Newspaper Article

Dynasty Saga of colorful lives, lingerie and `LoSang' ON GOLD MOUNTAIN: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of a Chinese-American Family, By Lisa See (St. Martin's Press: $24.95; 381 pp.)

Zilpha Keatley Snyder

1995

Overview

When Lisa See, at the request of her great aunt, Sissee See Leong, embarked on the task of recording her family's history, she was facing an enormous undertaking. The West Coast columnist for Publishers Weekly, See spent five years interviewing nearly 100 relatives and studying letters and documents gleaned from family sources, as well as from newspaper and magazine files, the National Archives and the Immigration Office. Not only would it be necessary to deal with a great number of individuals, and a time span of over 100 years, but also with unique crosscurrents of cultural and ethnic diversity. It is this diversity that sets See's saga apart from other excellent family histories of Asian immigrants. Like other chronicles by such justly acclaimed writers as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, See's story deal's with the difficult lives of her Chinese ancestors in their native country as well as the hardships, persecution and discrimination they faced on their arrival in \"Gold Mountain,\" the United States of America. The reader first becomes acquainted with a poor dealer in herbs and other traditional Chinese medications, who during a time of great unrest and deprivation in China, sets out for the \"Gold Mountain\" with two of his four sons. Fong Dun Shung, See's great-great-grandfather arrived in California in 1867, where he continued his work as an herbalist while two of his sons joined the thousands of Chinese men who labored to build the Central Pacific railroad. But it was Fong Dun Shung's fourth son, Fong See who, setting out from China in 1871 to find his long absent father, eventually became the patriarch of a remarkable Asian/American dynasty. Fong See, See's great-grandfather, must have been a man of enormous intelligence, business acumen and determination. Having arrived in Sacramento as a 14-year-old, he soon set himself up in business, at first selling merchandise from door to door and then, by the late 1870s, as a successful manufacturer of underwear for brothels. In 1894 Fong See hired an intelligent and courageous young Caucasian woman, Letticie (Ticie) Pruett, as saleswoman and bookkeeper and a few years later in defiance of law and custom they were married. Soon afterward Fong See moved his business from Sacramento to Los Angeles where he began the importation of Chinese antiques and artifacts, an enterprise that was to make him not only wealthy, but also a legendary figure in the burgeoning City of the Angels.

• Publisher: Los Angeles Times Communications LLC