Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  The Bryant party didn’t dally on the summit. They were eager for some civilized company and pressed on toward Sacramento.

  Marysville was about forty miles north of the capital. The Feather River formed a boundary between it and its neighbor, Yuba City, to the west, a short drive across a bridge. The Feather could be an impressive stream as it tumbled out of the mountains, but in the valley it ran slow and green. To the Spaniards, it was Rio de las Plumas because of the waterfowl feathers that were always swirling on its surface.

  There were eleven thousand people in Marysville, but it wasn’t likely to get much bigger. Developers were inhibited by the dikes and levees on the Feather. They had to do their speculating in Yuba City instead, where many parcels of farmland were available.

  Already Yuba City was twice the size of Marysville. It was habitable, but you’d never praise it for its beauty. It had once finished last in a poll ranking American cities on their virtues as a place to live. It had traffic, congestion, and every franchise under the sun. Among its famous citizens was Juan Corona, a farm-labor contractor and a mass murderer, who had hacked up twenty-five migrant workers and buried them by the river.

  Subdivisions had started devouring the farms in Yuba City as early as 1924, when Jake Onstott had gone to a local bank with an idea to circumvent foreclosure on his spread. He carved the land into lots and sold them to some employees of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Onstott’s farm became Garden Acres. Now there were Orchard Estates and Vintage Court and South Wind and Lincoln Park and Wildewood East. Commuters to the capital bought the houses in them, government clerks and petty bureaucrats, and so did military personnel from Beale and Mather air force bases, which were close by.

  In Yuba City, you could drive down a suburban block, turn right, and wind up in an orchard. Marysville’s streets were not so informal. The town was quieter and more conservative, Republican rather than Democratic. In the 1850s, it had been the state’s third-largest city, a center for supplies that were sent to the gold miners in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. From San Francisco, ships sailed up the Sacramento River to the Feather River, then docked and unloaded.

  In the evening, I walked around the old downtown and admired the handsome brick buildings from the Gold Rush era. I imagined it in its prime, with brimming poker parlors and dance halls, and the spritely cadences of an upright piano for a soundtrack. A miner might treat himself to a bath in a claw-footed tub, washing away the dust of his camp, knock back some whiskey, stop in at a bordello, and top off the night with dinner at a fine Chinese restaurant.

  The Chinese section of Marysville was once so thriving that it rivaled the big Chinatown in San Francisco. Some of its buildings were still standing, marked by aging signs or palimpsests on the bricks—a Hop Sing Society and a temple dedicated to Bok Kai, the River God of Good Fortune. Before the dikes and the levees were built, Bok Kai was charged with the job of flood control. He had handled the task successfully in China, along with averting famines.

  IN CHINA, IN THE 1850s, California was known as the Golden Mountain. Immigrants from Kwangtung Province in Canton were the first foreigners to enter the state in any number, running away from an economy in shambles. They were packed onto ships and transported in hideous filth to San Francisco.

  A middleman frequently paid for the immigrants’ passage and indentured them to miners. They repaid the loan out of their minuscule earnings, often at a scandalously high rate of interest. In the mining camps, the Chinese did pickax work. They broke rocks and dug tunnels with such serene composure, never complaining, that the miners called them “celestials.”

  When the boom phase ended in the gold mines, some Chinese remained in the foothills and bought up claims cheaply. They were able to scratch out a living where less diligent men had failed. Other laborers moved south to the Chinatowns in Marysville and San Francisco, taking jobs in laundries, restaurants, and factories, and as peddlers and domestics.

  Pig-tailed Chinese houseboys were a vogue among city swells, and most cigars in California were rolled by Chinese hands. In 1865, Charles Crocker, a railroad baron, hired a fifty-man, all-Chinese crew to lay track for his Central Pacific line and was so pleased with the result that he soon had ten thousand celestials in his employ.

