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

by Lisa See

  At Yokohama and Tokyo, most passengers contented themselves by staying on the ship and looking across the rain-swept pier to where Japanese ran to and fro, their heads protected by paper umbrellas, the clack-clack of their wooden sandals muted by the persistent deluge. The See boys ogled the scantily clad Japanese women who, from barges up against the Nanking, passed baskets of coal hand to hand up long ladders and into its belly. Their bodies—draped in only a few swatches of cotton—were streaked black and white with coal dust and rivulets of warm rain. But prurient interests had their time and place, and Fong See had other ideas for his sons. While Ticie took the younger children on sightseeing excursions through pelting rain, Fong See insisted that Ming and Ray accompany him on social calls to local antique dealers to buy lac-querware, bronzes, and porcelains.

  One merchant taught the boys what to look for in Imari pieces. “Do you see this color?” he asked. “You want to find the deepest cobalt blue or the deepest iron red. Look at the detail. Tell me what you see.”

  And Ming answered promptly, “It is a pattern based on woven brocade.”

  Fong See praised his son for the correct answer. He was pleased at how quickly they learned to recognize the differences between the Satsuma ware of the last century and the cheaper product made for curios. During the short layover, they bought goods worth thousands of dollars. Then they were back aboard the ship, pushing on toward China.

  As the Nanking neared the coast of China, a shadowy shape flying past the railing, followed by a scream and a splash swept away by the ocean breeze, signaled to the crew that someone had fallen or jumped overboard. From first class down to steerage, the call went out in Chinese and English, “Man overboard! Man overboard!” Parents quickly checked on their children. Mr. and Mrs. Leong located Ed and Gilbert, Elmer and little Margie. Mr. and Mrs. See spotted Ming and Ray and Eddy on deck. Sissee, naturally, was at her mother’s side. Bennie, however, was nowhere to be found. At Fong See’s insistence, the captain piloted the ship in narrowing, then widening, circles through the churning water. First- and second-class passengers and all available crew members gaped over the sides of the ship, hoping to catch a glimpse of the boy, while the gamblers on the third-class deck seemed sullen and unperturbed. Ticie grew increasingly worried. Then, as the sun dropped behind the horizon, Bennie emerged groggily from a nap. He had dozed off in his own berth, but no one had thought to look for him there. The captain immediately called off the search, turned the ship around, and got back on course.

  “Where have you been?” Ticie scolded. “We’ve been frightened to death.”

  “You a bad boy,” his father chastised. “Put you in garbage can.”

  Even more reprehensible than being just absentminded and inconsiderate to the family, Bennie was accused of making everyone sick. “We’ve been going in circles—up and down through the waves,” Ticie said. “Everyone has had to visit the doctor. This is your fault and yours alone.”

  The family’s first flush of anger soon turned to the merciless teasing that would continue for a lifetime. How he’d slept through the shouts. How he’d slept through the grinding of the engine as it throbbed through the swells. How he’d made everyone seasick.

  By journey’s end, the gamblers provided a solution to the mystery: One of their party had lost everything—all his money earned from his long years on the Gold Mountain. He could not live with the loss of face. Everyone agreed he had followed the only course open to him.

  At long last, the Nanking sailed up the Whangpoo, anchored, and waited for the tenders to ferry passengers to the Bund of Shanghai. For now, this was just a port visit. Months later the family would make Shanghai a major stop during their travels. But as the Sees gathered to look out at the western-style buildings that lined the Bund, the country enveloped them with its scents: the coal smoke; the cooking odors of garlic, ginger, and five-spice; the underlying stench of rotting fish.

