John Freeman started the hour by calling Lisa See’s family history, On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, the California Book Club’s December selection read on the book’s 30th anniversary, a “shattering and dazzling and funny and eye-opening and warm and very important book, especially now, but you could say that pretty much at any point in California history.” He asked See about when, during the course of her research, she came to see her great-grandfather Fong See, who is one of the main family members she writes about, as not simply a family legend but someone she connected with as a character.
See responded that it was when she went back to her family’s home village, which was considered a day’s walk outside Guangzhou. Her great-grandfather died when she was two, so she had no memories of him, but he lived large in the family’s memory, even when he was gone, and many family members had stories about him. In this tiny village, on a rooftop pavilion, relatives she had just met started pointing things out: “Oh, see that road over there. He built that road. See that school over there. He built that school. See those houses. He built those houses.” She continued, “And that was the moment when he became a real person to me that was three-dimensional, because everything that he had held back here, he was giving back to his village and helping his village and helping the family in the village, and I saw him completely differently after that.”
Her great-grandfather ran a shop that made underwear for sex workers. Her great-grandmother, who was a teen at the time they met, sold him on hiring her by telling him that she could speak English better and could therefore sell the clothes to the customers better than he could. Freeman asked what See thinks possessed her great-grandmother in that moment to cross the barrier.
See explained that her great-grandmother had run away from home. It was the late 1890s. See said, “For a woman at that time, what opportunities are there? You know, today, if worse came to worse, you could go work at a Costco, or you could go work at Starbucks, or you could sign up for classes at a city college, community college, but she didn’t have any options, really, and she didn’t have any skills. And so, I think this was a desperate move on her part, and that everyone else had said no to her.”
Michael Luo, author of a brilliant, comprehensive history of Chinese American immigrants, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, joined the conversation. He pointed out that there must have been a fear in See as she started to work on the book about whether she could pull it off. He said, “I’m wondering, at what point in the research or the writing did you start to realize, I’m going to be able to do this?”
See shared the story of how she got started writing the book. A writer had contacted See, wanting to include her family in a book. When See asked her great-aunt about sharing their stories, her great-aunt initially said, No, we don’t participate in things like that. But the book came out on the eve of her great-aunt’s 80th birthday, and See gave her a copy. “Her daughter called the next day and said, You know, my mom realized that she made a mistake. Why don’t you come over, and she’ll tell you some stories.” When See visited her great-aunt, she heard stories she’d never heard before, including that her great-grandfather didn’t have two wives, but instead four, and that there had been a kidnapping. After her great-aunt died, other family members told her they would tell See stories, too. See believes they did that to honor her great-aunt.
Luo commented that See has seen three decades of the fight against invisibility and for representation and that she continues to be involved in those struggles. He noted that there are Civil War sections and civil rights sections in bookstores, but trying to get books to readers has felt to him like an uphill battle with publishers and booksellers. He asked her where she feels Strangers in the Land or On Gold Mountain fit. “Where do you think we are in that [fight] right now?” he asked.
See said, “There’s so much that still hasn’t been told, and part of it is that we’re still very Eurocentric in how we learn history.” She noted that a lot of books, movies, and TV shows about World War II take place in Europe, but very little is set in the Pacific theater, though a lot happened there. She said, “One thing with On Gold Mountain, I think, is that people can relate to it because it is about a family, and we all have somebody in our family who is crazy enough, brave enough, to come here—and scared enough to come here. Maybe one family used a coffeepot and another one used a teapot, but the desire and the needs and the emotions and the relationships are the same.”•
Join us on January 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Tosh Berman will sit down with special guest Garrett Caples and host John Freeman to discuss Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
ON GOLD MOUNTAIN: THE ONE-HUNDRED-YEAR ODYSSEY OF MY CHINESE-AMERICAN FAMILY, BY LISA SEE
