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

by Lisa See

  By the late 1870s, Fong See officially ran his father’s Kwong Tsui Chang Company, which now stood at 609 K Street between Sixth and Seventh. When he moved out of Chinatown, he changed the name of the store to the Curiosity Bazaar. His neighbors were Mr. Luce, a marble cutter and tombstone maker, T. L. Acock, who made his living in real estate, and R. S. Davis, a dry-goods merchant.

  Instead of herbs, Fong See and his brothers manufactured underwear for brothels. Fong Lai and Fong Quong had tried to continue the herb business, but they had no experience. Their father had never taught them how to choose ingredients or brew tonics, or how to match herbs with a patient’s symptoms. Customers had quickly found other herbalists to treat them, and the Fongs had been left with an empty storefront.

  Although they knew next to nothing about herbology, they did know about clothing manufacturing from working in clothing factories themselves. Lai and Quong had worked first as apprentices at six dollars a month, then as journeymen at twenty dollars a month. Once they had learned enough, they felt ready to open their own factory. Although Fong Lai and Fong Quong had the experience, they worked for their younger brother, who acted as the front man and manager of the Curiosity Bazaar. It was not the Chinese way, in which age was revered, but the American way, in which the smartest and wiliest took charge. They were all members of the Gwing Yee Hong, the Guild of Bright-Colored Clothing, which served the needs of those who sewed shirts and ladies’ garments and undergarments.

  While his brothers and a few other men sewed in the back room, Fong See traveled up, down, and across the state, selling the factory’s merchandise to Chinese and white prostitutes. He didn’t go to San Francisco, where more than sixty women’s underwear factories kept up with the trade of both good and fallen women. Instead he went to mountain camps, railroad camps, farms along the delta, and as far south as Los Angeles. Everywhere a train stopped, there were bound to be men who wanted to satisfy their bodily desires and women who were willing to slake that lust.

  In Fong See’s father’s day, almost all the Chinese women in the state had been prostitutes. Later, when Fong See had first come to Sacramento, nine out of ten Chinese women were prostitutes. Now, as he traveled through cities and towns, he saw how they lived. They tended to reside in groups of two to six, and were kept by a man or sometimes by a madam. Only a few tried to make it on their own.

  Some were swathed in silk, satin, and lace, and lounged in beautiful houses, waiting for customers to come in and make their selection. These lucky women ate good-health meals to stimulate their desires—rice, pork, eggs, liver, and kidneys. Other, less fortunate women peered out from the barred windows of their cribs and wore the meager clothes of farm peasants. “Lookee two bits, feelee floor bits, doee six bits,” they would call out to white men in their broken English. No strong-sex meals for these women—just rice, a few slivers of vegetable, and doses of opium to assuage their loneliness. But even they made money for their owners. Seven customers a day for the lowest-grade prostitute could bring an owner $850 a year. No matter which kind they were—silk or cotton, healthy or diseased—all prostitutes needed Fong See’s stock.

  He carried with him lacy drawers split at the crotch like a baby’s pants in his home village—only these were made of fine China silk and edged in ribbon and lace. “No need to undress completely,” he would say as he laid out his wares. “You open your legs, the man goes in, he comes out, it’s all done. No need to take off all clothes. The man likes to see his prize wrapped like a present. White, lacy, beautiful, no matter how many men you have today. You buy extra pairs, your private parts always look clean and new.” For the lower-class prostitutes he brought ribbon-edged muslin underwear and camisoles.

  Once he sold his wares, he returned to the factory. Besides his brothers, the men who worked for him were mostly from the Chungshan district near Macao, and were known for their dexterity with a needle. As true craftsmen they earned more than the customary dollar a day. His workers might make two or three dollars a day for twenty-two to thirty weeks of work, averaging $364 a year—not as much as the tailors and seamstresses in the Big City, or as much as white workers in other factories. But here they had companionship, craft, and the knowledge that they were working for a Chinese, not a foreign devil.

  Fong See worked hard to be independent. He didn’t want to be a laborer. He didn’t want to be at another man’s mercy—not a white man, not a Chinese man. He wanted to build an empire. He wanted to have men work for him, be beholden to him, look up to him. He felt that in some ways this was already happening. He hired extra men, knowing that as soon as they had honed their skills and earned enough money, they—like Fong See’s older brothers—would leave to open their own small factories. There was always turnover, but the men were cheap and the factory kept going.

  Fong See sold his goods and brought back a profit—enough to provide them all with food, lodging, entertainment, and money to send back home to wives and mothers. He was the one who went next door to Israel Luce, the tombstone cutter, to pay the rent. His brothers couldn’t do it; they didn’t have enough wits, courage, or English.

  Fong See learned not only how to sell but how to stand up to those foreign devils who wished him out of the country. “He took it from me by violence.” “He cheated me out of my wages.” “They were lying in ambush.” “The immigration will soon be stopped.” He practiced these phrases as much as he practiced “Buy one dozen, get one pair free.” Fong See was brave; he wasn’t afraid to travel where he wasn’t wanted, he wasn’t afraid to talk to white or Chinese women. They liked him, often offering to trade their wares for his.

