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

by Lisa See

  After a restless and claustrophobic night, the family left Dimtao as quickly as they had arrived, but with far less fanfare. For the first and only time on this trip, they took the train. Kuen, Uncle’s son, traveled with them. Fong See thought Kuen could entertain Sissee and Eddy in the weeks to come.

  For Kuen, the following weeks in Canton were both amazing and bewildering. No longer did Kuen have to attend school, bowing to his teacher each morning and afternoon. No longer did he have to memorize the four books of Confucius or the classics of the great poets. No longer did he have to study from the traditional Chinese primer, the Trimetrical Classic, or, as it was more widely known, Learning by Three Sounds. No longer did he play on the backs of the village water buffalo. No longer did Kuen join his brothers and other boys of Dimtao as they mounted an army and spent afternoons in the ricefields fighting the boys from neighboring villages.

  Kuen had never been outside Dimtao except to make the annual New Year’s visit to the graves of his ancestors. As a result, Canton was far more frightening to him than to his foreign-born cousins. Kuen marveled at the wall twenty feet thick and close to forty feet high which protected Canton. He was astonished by a pagoda five stories high, the Temple of Five Hundred Gods, and the eight-hundred-year-old water clock. He was tantalized by the idea of the Island of Shameen with its lovely promenade shaded by banyan and camphor trees, but none of them was allowed to enjoy this, since only Caucasians were permitted on the island.

  Kuen’s uncle, unable to find a hotel or inn in Canton suitable for his western family, had rented a mansion from a wealthy mandarin. It was a fine place, a regular Chinese compound with a large garden, a series of interior courtyards, a private temple for meditation, and many, many rooms. Kuen’s uncle said he wanted Ticie and the children to feel comfortable, and he made the house as European, as Caucasian, as he could. He commissioned a craftsman to make chamber pots topped with western-style toilet lids, which were then placed in a special room where they were lined up according to the size and age of each person. The bedrooms came with their own carved beds enclosed like small rooms by panels of carved teak and painted glass.

  All of this was as unfathomable to Kuen as the way his ghost relatives spent their time. During the day, Auntie Ticie and Sissee might stroll past immense godowns, the warehouses where exports such as tea, silk, and cassia were stored to be shipped out of the country, and imports such as cotton, wool, opium, and kerosene were stored upon their arrival. Fong See and the older boys went to the bazaars where quaint curios and native articles of every kind might be bargained for and obtained. Jade sellers hawked decorative ornaments in varying shades of stone, in varying quality, and in prices from a few cents to several thousand U.S. dollars. Other kiosks carried rare porcelains, bronzes, ivory, and teak. In the furniture stalls, Fong See bargained hard for carved pieces, some of them inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He sought out idols, knowing they always sold well in his stores.

  Kuen’s uncle—so rich, so powerful—was secretive and clever. No one knew when he would go out or where he was going. Some days Fong See appeared in the downstairs entry dressed as little more than a peasant. Even though bad people wanted to get him, they couldn’t, for Kuen’s uncle was too elusive, too tricky to wear either his western clothes or the fancy robes of a mandarin out on the streets. Just as Fong See sought out oddities in his trips to fairs and expositions, he also sought out the strange and bizarre in China. He went to pawnshops and second-hand stores and bought them out lock, stock, and barrel. From antique dealers he bought huge lots, sometimes room upon room of merchandise. He risked buying pallets filled with this and that, not quite knowing if they would also include a piece of Han, T’ang, or Sung. It didn’t really matter, he explained, because he knew he could sell it all, marking everything up at least three times its cost to him.

  Years later there would be those who wondered if, when Fong See opened his pallets back in Los Angeles, he would pull out a Sung Dynasty bowl and say to himself, “This is Sung. This is not worth only three times the amount I paid. This is worth twenty thousand dollars.” What is known is that some of the biggest collectors in the country went to Fong See, and that many of their collections ended up in museums. But Kuen comprehended little of this.

