Novelist Lisa See’s great-grandfather Fong See left China for “Gold Mountain” in 1871 when he was young. Her family found opportunity first in Yee Fow, California’s “Second City,” Sacramento, before they moved to Los Angeles, where they found prosperity. In her memoir, On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, See walks us through her family’s life and businesses, showing us their endurance in the face of legal racism and economic hardship.
The family’s emigration from Dimtao in the Guangdong Province took two generations: “By 1870 the transcontinental railroad had been completed, and [See’s great-great-grandfather] Fong Dun Shung had opened an herbal emporium, Kwong Tsui Chang, in Sacramento.” His sons, including Fong See, followed as young adults, staying in California when he returned to China. Sacramento’s Chinatown was the seedbed of their financial opportunity, just as it was for thousands of Chinese immigrants drawn here by the successive economic booms of the gold rush and the transcontinental railroad.
But where is Sacramento’s Chinatown now? The short answer is that, like Sacramento’s vibrant Japantown, it’s gone. In the 1950s and 60s, it fell victim to the Sacramento Redevelopment Agency. Our capital city has no historic Chinese district comparable to those in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and that is by design. Chinese immigrants’ contributions to California’s early state history through the dangerous work of building the railroads cannot be overstated, yet Chinese history has been largely erased from our visible landscape.
A New Deal–era redlining map of Sacramento from the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality Project marks Sacramento’s west end, largely populated by Chinese, Black, and Japanese families, as a “melting pot” filled with “subversive racial elements”; this declaration was only one step of many toward the eventual destruction of these neighborhoods after World War II.
Editor, author, and Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin writes in his Los Angeles memoir, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, that “we interact with [a city] through its streets. The larger vision is composed of smaller moments, and if we are to apprehend or to reclaim it, we must engage block by block, boulevard by boulevard.” I set out to trace Fong See’s footsteps in Sacramento, to walk the streets of our missing Chinatown and stand in the spaces where Lisa See’s California story began.
On a bright afternoon in November, I gaze up at the Robert T. Matsui federal courthouse, my feet resting on Fifth Street, the bed of the former China Slough, also known as Sutter Lake. This marshy runoff of the river that bordered I Street was the north edge of Sacramento’s Chinatown. As See notes, many laundries backed up to this erstwhile body of water and emptied into it. The federal courthouse stands on this gold rush-era Chinese settlement; it was a site abundant in artifacts from the community. In 1999, the U.S. Department of General Services released a commemorative pamphlet, noting, “It has become fashionable in recent years for historians to give a nod to California’s Chinese pioneers as railroad and levee builders. Historical archaeology can take us further by combining artifacts with the history of a particular place and time to make the past approachable by looking at it on a human scale.” But so-called progress marched on, no matter how “fashionable” the American government deemed it to “nod” at the Chinese.
These are streets I’ve navigated for decades, but staring at the façade of the courthouse today and thinking about what’s been lost leaves me cold and ashamed. Like so much of Sacramento’s west end, the courthouse is visual white noise, the kind of building that’s built to be stately and inoffensive. Like Union Station in Los Angeles, the train station behind me sits atop a historic Chinatown. Unlike in Los Angeles, however, Sacramento’s Chinatown was never rebuilt.
One block south, what’s known as the Chinatown Mall is a shady, bound block: apartments, a motel, a Chinese cultural center, and a Thai restaurant. It sits between Sacramento’s Third and Fifth, I and J Streets. Its post–World War II buildings softly echo Asian architectural shapes, and a tiny plaque commemorates the Chinese labor and deaths that gave our state a railroad. Sacramentans are most likely to engage with Chinatown Mall from their cars, on I-5 North.
Today, two blocks away and tucked into the pocket of I-5, Old Sacramento’s Front Street is a whitewashed pantomime of the 1800s. On Front Street, Old Sacramento, where See writes of Fong See reaching “I street and [turning] right, keeping to the south side of the street.” Then nearing what used to be Chinatown, between Second and Fourth, there are charming cobblestone streets, caramel apples, and tourist shops. This afternoon, Front Street rustles with sounds of families in conversation, strollers rolling, and teens giggling. Here, the California State Railroad Museum has endeavored to fully illustrate the Chinese railroad workers’ history in its exhibits. It offers a comprehensive exhibit online.
Postwar “progress” in Sacramento—a Macy’s; a freeway on the east side of the river; wide, open blocks for government office buildings—came at a high cost to Sacramento’s Asian community. The Japanese, who were incarcerated as a result of Executive Order 9066, experienced a second trauma when they were asked to relocate again after the war. Blocks of Chinese businesses and culture—previously redlined—were declared blighted, then razed. This is tragic on its own, but it was made crueler by the efforts of the city’s historical preservation society, and a freshly elected President John F. Kennedy, who worked tirelessly to save Front Street for redevelopment as a historic district. The historical preservation society and the president won. The freeway bent around the historic district. Old Sacramento stands, but Chinatown lies under I-5.
From Chinatown Mall, I walk toward J Street again to face DOCO, Downtown Plaza shopping mall rebranded. It’s now an unevenly populated collection of shops surrounding the Golden 1 Center, home of the Sacramento Kings. It’s the kind of place that’s bustling only when there’s a basketball game. I’m looking for 609 K Street, where, by the late 1870s, Fong See “officially ran his father’s Kwong Tsui Chang Company, which now stood…between Sixth and Seventh. When he moved out of Chinatown, he changed the name of the store to the Curiosity Bazaar.” For most of my childhood, that corner boasted a Weinstock’s Department Store. I wonder if that would amuse Fong See and his wife Ticie—that this is what sat on the site where long ago, their shop manufactured undergarments for brothels.
K Street, Sacramento’s shining postwar gateway, remains enclosed as a pedestrian mall. The Macy’s that inspired the transfer of the freeway to the east side of the river sits abandoned. Government high-rises line Capitol Mall to its south. Families play cornhole on fake turf in the empty spaces between shops. A few lazy patrons gaze out blankly from the bars, getting an early start on their buzz.
See’s family moved the shop one more time, in Sacramento. “The Suie On Company—or the Curiosity Bazaar, as it was still known by its customers—moved to 723 K Street, in the Oshner Building,” a couple of blocks away. Eventually, the Sees left for Los Angeles, and eventually, what was left of Suie On Company burned down.
On the old Sanborn fire insurance maps, Sacramento looks so practical. A grid of squares approaching the river: order and sense. I-5 extirpated blocks and lives. On every map, now I trace Chinatown’s edges, searching for evidence of its erasure, what could have been. We’re all disappearing, I know. I wonder about what we’ll keep for future generations, the stories our streets aren’t telling.•
Join us on December 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when See will sit down with special guest Michael Luo 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.