  On this day, as on every day, the men in the factory sat around a large table, concentrating on their needlework. Bolts of ribbon and lace and stacks of ladies’ undergarments in various states of completion lay about in haphazard piles. The men meticulously stitched tucks and pleats into the thin fabric, which then fanned out into voluminous bloomers. Fong See had discovered that neither the prostitutes nor their customers were all that interested in the embroidery. They preferred the flamboyant. The more tucks, the more pleats, the more ruffles, the better.

  The silk had been his idea. He’d remembered it from his years in Canton, and had gone to Charles Solomon to learn how to navigate the treacherous waters of importing. Mr. Solomon ran a Japanese bazaar and had also encouraged Fong See to go into curios—baskets, fans, and cheap porcelains. For now, he stuck with underwear. The importing costs had been slight, but his profits had jumped in ways he couldn’t have imagined. The American girls especially loved the new merchandise, and it made him think. Most of his countrymen imported things like ginseng, bamboo shoots, and soy sauce—items that made for a civilized life on foreign soil—but no one had yet found the Chinese product that Americans would buy. His success with China silk proved there was a market, but he needed something with broader appeal, something that he could buy cheap in China and sell for more in the United States. Perhaps Mr. Solomon was right after all.

  Along one wall of the factory, two hired men pumped at sewing-machine pedals with their bare, hardened feet. As usual, the men who ran the machines and the men who did the handwork kept up a continuous stream of conversation about the exclusion law that the white men were planning in Washington.

  “They say that what we have suffered is only the beginning,” said Fong Quong.

  “Since we have been here, they have cut our freedom,” added Fong Lai. “They have tried to make our lives even worse than those we suffered in our home villages.”

  The men grunted their acquiescence. Every day it got worse in Sacramento. White men, taking advantage of railroad price wars, streamed into the state like rice grains running out of a punctured sack. These men were always angry. They tripped, slapped, beat, and spat on Chinamen. The foreign devils threw eggs and tomatoes. They took their filthy clothes to the Chinese to be cleaned and, when they came back for them, refused to pay, sometimes taking a day’s work and throwing it on the ground so tha
t a hapless laundryman would have to begin all over again. These white men pulled queues, jerking a man’s head back till he fell on the ground. Oh, how they laughed.

  The Chinese had endured many hardships since coming to the Gold Mountain. Now they were treated worse than the village dogs whose purpose in life was to eat the shit and lap the piss that fell from a baby with split pants. They had thought they had eaten bitterness in the past, but it was sweet cake compared to what they now endured silently and with no inkling of revolt. They swallowed their anger. They learned to bai hoi—stand aside, avoid conflict.

  White-demon newsboys on streetcorners still called out their news. They shouted out when Black Bart robbed another stagecoach. They hooted out the exploits of the good Earp brothers and the evil James brothers. But recently their hollering was of a different sort. As they held their newspapers aloft, Fong See saw drawings of Chinese men with their features exaggerated—queues becoming poisonous snakes, beautiful eyes transformed into elongated deformities, teeth rendered as blood-sucking fangs. At night, when he went for noodles, he sat with men who read aloud from the American newspapers in which his countrymen were described as heathens and barbarians—savage, lustful, impure, diseased.

  The threat to “racial purity” seemed to inflame white Americans most of all. “Were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people,” said John F. Miller, a speaker at the state’s constitutional convention, “it would be [with] the lowest, most vile and degraded of our race, and the result of that amalgamation would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.” Soon afterward, California enacted legislation to prohibit the issuance of a marriage license between a white person and a “negro, mulatto or Mongolian.”

  But this was just one of many unfair laws enacted in the past decade. A fifteen-dollar tax every three months was levied on laundrymen who carried their livelihoods on poles; the tax was only two dollars every quarter for those prosperous enough to own a horse and wagon—a law that clearly favored white men and hurt the Chinese. There had been laws against firecrackers and gongs, although no one had been able to enforce these. In San Francisco, if a man was arrested, his queue would be shaved—a deep humiliation and loss of face. That same city passed a law requiring five hundred cubic feet of air per person in rooming houses, when few sojourners could afford the luxuries of either space or air. In some cities, Chinese children couldn’t attend schools with white children. The Chinese couldn’t buy land. Some laws even punished white businesses for hiring Chinese laborers.

  It seemed that whenever the Chinese began making a profit, the Caucasians took it from them by enacting laws—laws limiting the size of shrimping nets, laws forbidding ironing after dark, laws banning the importation of prostitutes, laws banning any paraphernalia connected to the lottery or even allowing Chinese to visit lotteries, laws requiring that laundries be built of brick or stone and have metal roofs, laws forbidding the hiring of Chinese for public works. The laws not only acted as a constant, niggling persecution, but denied this specific race the very things that brought most European immigrants to American shores. Although some of those laws were overturned by the Supreme Court, many were not.

  “Perhaps this is just the gossip of the old men who sit on the street-corners,” offered one of the young apprentices.

  Fong Quong snorted, then said, “I have seen many things since I came to the Gold Mountain, and I know that there is no future for us here. The railroad is finished, and every time it travels west it brings a thousand more devils. You tell me who is going to get the jobs.”