  Everyone in the village said Kuen was lucky and he tried to feel lucky. He had heard tales of prosperous landlords and rich mandarins, so he had an idea of what to expect, but Fong See and his family didn’t live according to those expectations. They didn’t keep a cook in the house. They had no servants except for an old man who maintained the grounds. The mother was beautiful, kind, and gentle. When they had first come to Canton, she went with Fong See to buy. Lately, Kuen had overheard them arguing in the courtyard when she arrived ready to join Fong See on his excursions. Kuen didn’t understand their English words, but he noticed that now she elected to stay home, sit on what everyone called the veranda, and do her sewing.

  The family treated Kuen well. He had a good time. He didn’t make trouble. He spoke only a little, letting the others do the talking. If Eddy or Sissee or one of the others said he was wrong, he agreed that he was. If they said that he didn’t play fair, he admitted it, even when he knew and they knew he was in the right. No matter what happened—even the time when his cousin Ming lifted him up by his pants and shook him like an old rag, and they both slipped on the wet stones and Kuen twisted his ankle—he did not complain.

  Most of the time Kuen played with Eddy and Sissee. Eddy liked Canton. Bennie didn’t. Like Kuen, Bennie didn’t like to venture out of the compound, and acted nervous about what he was seeing, hearing, smelling. But Eddy liked hanging out with the people who would show him things. Those people turned out to be his interpreters, his rickshaw boys, the house coolies, and his sedan-chair bearers. After much pleading, his interpreter and a rickshaw boy might take him down to the Temple of Horrors, with its great crowds of fortune-tellers, jugglers, gamblers, peddlers, beggars, and children selling peanuts and matches, much as Eddy’s father had done fifty years before.

  Encouraged by Eddy’s adventurism, his quick learning of colloquial Cantonese, and his irrepressible naughty streak, the interpreter and the kitchen coolie took him to Canton’s bawdy houses—not the high-class places where Ming and Ray might be, and not the places where a dreadful disease was nearly as certain a reward as a night’s pleasure, but places suitable for a fourteen-year-old foreign boy, where the girls were as young as he. For a few yuan, Eddy said, he could look, even touch. The girls—their faces powdered white, slashes of red painted across their lips—wore loose black coats and pants. Eddy had slipped his hand inside their jackets and run his fingers over their breasts. At least this was what he told Kuen.

  Some afternoons, Ticie asked Kuen to teach Eddy and Sissee games that he liked, so he showed his rich cousins what they could do without money or store-bought toys. He taught them how to throw up a stone, then swipe up another stone off the ground, or throw up a stone and catch it on the back of his hand. Eddy would have nothing to do with this. “A girl’s game,” Eddy said in disgust. “Jacks.” Eddy preferred the stick game called gat. Any boy would like gat—so named because the game made a gat sound. Kuen found two bricks and laid a short stick across them. He then used a longer stick to flip the shorter stick into the air. Gat. Sometimes Eddy would catch the stick, sometimes not. If he did, Kuen would then lay his long stick down on the bricks. Eddy had one chance to throw his short stick to try to knock Kuen’s stick out of position. If he did—with a resounding gat—then he won the point. Sometimes they flew kites from the roof. Kuen taught Eddy how to attach shards of glass to his kite string and use it to try to cut the other person’s string. Pretty soon, Eddy was good enough to “pirate” Kuen’s kite all the time. The younger boy never complained.

  In the afternoons, if Fong See had a visitor, tea was served accompanied by dishes of peanuts, watermelon seeds, salted plums, and preserved olives. As soon as Fong See had moved on, Eddy and Kuen snatched up the
olive and plum pits and took them outside for their ongoing game of improvised marbles. Each took a turn tossing a piece of shattered roof tile to knock the olive pits out of a circle drawn in the dust. Sometimes they used the larger plum pits to knock out the smaller olives. Each boy’s collection of pits waxed and waned with an afternoon’s win or defeat.

