Lisa See's `Gold Mountain': A Pioneering Family's Dream

"On Gold Mountain" (St. Martin's Press, $25) is the story of a remarkable interracial pioneer family that grew up along with the young rough-and-raw city of Los Angeles, alternately defying and living within the boundaries of Chinese and American prejudices of the times.

Their story is both serious social history and one family's version of realizing the California dream.

The heart of Lisa See's family saga begins with the arrival of her great-grandfather Fong See, 14 and penniless, in California in the 1870s. He'd been so poor in China that his mother supported them by transporting people on her back.

Early on Fong See launched a successful business making crotchless underwear for prostitutes. Then, with his Caucasian wife, Ticie (miscegenation laws prevented marriage, so they had a legal contract), he became Los Angeles Chinatown's most successful importer, building an empire on Asian antiques and artifacts.

When he died at age 99 he was a wealthy patriarch with 12 children and two families (having taken a traditionally subservient Chinese teenager as another wife).

The family's business interests included restaurants, furniture factories, renting Asian artifacts to movie studios, and the first nightclub in Los Angeles' Chinatown, Dragon's Den, which attracted bohemian and Hollywood types.

Fong See struggled to reconcile having great power on one hand and discriminatory roadblocks on the other: by law he couldn't buy a

house or become a citizen. His children took different paths in divining roles, given their odd position in society: pampered and spoiled, sometimes fawned on as "exotic," yet nowhere completely accepted.

It's the unique meshing of different cultures within the extended family that sets this immigrant saga apart. Lisa See, Fong See's great-granddaughter, a Publisher's Weekly West Coast correspondent who is one-eighth Chinese, spent five years researching the book through interviews and archival materials. She weaves the stories of not only her Chinese but also her Anglo family relatives, who married into the See clan (Ticie's family was from near Medford, Ore.; Lisa See's grandmother Stella, who married Eddy, one of Fong See's sons, grew up in Waterville, Wash.)

Included, too, are fascinating glimpses of early Los Angeles, a city that tolerated - and even held a special place for, if only as a curiosity - this unusual family in a way nowhere else in the country probably would have.

The book has been well-received and will be the basis of a six-hour miniseries to air next year. See says she believes it's drawing audiences for three reasons: "The Amy Tan phenomenon; a huge number of Asiaphiles . . . an old-fashioned word and out of favor, but people enamored of the Orient and all that it conjures up." But most of all, she says, many people are attracted to stories about family, because they long for family connections, and to understand the meaning of family.

Author Lisa See will read from her book at Elliott Bay Book Company at 8 p.m. tomorrow.