Not Your Everyday Meet-Cute

Lisa See interviewed nearly 100 members of her family to write On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, her sweeping memoir of their first century in America. This extraordinary act of retrieval gives birth to a new question, though. Whose story, whose life, gets to be the focal point? This book begins with her great-grandfather Fong See, who came to the United States following his father, a modest herbalist, and made a fortune as a merchant. But does money make people remember you? If you come from a family like See’s, from a poor village near Canton, it might. When Fong See made his money, he would be the first to build a house with glass windows and plumbing. He would build a hotel. He would help bury the dead.

But many, many others lived in the wake of his life, and On Gold Mountain tells the moving story of those people too, from his children to his brothers, from his wife who stayed behind to the wife he met in Sacramento. One day, the latter turned up at age 18—a white teenager freshly arrived on the train from Oregon, she walked into his store seeking a job. This isn’t a place for you, Fong See tried to tell her. He wasn’t speaking only of their racial difference. By then, Fong See ran a shop making crotchless underwear for young sex workers. At the time, 9 of 10 Chinese women in Sacramento were prostitutes. San Francisco alone had more than 60 shops such as Fong See’s that specialized in making “fancy” underwear. In Sacramento, he had less competition, and out of the blue one day, he had a white woman in his store who was willing to help him talk to his customers. Ticie, as she was called, stayed to work, and months became years and they fell in love.

This is not your everyday meet-cute. Crucially, when Ticie and Fong See met, in the 1890s, it was illegal for them to marry by license, so they formed a partnership instead—a lawyer-drafted contract that they regarded as a marriage. See argues it was love, and it’s hard in her sweeping narration not to feel how far comfort and kindness would have gone given the backgrounds her great-great-grandparents hailed from. Ticie’s family had moved west when the “stretch from the Platte River in Nebraska to Fort Laramie in Wyoming averaged twelve graves to the mile.” Her mother had just died when she left home. Fong See’s family was full of cautionary tales. He was the fourth son of an herbalist. He had found a way to earn a living that did not risk his life.

One of the profound accomplishments of On Gold Mountain is to record how much this kind of employment meant in the 19th century, to show how labor was not just work but a form of future making. Fong See’s father had come over to tend to the needs of railroad workers when the Central Pacific was carving its way to the West Coast. He saw men’s bodies mangled and worse. He watched many gamble away their small paychecks. Ninety percent of the railroad workers at the peak of this construction were Chinese. Selling underwear, by comparison, must have seemed like a gift.

On Gold Mountain remembers the extraordinary labor Chinese people put into building California by giving it a story, a set of lives, a family, and reminds how little many were rewarded. After the railroad reached the West Coast, for instance, ports and places had to be made habitable for business and for trade. In Sacramento, See tells us, between 1871 and 1874, 500 million acres of land were retrieved from the river delta, and land value rose with it, but “the Chinese owned none of it,” See says, “since the Alien Land Act of 1870 forbade the ownership of American land by Chinese.”

Fong See is obviously the exception. He manages to keep his store running even as it’s clear a second Chinese Exclusion Act is coming. He has four sewing machines and as many as 10 men working for him. As a result of being a merchant, he can come and go—not without harassment. But he has some liberty. When he and Ticie marry, they sense the growing violence in Sacramento around Chinese people and relocate south to Los Angeles. They start over as merchants in business there. Almost immediately, their stores are successful.

In Lo Sang, as Los Angeles is called, they live in a series of apartments, and eventually above one of the stores, and quickly have two sons (they eventually have five children). They open a new store, underwear gradually giving way to novelty items, curios, porcelain, and then furniture. Antiques. People go for it. They love the encounter with a China of their imagination, which See’s great-grandfather provides. He rewards himself with “the first automobile to be owned by a Chinese anywhere in the country.” But despite his young wife’s desire for a proper house, he refuses to move them into one.