  For Fong See, this wasn’t just a pleasure cruise. Nothing for him was ever that simple. Duty, pride, and business all played important roles in his schemes. As for duty, during Fong See’s years away from the village, his father, Fong Dun Shung, had died, as well as his sister, Lin, his first wife, Yong, and his older brothers. They were buried on hilltops not far from Dimtao. Though Fong See lived thousands of miles away, all the proper burial traditions had been carried out to his specifications. As they lay dying, each was placed on a pallet by the door so that his or her spirit might find free air. A piece of paper had been placed over each of their faces so that they couldn’t count the roof tiles, cursing the family always to live in a small house. From America, Fong See had enlisted afeng shui man to test the wind and water signs for burial sites. If all signs were auspicious, then the dead would be able to use these cosmic currents to benefit the living. Tables were set with food for the dead and other spirits. Firecrackers, gongs, and cymbals hurried the spirits along their processionals. Neighbors had been prevailed upon to make buildings, clothes, and people (especially servants) from bamboo and paper. Others cut brown paper into “road money,” which was thrown into the air along the paths of the processions to purchase the right-of-way from evil spirits. All these artifacts of worldly life were burned at the graves so that the dead would have plenty in the afterlife.

  Although all of the ceremonies had been properly attended to, Fong See knew that they had missed one key presence. That he had not been in Dimtao for the funerals of his first wife and father disturbed him. Now Shue-ying, his mother, was ill and not expected to survive another winter. Filial responsibility demanded that he pay his respects. Custom dictated that he present his children to their grandmother; that his wife show gratitude to her mother-in-law. He had been absent for the others, but he couldn’t allow himself to neglect his mother. She had provided for him during the desperate years after his father went to work on the railroad.

  As for pride, this trip gave Fong See the opportunity to show the people of Dimtao what a big man he had become. He was their benefactor. They owed him tribute.

  Business required that he take this time to train Ming and Ray in the intricacies of selecting genuine antiques from fakes, or an interesting piece of folk art from an obvious tourist trifle. He would show them by example how to distinguish a cheat from a trustworthy opponent in the fine art of bargaining.

  Ticie let her mind drift back to her last trip to China, nineteen years before. Then, China and the Chinese had still been foreign and new to her. Now she felt that she was—like the sojourners in steerage—going back to her own home country. Except for special American holidays, she rarely thought of herself as Caucasian anymore. She was Chinese, like her husband and her children. She was part of their world now. Yet something must have been troubling her, for she traveled with her own cache of twenty-dollar gold pieces, hidden away from her husband’s watchful eyes.

  Each of the See boys—Ming and Ray already young men, Bennie and Eddy still children—pondered what this trip would hold for them. Will I find riches? Will I find a beautiful girl to marry? Will I have fun? Will I be lost and forgotten? All of them wondered if they would be accepted. In America they were not Americans; in Chinatown they were not Chinese. What would they be in China?

  Eddy remembered his friend Eddie Lee’s story of going back to his home village to attend an uncle’s wedding. “Every family had a water buffalo, a pig for sure,” Eddie had recalled as the two boys sat on crates in the alley behind the store. “Every time I went outside, my cousins picked up dried manure and threw it at me. When it hit, that dung scattered like sawdust.” The boys had called him names. He was full Chinese, no half-breed, and still they taunted him with the familiar epithets: “foreign devil,” “white ghost.”

  Eddie Lee went back to his auntie’s house to sort through the soap and the boxes of dried fruit given to him as farewell gifts before he left for China. Rifling through his belongings, he found some raisins in a shallow wooden box. He took the box outside, pried open the lid, and offered its content
s to the bullies. “In five seconds, every raisin was gone. From then on, they were all my friends. They showed me where to steal sweet potatoes.” Then Eddie explained the difference between orange sweet potatoes—how to pick them, start a fire with kindling, and cook them in the smoldering ashes—and the red-skinned sweet potato with the snow white meat that you could eat raw. “Boy, they were good,” Eddie had said, but then he was Chinese and always said he had a Chinese stomach.

  Now, looking out across the water to the Bund, Eddy, like his brothers and sister, considered that his own reception in the home village of his father, the home village of his ancestors, might be as chilly as those he’d sometimes encountered in Chinatown.

