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

by Lisa See

  IMMIGRATION

  1902–13

  THE See family arrived in San Francisco in late 1902. Fong See stood out from the mass of Chinese immigrants; his wife was a white woman, and their children were American citizens. This, combined with the family’s obvious wealth, meant that their interrogations were perfunctory. Within hours the family was processed and on its way to Los Angeles. Once again they settled into the store on Main Street, where each day new merchandise arrived from the Far East. Fong See’s workers occupied themselves prying open crates and removing excelsior and rice-scrap wrappings to reveal new surprises. With so much stock on hand, Fong See began to think of ways to expand to meet the needs of an ever-changing and growing city.

  Downtown Los Angeles may have still been rough-and-tumble, but all around the outskirts, residents were beginning to bask in their wondrous luck. Contented farmers watched as heavy bunches of grapes strained at the vines. Row after row of lemon, lime, and the ubiquitous orange trees filled the air with their intoxicating scents, and served as the most eloquent advertisement for Southern California. The land was so rich, it was said, that farmers grew cabbages as large as toddlers and watermelons heavier than men.

  At the seashore, bathing beauties basked in long woolen costumes. To the east lay the dreamy town of Pasadena, where wealthy easterners came to winter. They loved to have fun. They formed their own riding club and rode to hounds. For New Year’s, they raided each other’s yards and thrashed through the Arroyo, where they swooped up armfuls of roses, geraniums, poinsettias, bougainvillaea, pampas grass plumes, and the feathery branches of the California pepper tree. They decorated every carriage, ranch wagon, buggy, and tallyho in garlands, wreaths, bunting and a profusion of flowers for the annual New Year’s Day parade.

  Fong See and Ticie saw Pasadena as the logical place for another branch of the F. Suie One Company. The town’s citizens had the three things that the Sees needed to be successful. They were rich. They were sophisticated. And, since most of them had come from the East, they weren’t leery of doing business with a Chinese.

  In December 1903, just two months after the birth of their third son, Bennie (Ming Loy), the Sees opened a store in Pasadena, on South Raymond Avenue across from the Green Hotel. At first, customers may have been set at ease by Ticie’s white, matronly presence. As time went on, they came back to see Fong See. To spend an afternoon with him was an adventure.

  With three children, two stores, and an active auction business on the side, Fong See required more help. On January 3, 1904, Fong Yun and his older brother Quong arrived in San Francisco Bay on the Coptic. Unlike Fong See and his family, the brothers were detained and treated as common immigrants—just two members of a nameless “horde” of Chinese that the United States was determined to keep out. The inspectors made thorough physical examinations of both men, matching Quong to his original exit file and noting that Fong Yun had a small mole on his forehead, small pockmarks on his neck, and a large amount of hair on his legs.

  Two days later, Yun’s interrogation began aboard ship. Yun, through an interpreter, described his education, how his father had bought stock for him in the F. Suie One Company when he was just a boy, and how he had worked in Hong Kong in a business, the Kwong Tsui Chang, that was “virtually” his. After just thirty-four questions, Inspector Ward Thompson wrote, “I have the honor to report that this applicant in no way controverts the statements set forth in his certificate and that his appearance and conduct are consistent with his claims.”

  Things didn’t go as smoothly for Fong Quong, who, like Fong See, arrived with the status of “returning merchant.” Over the next several weeks, immigration officials would use money, intimidation, and time to elicit the information they wanted. Quong’s first interview also took place aboard the Coptic before Inspector J. Lynch, interpreter H. Eca Da Silva, and a stenographer. Fong Quong was as much of a human being—with desires, dreams, and weaknesses—as the men who sat across from him, yet they toyed with his future as though they were gods on Mount Olympus.

  Inspector Lynch was suspicious from the start. He began with easy questions—What is your name? How old are you? Where were you born?—then quickly progressed to Quong’s alleged business interests in this country, querying him on his status at the Suie On firm in Sacramento.

  “In what Chinese year did you first become a member of that firm?”

  “I think it was my seventeenth year,” Quong answered nervously.

  “How much stock is carried in your Los Angeles store?”

  Fong Quong, who had never been to Los Angeles, answered, “About twelve thousand dollars.”

  “Did your firm manufacture anything at the Sacramento store before you went to China?”

  “No,” he lied.

  “Do you know if they manufacture anything in Los Angeles?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it a fact that your firm manufactured ladies’ underwear in your store in Sacramento?”

  “I misunderstood,” Quong said. “We employ people to do the work on the underwear. The partners do not take a hand in it.”

  Inspector Lynch was far from satisfied. He asked Quong to give the names of “white men” who could vouch for him. Quong—frightened and humiliated—dredged through his memory and came up with the names of Luce, Acock, and Davis. After giving this information, Quong was transferred to the dilapidated warehouse on the Pacific Mail steamship line’s wharf, which had been turned into a processing station after Exclusion. Every morning Fong Quong awoke to increasing feelings of fear, frustration, and uncertainty. But he could only wait.

  A week later, Mr. Lynch wrote to Charles Mehan, the Chinese Inspector in Charge, that he had traveled to Sacramento and personally examined the white witnesses, except for Mr. Luce, who had died some three years before. Mr. Lynch deemed these interviews “worthless.” Mr. Mehan, in turn, wrote Mr. Putnam, the Los Angeles Chinese Inspector in Charge, to “please cause an investigation to be made in the case.”

  On January 16, the very day that Yun arrived in Los Angeles, Fong See was sworn in to testify in the matter of Quong. Fong See described his own past—his birth, the housework and peddling he had done in Sacramento, the partners in his firm, the location of each of his stores. At this last bit, Inspector Putnam seemed to brighten.

  “Have you an interest in any other store?” he asked smoothly.

  “Yes, I got one at Pasadena just opened,” Fong See responded.

  “Didn’t you have a store last summer on Fourth Street in this city?”

  “Yes, I had one there where I auctioned goods every day.”

  “Didn’t you have a store in Long Beach last summer?”

  “Yes.”

  Finally, Mr. Putnam got to the crux of the matter. “What white men are there who know Fong Quong owned an interest in the firm of Suie On while at Sacramento?”

  “That is a long time ago. The old fellows nearly all died, and I don’t know,” Fong See shrugged.

  Putnam queried Fong See on the dry goods man, Mr. Davis, the tombstone man, Mr. Luce, and finally Mr. Acock. “What is his business?”

  Even Fong See was unnerved by this relentless questioning about people whom he hadn’t seen in six years. “I don’t know if he did any business at all,” Fong See answered, his English faltering. “Don’t know what he did, but sometimes real estate, and something else. I did not see enough; he old man.”

  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.