Ancient and Fundamental

The other day, trying to plan our family’s summer travel, I suggested Spain. On our honeymoon 21 years ago, my husband and I gazed at the fantastical dripping-wax spires of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. We vowed to return with our children someday. Next year will mark the cathedral’s completion, a hundred years after the death of its visionary architect, Antoni Gaudí.

“We can’t,” my son said.

“Why not?” I asked, though I already had an inkling.

“Because we might get detained,” he said. “They might not let us back in.”

He was—and he wasn’t—joking. He and his twin brother, freshmen in high school, closely followed the news, the reports about the attacks against birthright citizenship, and the virulently xenophobic rhetoric of the Trump administration.

“Let’s go to Hawaii, then,” my other son said.

I am the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. My sons—half Serbian and northern European, half Chinese—are another generation removed, and yet still they worried.

“It seems impossible, but who knows?” I asked, referring to an end to birthright citizenship. Federal efforts to revoke citizenship—a process known as denaturalization—have escalated this year. (Recently, the Supreme Court agreed to review the legality of a Trump executive order that would severely restrict the right to birthright citizenship in the United States.)

“This administration has shown it doesn’t care about boundaries,” my son said. Not the boundaries on a map, but presidential norms, as well as legal and constitutional limits, for which Trump and those around him have shown disdain and disregard.

Those with unchecked power often target the most vulnerable. Lisa See’s sprawling epic On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family charts the origins of the old, old hate for the Chinese.

In 1871, her great-grandfather Fong See, then a teenager, left southern China, bound for these shores. He married four times and fathered 12 children—“five Eurasian, seven Chinese”—including See’s grandfather Eddy, and launched a prosperous antiques and curios empire in Southern California, despite entrenched racism.

The Sees struggled to bridge cultural divides—trying and succeeding, trying and failing. See intertwines her family history with the major events of the 20th century, including the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar era, returning repeatedly to the themes of family and tradition.

Aspects of the patriarch’s history dwell in the “nebulous world of fact mixed with mystery, fantasy and apocrypha…a mosaic composed of perceptions, feelings, sometimes wishful thinking, and undeniable fact.” One of those undeniable facts: He “rose above, ignored, and finagled his way around discriminatory laws.” In Fong See’s early years, as he toiled in Sacramento—an entrepreneur successfully manufacturing crotchless ladies’ underwear he sold to brothels—anti-Chinese sentiment was on the rise.

Chinese migrants had first come to this country during the gold rush, and they stayed on to work in laundries, on the railroads, and in other low-paying, dangerous jobs. Politicians, unions, and businesses condemned the Chinese for taking those jobs and driving down wages of American workers.

In 1882, a little over a decade after Fong See traveled to the United States, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from coming to this country. Aside from those joining the United States in accord with limited loopholes that allowed for merchants, teachers, students, and scholars, immigration from China dwindled to almost nothing.

In 1895, immigration officials denied entry to Wong Kim Ark, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants who was coming back from a visit to China. Officials argued that he wasn’t a citizen. He fought his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1898 that any child born in the United States automatically became a citizen.

Justice Horace Gray wrote, “The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens.” These are words that I find resonant and stirring, which affirms that birthright citizenship is part of the bedrock of this country and of my family.

To exclude Wong would have excluded Fong See’s American-born children and the descendants who followed.

To exclude Wong would have been to exclude me and my siblings.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. But policies, on the whole, still all but banned most immigration from Asia for decades. The 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite set off the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. U.S. universities expanded their science and engineering programs, which in turn attracted top graduate students from abroad. Students like my parents, who arrived in the early 1960s to study in the Midwest. They met, married, and made their way to California, where my own story begins.

This fall, international-student enrollment dropped significantly because of visa-processing delays and deep uncertainty around the future. Which is a loss in so many ways—in innovation, in diversity, in the stories of these would-be students who could have become a part of our collective American history.

In On Gold Mountain’s epilogue, which was added to the 2012 edition and serves as a postscript, See movingly writes about how researching her family history changed her life and shaped her fiction. “In all my novels…I’ve written about history that has been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up. I’ve written about how history affects individual people and their families, every day, including all of us right now.” Words to heed, words to hold on to, as we navigate whatever comes next.•

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.

Dustin Snipes

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Heather Scott Partington writes about changes to the site of what used to be Sacramento’s Chinatown. —Alta

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PERMISSION TO WRITE

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LUCKY PENNY

Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin writes about the magic of a penny, a type of coin that will no longer be pressed by the U.S. Mint. —Alta