  The Chinese advanced themselves by jumping at every opportunity. They worked on farms, in the shipping trade, and at lumber mills, accepting abysmal wages that few white men would even consider. By the 1870s, their secrecy, their numbers, and their willingness to do almost anything had the state in the grip of a Yellow Peril. One popular book predicted that they would take over California by the end of the century. The Chinese were villified and subjected to mob violence. Some were lynched, while others had their houses burned down.

  In the midst of the hysteria, the California State Senate convened a committee of seven senators to gather testimony about the “social, moral, and political effect of Chinese immigration.” From its witnesses and self-styled experts, the committee heard that the average immigrant paid between forty and fifty dollars for his steamer passage; that the average laborer in China made between ten and twenty cents a day; that Confucius encouraged ancestor worship; that many Chinese marriages were arranged by contract; that prostitution in China was regarded as a profession, not as a sin; and that boys as young as twelve had contracted syphilis and gonorrhea from Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco.

  A Mr. W. J. Shaw, who had spent either three or four months in China—he couldn’t remember for certain—alerted the senators to the fact that Chinese children with bad habits were drowned by their parents. The Chinese had no literature, Shaw said, and their architecture was primitive.

  James Galloway, a lawyer and a forty-niner, painted a black picture of Chinese life in the mining camps, where, he insisted, the men smoked opium, ate dog meat, stole from one another, consorted with lewd women, and showed no moral concern of any kind.

  “I am not much prejudiced against them,” Galloway averred, although under questioning he confessed that he’d written some inflammatory articles about “coolie labor.”

  Some well-intentioned ministers testified that the Chinese could be saved only through Christian education. Reverend J. H. C. Bonte veered slightly off the subject to make some prescient remarks comparing the Chinese to the Japanese. He said:

  They [the Japanese] seem to have an instinctive understanding of our institutions. I have read essays by even young Japanese girls, and they seem to have an instinctive insight into things as they are.… In dress and appearance, Japanese coming here try to imitate Americans. They stop at hotels … and live like Americans. I am utterly amazed at the difference between the Japanese and the Chinese.

  Statistical tables brought before the senators indicated that immigration was on the rise again, with 16,085 Chinese going through the port of San Francisco in 1874, and 18,021 in 1875.

  A clipping from the San Francisco Journal of Commerce was read into the record. It suggested that after the Chinese had overrun the Pacific Coast, they would spread their rule around the world, just as Attila, Tamerlane, and Genghis Khan had done.

  Finally, some Chinese who resided in California were summoned to testify. They were reluctant witnesses, often tough guys and petty criminals in the employ of the tongs that worked as enforcers for various family associations. They sold opium, operated gambling dens, and ran girls. They had a bravado about them and knew how to stonewall.

  Take Billy Holung, a saloon worker at the Pony Exchange. Senator Hayward interrogated him.

  Q: How do these Chinawomen come here—the women who are prostitutes?

  A: I don’t know.

  Q: Who owns them?

  A: I don’t know.

  Q: Did you ever see any rewards offered for killing men?

  A: Never heard of that.

  Q: Do you know anything about Ah Quong being killed?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: What was he killed for?

  A: I don’t know.
/>   Q: Who killed him?

  A: I don’t know.

  Sometimes there was a bantering quality to the interrogation, as when Senator Donovan questioned Hong Chung, an inspector for the Sam-yup Company, a family association, who was becoming a legal citizen after twenty-four years in the state. Senator Donovan asked if other Chinese would follow suit.

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: A great many?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: Will all become American citizens?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: And stay here?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: Will they become candidates for the office of Governor of the State as soon as they are citizens?

  A: May be. I don’t know. They are going to become citizens. I like to be citizen. American man make no good laws for Chinaman. We make good laws for Chinaman citizens.

  Q: Would you like to be Governor of the State of California?

  A: Of course. I like the State of California a long time; I like a free country.

  Q: Would you like to be Governor?

  A: I cannot be Governor. I like the State of California, and like to be a citizen of the American man’s people.

