Lisa See on Why She Writes

The first time I interviewed my great-aunt and grandmother, I learned things I’d never known. My great-grandfather Fong See didn’t have two wives; he had four. And, oh, there was a kidnapping…

Back then, now 35 years ago, I thought I’d write a letter I could send at Christmas to my family that would specify all the names and dates of our history in America on one page, but things got out of hand. I’d talk to one relative, who’d send me to another relative, who’d send me to a neighbor, friend, customer, or business associate. I abandoned the Christmas letter. Instead, I wrote magazine pieces about my family and Los Angeles’s Chinatown.

This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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After two years of interviews, I still had many questions to which no one in the family seemed to know the answers. Why weren’t my great-grandparents legally married? Why did they move from Sacramento to Los Angeles in 1897? Why didn’t Fong See buy a house for his wife and children? Why did they travel back to China in the years they did? Fate intervened in the form of a jury summons that spurred me to check out all the books I could find on Chinese American history so that I’d have reading materials as I waited in the courthouse for two weeks (the practice then) to see if I’d be called to be on the jury. On my first day, I came across an answer to one of my questions. I was stunned and excited. As I stumbled on more answers, an idea began to form in my mind. History had happened to my family.

We are taught the front line of history: the wars, battles, dates, generals, presidents, kings, and prime ministers. But if you take one step off the front line, who’s there? Real people. Families. Every step of the way. Like all families, mine was affected by state and federal laws—and global events. My great-grandparents couldn’t be legally married, because it was against California law for someone who was a quarter or more Chinese to marry a white person. My parents were one of the earliest couples in my family to be legally married in the United States. Fong See couldn’t buy a house, because it was against California law for Chinese people to own property. He couldn’t become a naturalized citizen, because federal law forbade it. Decades later, after the United States entered World War II, my grandfather could no longer get water chestnuts and other ingredients from China. This may seem insignificant, but he had to close his restaurant, which put him in a weakened position when the family partnership dissolved, and he was left the poorest of the siblings. After two weeks spent reading in the courthouse, I knew I could write a book that told the history of the Chinese in America through the eyes of my family.

History is doomed to repeat itself. We seem incapable of learning from our mistakes. When I was doing the research for On Gold Mountain, I found my family’s interrogation transcripts from the different times they were detained at Angel Island. I interviewed family friends who’d been sent to Japanese internment camps and learned that my grandparents had lived in the home of the Oki family to keep it safe for them until World War II ended. I discovered that some of my “uncles” had entered the country illegally as “paper sons,” and they lived with the fear that they could still be caught and sent home, even if they’d been here 50 or more years, paid taxes, and had children and grandchildren who served in the U.S. military. Is any of this sounding familiar?

I’m writing this in the early days of ICE roundups. Alligator Alcatraz is about to open in the Florida Everglades. We may be doomed to repeat history, but I remain hopeful that my writing can help remind people that we all had someone in our family who was scared enough, crazy enough, or brave enough to leave their home country to come here, that we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. And I hope that I can continue to find, preserve, and share voices from the past that can help explain what we are living through today so that we can try to do better, be better, tomorrow.•