Several months later, as his countrymen jostled past him and went belowdecks, Fong See gripped the railing of the riverboat that slowly glided from San Francisco Bay up the yellowish river toward Sacramento. He had heard that most of these trips went overnight, but since he had been on the Gold Mountain, he had tried to see and experience as much as possible. For months in the Big City of San Francisco, he had walked the streets of Chinatown, stopping at every herbal shop and visiting every acupuncturist’s office, inquiring if anyone knew his father or brothers. When Fong See turned up nothing, he decided to try Sacramento, the Second City.
“Little Brother, you and I must be of the same mind.”
At the sound of his dialect, Fong See turned to see an older man with baskets and rope-wrapped packages at his feet.
“You must be wise indeed to stay out here while our countrymen go belowdecks to possible death. Do they not think? Do they not remember?”
“Old Uncle,” Fong See responded, using the customary honorific, “I am traveling to Yee Fow, the Second City. I do not understand.”
The older man thrust his chin forward, pointing at the young man. “You are new here?”
At Fong See’s nod, the older man explained. “The fan gway call these boats ‘floating palaces.’ I call them death houses. Do you remember your mother telling you never to lift the top off the rice pot? Not only will this ruin the rice, but you could get a bad burn. This boat is like that pot. It runs on steam. Below, there are great boilers that explode when the white devils forget to attend to them. When I was a young man, only a few years ago, a boat called Yosemite exploded just after leaving a place called Rio Vista. We will pass there later today. When the explosion came, bodies flew through the air. One hundred died in the first burst, another fifty died in the second. Only Tang Men perished from the explosion, or from drowning when the boat sank. I saw their bodies floating in the water. Their skin had scalded and split. The fan gway buried our countrymen in one grave. You could not blame them. Our countrymen were nameless pieces of boiled flesh. The fan gway, what do they care about human beings? They saved the gold, not the people. Later they brought that death ship back to the surface. They cut it up and made it into a new boat that even today plies these waters. I saw these things, and they turned me into the old man you see before you.”
By staying on the deck, instead of going down to the “China Hold,” where hundreds of his countrymen paid a few cents to travel in steerage going up and down the river in search of work, Fong See learned much. As he spoke further with the old man, he learned that the drafts of these ships were so shallow it was said that they could run on land after a rain. He learned that at night or in the fog, the captain rang his bell and waited for an echo to bounce off a building so that he would know which way to go, which way to turn. He heard other stories about captains who didn’t hear the echo or were lazy in their duties, ran aground, and splintered their vessels in the heavy fogs that blanketed the tule marshes.
Fong See stood by the old man for hours. Looking straight down, he saw turbid water that churned and swirled with each revolution of the paddlewheel. For most of the trip, mud banks kept the river within their gentle embrace, but sometimes they passed high levees like those he knew in China. They had been built by fellow sojourners, the old man told him. The boat chugged past flimsy wooden buildings that clung to the riverbank on stilts—again reminding Fong See of China. He had seen places like that in Canton when he sold peanuts on the street. The boat passed cultivated fields where he saw his countrymen bent in their labors.
“Come,” the old man said. “I will show you something.”
Fong See followed as the old man ducked behind a pile of cloth bags, then, checking to make sure that no one was looking, climbed the crew’s stairs to the upper deck. They hunched down low and crept along the deck until they reached a window.
“Go ahead, Little Brother. Take a look.”
Fong See raised his head and peered inside. He didn’t care what the old man said—this was a floating palace.•
Excerpted from On Gold Mountain: The One Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family © 1995, 2012 by Lisa See. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Vintage Books. All rights reserved.
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. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
