It may seem odd to suggest of a book that has been the source of an opera and a museum exhibition—and has remained in print for three decades—but On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family is Lisa See’s most underrated work. In part, that’s because it is her first, and debuts can often feel conditional. But even more, I think, it has to do with the fact that On Gold Mountain is the author’s only full-length piece of nonfiction. It’s not uncommon for a writer to begin her career with a memoir before shifting to fiction; See has 11 novels under her belt. On Gold Mountain, however, is a different sort of project: a family history, with the emphasis firmly on the second of those words. “In 1989, Aunt Sissee celebrated her eightieth birthday with a traditional Chinese banquet,” See explains in the book’s foreword. “Three days later my cousin Leslee called. She wanted me to know that Sissee, her mother as well as my great-aunt and the only living child of my great-grandfather’s half-Chinese, half-white family, thought it was time for a book to be written about our family and that I was the person to write it.”
See comes from a family of writers; her mother was the exemplary novelist and critic Carolyn See. Until 1996, the younger See was the West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly, and her journalism has appeared in publications including the New York Times and Vogue. She brought these journalistic skills to On Gold Mountain, which required five years and nearly 100 interviews to research. The result, in my view, is a book that is sui generis: a work of reportorial and cultural scholarship, written with a novelist’s attention to character and detail, and built on the life stories, played out over four generations, of its author’s ancestors.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Gold Mountain, of course, is how Chinese immigrants referred to California in the wake of the gold rush, which drew many to these shores. In that sense, the collective story See traces begins with possibility. Her great-grandfather Fong See immigrated to the United States in the 1870s and became a successful Los Angeles Chinatown merchant. In his great-granddaughter’s telling, he is something of a visionary, observing to one of his children in the 19th century that “one day the whole city will be filled with buildings so tall that you and I can’t even imagine them. We need to be ready for that.”
And yet, if that prediction has come true in a way, Chinese communities in California and throughout the United States have also long suffered under xenophobia and institutionalized racism. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act banned the immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of 10 years, and it was only in 1948 that California repealed the miscegenation laws prohibiting mixed marriages; as a result of those laws, See’s great-grandparents—her great-grandmother was white—were legally unable to wed.
Now, of course, we find ourselves in a similar circumstance, with immigrant communities under attack and mass deportation a cornerstone of federal policy. It’s impossible to encounter On Gold Mountain without considering it through such a lens. What I mean is that the generational history of See’s family can be understood only if we accept it as representative: an American story on the most fundamental terms.•
Join us on December 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when See will sit down with a special guest and host John Freeman to discuss On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
ON GOLD MOUNTAIN: THE ONE-HUNDRED-YEAR ODYSSEY OF MY CHINESE-AMERICAN FAMILY, BY LISA SEE