  Finally, Kuen’s uncle and his family once again packed their trunks and prepared for a northward journey. Kuen was sent back to the village. He tried to tell his family and friends about his adventures, about how strange it had been to see first-hand how these foreigners lived. “We don’t want to hear your bragging,” his friends said. “I don’t have time to listen to your nonsense,” his mother chided. Kuen learned to keep his memories to himself.

  Travel in China was difficult at best. Officials and the common peasantry had long fought the introduction of railroads into the country. The opposition was the result of old customs and a well-founded distrust of foreigners. Poorly educated people—cart drivers, wheelbarrow pushers, and boatmen—believed that the railroads would irritate evil spirits who would then seek revenge upon the populace. (A railroad would also deprive these common workers of their livelihoods.) The educated class, on the other hand, had discovered that when a foreign entrepreneur—from England, Germany, France, Russia, or the United States—built a road, that road was then used by that particular nation’s government to extend its power in China, to gain some new piece of territory or trade advantage. Chinese officials realized that railroads—just like paved roads—would make travel easier for missionaries and other foreigners who wanted to exploit the country. The opposition had been so great that, back in 1875, the first railroad line from Shanghai to Wusung was bought by the Chinese authorities and destroyed. By 1919, however, there had been some progress, as fifty-four railroad lines tentatively webbed across China’s great expanse.

  So, except for their hasty retreat from Dimtao, the Sees never traveled by rail. Instead they went by sedan chair, river steamer, hakka (a wooden boat for small canals), junk, sampan, horseback, or by the steamers that plied the China coast. Outside the major cities, the Sees packed their own food and bedding, and brought along their own servants. Sometimes, after a long day’s travel by sedan chair, the family would settle into a country inn furnished only with simple beds and a stove built into the wall to serve cooking and heating needs.

  Pleasant days drifted by on river steamers. The younger boys made up games. Ticie read or did needlework, encouraging Sissee to sit by her side and practice her stitches. Fong See often disembarked and walked along the shore as coolies pulled and hauled the ropes attached to the boat. Sometimes these laborers would know of a local family in dire straits, a family so poor that the landlord was about to shoo them off his land for late payment of rent or the bad quality of their crops. To these families Fong See made side trips. Did this esteemed farmer have anything he wanted to sell? Perhaps an ancestral altar for New Year’s worship? Perhaps some trinket from his honorable wife’s dowry?

  Travel by sedan chair was far more arduous. Four coolies carried Letticie’s chair, two ran behind. When any two got tired, the new ones took over, never missing a step or upsetting the rhythm of their steady dog trot. The Sees had hired the best bearers, ones who promised always to stay out of step, which reduced the risk of motion sickness for the passenger. This type of transportation necessitated that Letticie and Sissee be separated. Sissee wore a white sailor hat to keep the sun off her fair skin. Letticie constantly looked back—shifting her weight, much to the coolies’ annoyance—to check whether her daughter was still in sight. At each rest stop, Ma said, “When I see your white hat coming, I know you are safe.”

  During the next few months, Fong See fulfilled his third goal for this trip—business and the education of his sons. He and Ticie took separate approaches. Usually, Fong See focused on how to deal, while Ticie showed the boys what to look for. Just as artisans had taught Ticie how to appraise a piece of porcelain for its purity of design, she now taught her children. Ming and Ray—and, by osmosis, the younger children—learned to recognize the traditional shapes for Chinese porcelain—the ginger jar, rice bowl, and mei-ping vase.

  At a kiln specializing in celadon ware, Ticie knelt in a dusty warehouse and ran her hands over the grayish green surface of a porcelain ginger pot. “You need to establish whether a piece is real or a fake,” she explained. “Pa and I have three things that we look for when buying authentic pieces. First, the shape must never stray from the norm. If you have trouble determining this, look at the silhouette.” Here she pulled the jar out to the center of the room. “Do you see that it is narrow at the bottom and bulges only at the top third? Next, we consider the color of the glaze.”

  “Like we did with the Imari in Japan?” Ming asked.