  When the committee had finished its deliberations, it put forth a mild, unenforceable recommendation that no more than ten Chinese should be permitted to emigrate on any ship. It had no effect on the swelling tide. Although the federal government passed a prohibitive Exclusion Act in 1882 that forbade Chinese laborers and their wives from entering the country and denied them the right to become citizens, the sphere of Chinese influence kept expanding.

  The tongs, which were first formed in San Francisco in the 1850s, still rule every Chinatown in the United States. Anyone can join one by paying about thirty dollars. Each tong has a gang that does its bidding. A Chinatown is carved up block by block, and everybody knows which street belongs to which gang. The tongs’ pursuits are the traditional ones of gambling, prostitution, extortion, illegal immigration, and drug dealing.

  Among the Chinese in California today, there are pockets of immense wealth, but outsiders seldom see any evidence of it. All the gangsterish maneuvering in a Chinatown is invisible to them, deliberately so. Even the Chinese-language newspapers seldom report on Chinatown crime because too many people, including pillars of society, would be implicated.

  Over the years, the fears expressed at the committee hearings have proved to be unfounded, though, particularly those of Senator Donovan. The Chinese account for almost one-fifth of the state’s population, but there are only a few prominent Chinese politicians, and no person of Chinese ancestry has ever run for governor.

  THE DREAM OF STRIKING IT RICH IS ENDEMIC IN CALIFORNIA, and those devoted to agricultural pursuits are not immune to it. For Carlos Zambello, the possible ticket to the moon was wild rice. Although consumers in the United States bought a pound of it about as often as they bought a new car, Zambello was not deterred. He knew that more and more Californians were wising up every day, turning health-conscious, and forsaking red meat for grains that were high in fiber.

  Zambello, an Argentine by birth, operated the Wild Rice Exchange with some partners on Highway 99, outside Yuba City. He was a stocky man of almost forty whose brisk manner blended the scientific and the entrepreneurial. He presented himself as a busy executive with a full docket of appointments, but he had the social grace that came from good breeding and made a little time to talk with me when I got curious about his business.

  In his office in a trailer, he sat me down and gave me some complimentary wild rice that he packaged under the Gourmet Valley label, along with some pamphlets filled with recipes. Another pamphlet offered history and anecdotes and explained that wild rice was not a true rice at all but rather the seed of a tall, aquatic grass.

  Zambello was from the farm country north of Buenos Aires, at the edge of the Wet Pampas. The soil there had been exploited for over a century without being fertilized, he said, and it held no promise, so when he traveled to the United States as a foreign exchange student to complete his high-school education, in 1971, he became intrigued with his new country and its many possibilities.

  Wild rice was among them. Indians harvested it on Leech Lake Reservation near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the town where he was staying, but he learned that the traditional farmers of the region were seldom tempted to try it as a crop. They worried about the yield—it could never be predicted exactly because the variables were too great. Humid summers in the Midwest could ruin the rice with damaging funguses, and harsh winds caused it to shatter. In addition, the seeds were three times as expensive as ordinary seeds.

  The wild-rice picture, then, was not very bright unless you transposed it to California, as Carlos Zambello had done.

  On the Sacramento River floodplain, ordinary rice grew handily. The crop was simple to manage and clockwork in its cycles. Seeds were sown from planes in the spring, and farmers released water from dikes and wells to make shallow paddies. Mosquitoes were the bane of the paddies. Thirty-seven different subspecies could be isolated, including a malarial strain, but they were no bother to the rice. The harvest was in late summer. Special harvester combines built to slog over wet ground did most of the work. The rice was dried and stored in silos, and water birds ate the chaff.

  Since the 1940s, when a professor from the University of California began growing a domesticated strain as a potential food for ducks, farmers on the floodplain had been experimenting with wild rice, banking on the mild climate and the virtually pest-free environment. Their efforts increased through the 1970s, and Zambello had joined them in 1986 by purchasing and refurbishing a dilapidated rice drier and a cobwebby warehouse.

