would captivate the family with unfulfilled promises of oil riches. These deals showed just how smart Fong See was—to have outflanked and outsmarted the Caucasians yet again. Let them enact their law forbidding any Chinese ineligible for citizenship from buying land in California. He’d “traded” for his, and placed the properties in his American wife’s name.
The world as Fong See knew it was slowly changing. Fong See, who scrupulously avoided the many associations in Chinatown, was always interested in the larger goings-on affecting the Chinese in the country and listened each afternoon as Fong Yun—Uncle, as he was called by the children—read from Chung Sai Yat Po, the Chinese Daily Paper. Mostly the paper reported news of humiliations: An immigration officer had shot a Chinese sailor for spitting at authority; a Chinese man and a Greek man had gotten into a fight when the latter decided not to pay the former for his meal; a cook, who hadn’t been paid his wag
es, was shot and killed by his white employer. It also reported on new laws: A health ordinance required the inspection of all Chinese businesses that sold food, including restaurants and grocery stores; anyone caught without their resident papers would be jailed, then deported. The paper reported, as well, on new trends in immigration, as it did in 1908, when Mexico temporarily became a new steppingstone on the path to opportunity; Chinese crossed the border on foot and by small boat and horse cart. To reverse this flow, the Los Angeles police were accepting any tips on new faces in Chinatown. New immigrants could be assured of arrest and search. Indeed, a Los Angeles mechanic had recently turned in seven Chinese who were just passing through.
Opium arrests, tong wars, prostitution, and gambling got big play in the Chinese press. In a series of articles, a family association reached out to opium smokers: If you feel bad when you’re quitting, come and get special medicine from us to help you through your pains. Gambling had come under increasing pressure by the whites. The trouble was, Chung Sai Yat Po reported, the Chinese liked gambling the way Americans liked movies. Could the government grant the Chinese a special right to gamble in exchange for their help in arresting those involved in the opium trade?
Fong See always listened to his brother’s readings about interracial marriages with heightened interest. In 1907, Uncle read a news story in Chung Sai Yat Po about a certain Chiu Si Ho who eloped with a Caucasian, much to the consternation of the girl’s parents. That same year, a Chinese man married a Negro woman. No one knew if it was legal, but the pastor decided to go along with it anyway. But for every “success” like these, there were men like Samuel Gompers, who declared that “the Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinese, Japs, or any others,” and that “the offspring of miscegenation between Americans and Asiatics are invariably degenerate.” These assertions proved so persuasive that California, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Virginia, Utah, and Wyoming all passed laws forbidding intermarriage between Chinese and Caucasians.