  “Exactly,” Ticie answered. “Over time you will learn to differentiate glazes by the quality and types of minerals used this year, ten years ago, or in the last century.”

  The last criterion—the quality of the brushwork—didn’t apply as much to celadon ware as to the overglazed enamels of which Fong See was particularly fond. Still, it fell to Ticie to point out the painterly quality of the faces, landscapes, and flowers that adorned a work. “The fewer the strokes an artist uses, the more telling,” she explained when they stopped at another kiln. “When you look at these enamels—or even scrolls—think about what type of brush an artist used, the amount of paint he allowed on the brush, the angle at which he held that brush. All of these things will help you decide whether a piece is worth the asking price.”

  At this, Fong See took over, telling the children that they must buy only what they felt confident they could sell. They should also keep in mind that a business profited by appealing to a variety of customers.

  “We purchase good antiques for collectors and museums,” Ticie went on. “We buy curios and copies for tourists. Sometimes we pick up cheap imitations that we can age for people who can’t afford a real antique. We buy decorative pieces for people to put in their houses in Hancock Park and Pasadena.”

  From village to village, and city to city, the family traveled, stopping at kilns specializing in oxblood, blue-and-white, famille rose, and famille vert porcelains. They looked for scrolls, furniture, carvings, and embroideries. Ticie took special care with the embroideries, recognizing how the matrons in Hancock Park and Pasadena really did love the purely decorative. “These embroideries are popular with our customers who use them as doilies or runners on their dining tables. They like to drape the larger ones over their couches or pianos. Some use them for costumes at balls or masquerade parties.” She taught Sissee how to examine the sheen of the silk and told her the story behind the “forbidden stitch”—outlawed because young girls went blind doing the intricate needlework.

  Only occasionally did the family halt their peripatetic touring to enjoy the scenery. In Soochow, the family found the lotus in bloom and a lake lying still with hardly a ripple. These quiet and beautiful surroundings offered a respite from the hubbub of Canton. They traveled onward to Nanking, the old southern capital, to see the tomb of the “beggar king,” the founder of the Ming Dynasty. Weeds grew with abandon, giving the place a desolate air, but the boys were especially excited to be here, for each of them carried the name of Ming in their Chinese given names. They found no other tourists, just a few barren women who made the pilgrimage to the tomb to toss coins onto the backs of the stone elephants which lined the royal pathway. If a coin stayed on the elephant, it was seen as a propitious omen for fertility.

  In Tsingtao they discovered a German town intent on its brewery. The town was clean, the houses European. Everyone in the party sampled the German beer made for export, but all agreed that the pear wine made from the local fruit was far better. From here, they boarded a steamer and went north to Tientsin. After a short visit there, they traveled inland to Peking—the beautiful imperial city of wide boulevards. Ticie and the younger children went on day excursions to the Grea
t Wall, the northern Ming tombs, the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, and the Fragrant Hills. Fong See, Ming, and Ray went out to buy. Eventually, Fong See left the older boys in Peking to continue learning about Chinese art and how to buy it, while the rest of the family went back south to Fatsan and Canton.

  Ensconced in a nineteen-room mansion with nineteen servants, Ming and Ray quickly adjusted, applying their charm to young ladies of both good and bad family. The brothers felt sorry for the White Russian girls from Vladivostok, and spent many evenings with these lovely refugees. On other nights, the boys lingered in the city’s more decadent “pillow houses.”

  In Peking the camaraderie between Ming and Ray, only one and a half years apart in age, began to show strains. Ming dedicated himself to the rarefied life of a Chinese gentleman. Each morning, a private tutor drilled him on his Mandarin. Each afternoon, he called for a sedan chair and set off to the commercial district. Inside the darkened den of an antiques dealer, Ming relaxed in a low-slung chair, sipping tea and bantering good-naturedly with a crafty rug merchant. Day after day, Ming returned. He turned carpets over and examined the quality of the knotting. He patiently counted those knots, knowing that the greater the number of knots per square inch, the thicker the pile. He queried the dealer on the silk content. He was unyielding about color.