  His partners, who did the actual farming, stuck to a strict routine, he told me. Seeds were air-dropped from February through May, and they had a growing season of about ninety days. Wild rice couldn’t tolerate any weeds or chemicals and germinated at a lower temperature than white or brown rice. Sometimes rice midges attacked the crop in the early stages, but there wasn’t much to fret about after that. Once the wild rice was harvested, it had to be dried and carefully roasted. The precious seeds were stored in water at a temperature close to freezing.

  The first year that Zambello was in business, he had made a killing on a bumper crop. He and a friend, Daniel Maohs, had devised a means to ship wild-rice seeds without damaging them, and he had sold about 7 million pounds of green, field-run product to marketers and processors in Minnesota—he had harvested 19 million pounds in all. Unfortunately, some competitors soon hit on the same innovation, and things were never quite so good again.

  Zambello sometimes sounded frustrated when he talked about the obstacles facing him. Wild rice was costly and had an exotic reputation. In general, he said, Asians wouldn’t touch it, and neither would Hispanics. People were confused about how to cook it, and about what to do with it once it was cooked.

  Still, Zambello had his fantasies. Someday, he thought, the Wild Rice Exchange might be a tourist destination on the order of a Napa winery. He would call it the Old Rice Mill. It would have a tasting room for wild rice and a gift shop with T-shirts and the entire line of Gourmet Valley products. He had even gone so far as to hire an architect to draw up the plans, and he pulled out the sketches to show me. The Old Rice Mill resembled a Moorish palace crossed with a sand castle.

  In 1986, that banner year, Zambello had believed that construction on the mill might soon begin, but he knew now that he would have to wait. He would have to be patient, as well, yet he was not without hope. He was in California, after all, where the transformations were always imminent and continuous and many a left-field scheme had turned to gold.

  THE CHINESE WERE DISAPPEARING FROM MARYSVILLE, but new immigrant groups continued settling in the Sacramento Valley to take their place. Sikhs from the Punjab were among them. On Bogue Road one afternoon, I had to blink when in the midst of tract houses I passed a blue-and-white temple with minarets. It had the effect on me of seeing a mosque in Levit
town. Christmas lights were strung about it, as though every day brought a reason to celebrate.

  The head priest at the temple was called “Bengal,” or so I heard his name when we talked on the phone. Bengal’s English was heavily accented and hard to decipher. He agreed that I could visit the next day, but he neglected to tell me where to meet him, so I wandered about peering through doors until I came to one that opened onto a glossily waxed corridor. Some old men were sitting on the floor of a room at the end of it and drinking tea.

  Bengal stood out from the others. He was still young. He had an intelligent face and eyes that burned. He wore a gold-orange turban and a silk pajama suit. He looked regal. Some kernels from a Chico-san rice cake were clinging to his scraggly, black beard, but he paid no attention and comported himself with great dignity. He had the proud, stiff-spined strut of a British colonial officer and paced a few steps before putting his hand softly in mine by way of greeting.

  An old man fetched me a cup of tea. It was rich and sweet, thickened with condensed milk, and I drank it in throaty gulps, following the example of the elders.

  “That is how we do it!” Bengal said. His voice was both musical and exclamatory. He smiled brilliantly, as if the sight of me, a visitor from another planet, would never fail to delight him.

  Sikhs had been migrating to such valley towns as Yuba City and Nicolaus for many years, Bengal told me, fleeing from the bitter turmoil of their homeland. They were often farmers, so they farmed in California, but poets and novelists were among them, too, as were turbaned gas station owners and proprietors of 7-Elevens.

  Sikhism was known as a tolerant religion, I learned. Its founder, Gurū Nānak, was said to have lived first from 1469 to 1539, then until 1708 reincarnated as ten different gurus. His Alphabet of Teachings had a finely wrought humility. It taught that faith and contentment were the food of Angel-Beings, and that the world was a passing vanity. Sikhs didn’t fast or believe in penances, and they didn’t worship images, statues, or idols.