  Sissee, her ringlets falling down her back, worried. If one of them was kidnapped, she would be the likely choice. Her skin was pale, her countenance sweet and innocent, her father rich. More important, kidnappers would view her as an American, and Americans—the world knew—valued their daughters. They would smell that she was lo fan. These thoughts were soon overcome by Sissee’s curiosity as she listened to a strange music. She moved closer to her mother and whispered, “What is that song? What is that singing?”

  “It is the sound of the Orient,” Ticie answered. It was the voices of thousands of Chinese, as they spoke their native language, floating through the air to fill the hearts of her children.

  After a brief rest in Hong Kong, the family traveled to the teeming city of Canton, then were carried a day’s journey west by sedan chair to the home village. Dimtao was still modest—with no electricity, no running water, no glass windows. In recent years the people of Dimtao had built a twenty-foot brick wall around the village to protect themselves from the ravages of warlords, marauders, and bandits. (Over the last few years a million peasants had been conscripted into China’s army. By the time their duty to their country was over, many had lost their ricefields, and they became ruffians, raiding villages, stealing pigs and chickens, and kidnapping the sons of wealthy landowners.) Now villagers entered Dimtao through specially guarded watchtowers. Still, no direct route led to the village; travelers had to know the right set of raised paths to follow.

  The See family’s entrance into Dimtao produced an effect similar to a circus arriving in a small American town. There were nine sedan chairs—one for each person in the family and another two for the interpreters that Fong See had hired to translate for his wife and children. (He would hire many others as he traveled up the China coast, and later inland to Peking and the Great Wall. His Cantonese, by this time, was only passing. His Mandarin was nil. He himself would need interpreters for every place he went in China except for this one small county.) The sedan chairs for the younger children each had two bearers. The adults had a total of six bearers apiece—four to carry them, two more to switch off when they got tired. In addition, Fong See had employed extra coolies to transport luggage, gifts for the people of Dimtao, and any merchandise he purchased along the way.

  While many old-timers could remember back to the time, almost two decades before, when Fong See, his wife, and two infant sons had made their first trip back to the village, most of the people of Dimtao had never seen a Caucasian before. As Ticie stepped down from her chair, the villagers crowded around her. They were intrigued, fascinated. Before them stood a woman with pale white skin and hair that seemed aflame when caught in the sun’s rays. And all of them—even Fong See—had the smell of foreigners on them. Eddy, overexuberant, jumped down from his sedan chair, raced around, climbed up on a low railing by a pigpen, held up his arms, and declared, “I’m the king.” When the interpreters relayed this to the curious crowd, they shook their heads. This boy was the king? King of what? They snickered behind their hands, careful not to show their teeth.

  Even from his home on a distant continent, Fong See functioned as the headman of the village. He owned one hundred mou, approximately twelve American acres. He had a direct effect on almost all of the villagers’ lives. Thanks to Fong See, children’s stomachs would no longer bloat, and old women would no longer die from want of a bowl of rice. A few fortunate sons worked for Fong See back in Los Angeles, while the less adept members of his clan toiled in Dimtao’s ricefields, wading through the paddies, planting seedlings, pulling weeds, guaranteeing a good harvest. Others worked the vegetable patches. The shoulders and backs of these farmers and their wives were bent from years of carrying buckets hung from a pole slung across their shoulders coolie-style to bring water to the rows upon rows of fresh green sprouts. At night these families returned to houses owned by Fong See. His wealth and power were greater than any they had ever seen. The villagers relied on him for their survival. Now they gathered around Fong See, knowing he would have brought gifts for them all.

  He handed out lai see to the village children. To family members he brought special gifts. Leong-shee, Uncle’s wife, exclaimed over a gold coin and a lacquer box concealing a bottle of perfume. Kuen, her five-year-old son, received a little boat with a propeller. He had never before seen a toy like this, and Eddy, with his usual enthusiasm, showed his cousin how to wind the rubber band and set the boat on a wobbly course through a shallow water puddle.