  “But what can we do?” another apprentice cried out.

  “What we have always done,” answered Quong. “We will keep working. We will continue to send money home to our wives and mothers. Most important, we will keep to ourselves.”

  “They say the Chinese must go. I am not stupid. I will go back to my home village. I will spend my days with my wife and sons.”

  “That is not for me,” said Fong Lai. “They may want us out, but I am going to stay.”

  “I agree, and I’m sending money to my home village to bring my younger brother before the law is passed. If you don’t get in now, you never will.”

  “I’m sending for my good-for-nothing son,” said another worker. “Perhaps here he will learn the meaning of hard work.”

  The winds of politics and money had shifted the sands of the Chinese immigrant’s life. Certainly the depression of the 1870s, in which 30 percent of the people of California lost their jobs, had contributed greatly to the antagonism between Caucasians and Chinese. A job was a job, and whites, who represented a 90-percent majority, felt they were entitled to it first. But there were other factors as well. Gold production had dropped to one-third of what it was in 1869. The tourist trade to the state had diminished as visitors opted instead to travel to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Then Mother Nature conspired against everyone, especially the Chinese. During the winter of 1876–77, rainfall was one-quarter the normal amount of the previous twenty-five years; this had dire effects on the wheat, cattle, and citrus industries. Chinese who worked on ranches and farms lost their jobs; later they were replaced by white laborers.

  With the state in turmoil, politicians stepped in—not to help, but to take advantage for their own personal gain. The “Chinese issue”—beginning with Governor Stanford, before he realized the money he would make from the Chinese on his railroad—had been a sure-fire winner in elections. The issue became so hot that even on the national level “the Chinese question” could make or break a politician. In the 1876 presidential election, swing votes were tied to the Chinese exclusion issue. Rutherford Hayes endorsed exclusion and won the election. Once in office, he reiterated his stance, saying the “present Chinese invasion” was “pernicious and should be discouraged. Our experience in dealing with weaker races—the Negroes and Indians … is not encouraging…. I would consider with favor any suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores.” In the next election, James Garfield carried the anti-Chinese torch into office.

  Eventually, all anti-Chinese legislation would be enacted on the eve of national elections. To get the labor vote, a candidate had to be anti-Chinese. No one was more so than Denis Kearney, the president of the Workingmen’s Party, who took to speaking in vacant city lots, where he began and ended each speech with the proclamation, “The Chinese must go! They are stealing our jobs.” In the crowds that came to hear him, men carried placards that read WE WILL NOT GIVE UP OUR COUNTRY TO THE CHINESE, and OUR RIGHTS WE WILL MAINTAIN, and WHITE LABOR MUST TRIUMPH.

  In Congress, the arguments for exclusion were purely racist. Many of them were the same ones that had been used against the Irish decades earlier. The Chinese took jobs from “real” Americans. The Chinese were dirty, drank too much, and lived on too little money. They didn’t spend their money in this country, preferring to save it and send it home. The Chinese worshiped their ancestors; wasn’t that something like worshiping an idol? They worked too cheaply, and when they were out of work—unlike Americans—they became hoodlums. The Chinese carried disease; they were clannish; when they died they sent their bones back to China, as if American soil wasn’t good enough for them. In other words, the Chinese were totally unassimilable.

  Some of this rhetoric was not only inflammatory but downright false. Accusations that the Chinese spread “loathsome diseases,” for example, were a dime a dozen. When the Grass Valley National wrote that any Chinatown in California was “but a synonym for a row of brothels, a collection of stinks, and the dwelling places of thieves and prostitutes,” it failed to note that the same was true of just about any California town at that time. Visiting brothels, gambling, and smoking opium were activities common to Chinese and whites of all economic levels. The Chinese did send their meager earnings back to China, but the fact that American China traders made millions in the opium trade each year, and sent their money back to their h
omes in Boston and San Francisco, aroused virtually no criticism.

  Ironically, many of the attributes that Americans found distasteful about the Chinese were the very things the Chinese found equally repellent in Caucasians. The fan gway spoke an unintelligible language. They had peculiar vices. They didn’t understand the ways of the universe. Their religious beliefs and practices were incomprehensible. They followed a strange calendar. Additionally, whites didn’t welcome the New Year properly by cleaning the house, preparing foods to bring good luck in the coming months, settling old debts, or honoring their ancestors. They had absolutely no sense of family. In sum, Caucasians were barbarians and there seemed to be an unending supply of them perfectly willing to take the jobs that the Chinese had fought so hard to develop.

  The Exclusion Act of 1882 was devastating. Under this law, Chinese laborers wouldn’t be allowed to enter the United States for ten years. The wives of current resident laborers were also barred from entry. All Chinese needed to be registered and carry their residency papers at all times. Finally, they were declared totally ineligible for citizenship. (This clause alone allowed the United States to join Nazi Germany and South Africa as the only nations ever to withhold naturalization on purely racial grounds.) Only Chinese who were teachers, merchants, students, tourists, and diplomats would still be permitted entry.