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, Lisa See’s only full-length piece of nonfiction, is the author’s most underrated work. 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 word.
See brought journalistic skills to On Gold Mountain, whose first edition was subtitled The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, and 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—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.”
Yet, if that prediction has come true in a way, Chinese people in California and throughout the United States—including See’s family—have also long suffered under xenophobia and institutionalized racism.
Now, of course, we find ourselves in similar circumstances, 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. 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.•
ON GOLD MOUNTAIN: THE ONE-HUNDRED-YEAR ODYSSEY OF MY CHINESE-AMERICAN FAMILY, BY LISA SEE