  With gifts in hand, everyone followed closely as this well-dressed parade made its way down a narrow alley toward where Shue-ying was waiting in the house she had prepared for them. The dull gray brick had been whitewashed. Earthenware pots planted with miniature tangerine trees and blooming flowers had been festooned with red ribbons and set about her small courtyard. According to her son’s instructions, impromptu mattresses had been made from hay stuffed into loose cloth bundles and laid across the rough wooden planks that ordinarily made up the beds. Lacquered wood pillows had been bought in nearby Fatsan. Each bed had been hung with mosquito netting. “Honey buckets” had been placed under the beds on the assumption that the children would be too western to run out along the raised paths between the rice paddies and do their business.

  Under Shue-ying’s watchful eyes, the servants had thoroughly cleaned the inside water system that ran from the roof to the outdoor kitchen area. One servant had gone for fresh water, carrying each bucket up to the rooftop storage tank, while another had cleaned each of the bamboo pipes that led back down to the kitchen. New gravel had been purchased and stuffed into each cleaned pipe. The water would filter through several levels of bamboo and gravel, and by the time it reached the kitchen holding pot, it would be clean. But even with these efforts, these foreigners—her son included—would not have the stomach strength to take the water straight. Everything would have to be boiled.

  When they arrived at the house, there were no hugs, no kisses. Shue-ying’s grandchildren saw her as she was—a frail Chinese woman nearing her nineties. She was not precious to them; they seemed strangers to her. Sissee and Eddy watched—not with pangs of jealousy, for they had never known what it was like to have a grandparent, but with a kind of detached interest—as she took her gifts of tinned cakes and cookies, stashed them on a high shelf in her room, and assured her grandson Kuen that, if he were a good boy, she would give him a treat.

  Later that first afternoon, Fong See—sitting at a low table set with a pot of tea and porcelain dishes of sweetmeats—received villagers who had complaints. A cousin had hoarded rice; a second cousin argued that his family had not been paid the proper bride-price for his only daughter; someone else requested a better house. Another cousin, Fong Suey Ming, pointed out that most villagers had no capital to start their own farms, and that sending relief funds—as Fong See had done so generously during famine years—could not solve the basic problem. Suey Ming suggested that his honorable Gold Mountain cousin make a large donation to help the villagers start a real farming business. To everyone’s surprise, Fong See promised to provide ten thousand American dollars.

  That evening, Fong See hosted a banquet for the entire village. Each dish was filled with special ingredients that promised to bring long life, prosperity, and many sons. Fong See walked out among the tables, handi
ng out more lai see to the children, the single girls of marriageable age, and a few relatives deserving of special attention and recognition. As Fong See passed from table to table, one of the old-timers spoke up. “Is our Gold Mountain See not like the woodcutter of legend?” A few mumbled their agreement and settled in for a postprandial story.

  “The parents of the woodcutter were poor, and came from as poor a village as our Dimtao,” the old-timer began. “The woodcutter learned to love the forest, and each morning as he worked there, he wondered if he could do something for his parents. One day he heard the rushing of a waterfall. As he drank from it, he discovered that it ran with sweet wine. He filled his gourd and took it back to his father. Just as in our village, news traveled quickly. The next day when the woodcutter went to the forest, he found his neighbors at the waterfall. Oh, how angry they were, for they found only water in the glistening depths. The neighbors were so jealous that they threw the woodcutter into the waterfall, leaving him there to drown. In despair, he filled his gourd with the water and went home to his father. Again the gourd was filled with wine. You see, many can go to the source, but only our Gold Mountain See can get the wine.”

  As the reunion ended, the evening turned dark and evil. Word passed that a spy in the village had informed local kidnappers of the whereabouts of the children. Fong See knew that he could not allow his family to stay in the village for any length of time. Even this one night posed many hazards. The children were quickly gathered up and locked into a stifling one-room house with no windows. Guards were hired and posted around the perimeter. Fong See questioned villagers to no avail.