Instead, he spends money to take them back to China, to the wife he left behind and hasn’t supported, and to the family he slightly has forgotten. Oh the heartbreak See captures as the selfishness lurking inside Fong See’s heart blossoms. He runs three stores—in Pasadena, in Long Beach, and in Chinatown. He goes to work in a tailor-made suit. When Fong See begins to tire of Ticie’s power over their daughter, he argues to his wife, “She must learn the Three Obediences. When at home, obey father. When in home of husband, obey husband. When she becomes a mother, obey son.”

You can sense their break coming long before it happens. They travel back and back and back to China, always putting off the house Ticie desperately wants so that Fong See can come home to flaunt his wealth. The descriptions of these trips to China are full of redolent detail. How on the boat one time, as the kitchen ice melted, the sauces on the dinner meat grew heavier to “cover the rank flavor of the putrefying flesh.” How the family travels by sedan chair and river steamers. How on each trip, as Fong See’s wealth increases, his gestures grow bigger. He buys up 12 acres of land, builds a hotel, a firework factory. “The See family’s entrance into Dimtao produced an effect similar to a circus arriving in a small American town.”

Moving between Fong See’s rise and the lives of his brothers, his wife back home, and other people who traveled in his wake, On Gold Mountain spends equal time chronicling Fong See’s remarkable long life and reminding us how many people slide off the nation’s slippery slope. “To the public at large,” See points out, many of the jobs available to the Chinese “were invisible. No man ever considered who rolled his cigar, cut the wood for his fireplace, or made his underwear. So the importance of the Chinese in supporting whites’ rising standard of living went largely unappreciated.”

Perhaps that is why Fong See lived the way he did. After he separates from Ticie, his two elder sons in Los Angeles grow up like playboys. They drive Packards and Hudsons and wear tuxedos to night clubs, picking up the tabs. He grooms one for taking over business interests back in China and sets him up with a bride, but the teenager refuses. Astonishingly, in his mid-60s, Fong See marries the wife his son won’t marry, a beautiful 16-year-old with high cheekbones, and soon, she is pregnant. Ticie hears through the Chinatown rumor mill and decides she has to divorce. She goes off on her own then, taking two stores. Fong See will live for another 40 years, almost.

On Gold Mountain chronicles the fallout of those decades, the way Ticie and her sons make their way, and See’s own father grows up in a clan so large that it is as if it is not a family anymore but the mountain itself. The legacies of betrayal, of success, of longing and suffering, of humiliation and bravado are shared by them all, but the life of her great-grandfather continues like a rebuke that is worth being proud of sometimes. He made it, and he brought others with him.

Writing into his mind and that of her great-grandmother and many other relatives, See tries to imagine how it felt to live in this time. There is dialogue she has creatively re-created. She posits emotions where the record leaves off. In some ways, this protects her book from being simply a tale of resilience. It never was, her book makes clear. But she also lays down with utter clarity the ways in which men like her great-grandfather were not supposed to exist.

“It seemed that whenever the Chinese began making a profit, the Caucasians took it from them by enacting laws,” she writes early on, slightly from Fong See’s point of view. “Laws limiting the size of shrimping nets, laws forbidding ironing after dark, laws banning the importation of prostitutes, laws banning any paraphernalia connected to the lottery or even allowing Chinese to visit lotteries, laws requiring that laundries be built of brick or stone and have metal roofs, laws forbidding the hiring of Chinese for public works. The laws not only acted as a constant, niggling persecution, but denied this specific race the very things that brought most European immigrants to American shores. Although some of those laws were overturned by the Supreme Court, many were not.”

After World War II, the endless parade of racist lawmaking begins somewhat to cease, and indeed, some of these laws are overturned, but not all. By that point, See’s family has been in the United States for over a century. And now we have returned to a time when descendants of people like them are being asked to show their papers. Are being chased home from work. As if many of their ancestors did not essentially birth a miracle and build many of the things that made it possible to live in California today.•

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.