To Get Rich is Glorious
Although there are hardly any Chinese left anymore in Trinity, back in Gold Rush times the county once had a [bare] majority Chinese population. Weaverville, the county seat, still boasts what is arguably the oldest continuously-used Chinese temple in the Western Hemisphere, site of elaborate annual festivities by the (nowadays lilly white) local community every Chinese New Year. This article launched a five-part Trinity Journal series to celebrate the Year of The Dog, 2006.
After our little towhead kungfu champs strut their stuff again in this year’s Lion Dance; after the grand Rotary banquet in the CDF Hall to usher in the Chinese Year of the Dog; after your annual visit to the faded gilt-and-brocade splendor of the Weaverville Joss House 
– spare a moment to savor the silence in the plain, barn-like back room of the Cloud Forest Temple.
This was the community hall, the all-purpose meeting place where local Chinese would repair for everything from fortune-telling to ad hoc contractual arbitration. The walls are plastered several layers deep with crimson papers – now tattered and faded – listing the annual donors to the Temple’s upkeep fund. These rosters (which are among the very few written records left by the Chinese who once comprised a bare majority of the Trinity population) offer a glimpse into the community’s institutions and hierarchies.
One name leads the list year after year: the Wing Chong Company, Trinity’s number one Chinese mercantile concern. Check it out. The characters
roughly translate as “glory” and “prosperity” — shades of Red Reformer Deng Xiaoping’s famous dictum “to get rich is glorious.” An apt tag for the “Noble House” of our own Chinatown.
Seven Chinese calendrical cycles (i.e. about 84 years) ago, the company passed into the hands of the Moon Lee clan – Weaverville’s much-beloved “Last Chinese Family.” Under their management, it gradually morphed from a purveyor of dried seafood, medicinal herbs and mysterious Oriental utensils into a broad-spectrum grocery store catering to Trinity’s increasingly white-bread population.
Wing Chong provided the foundation for Moon Lee’s rise from humble origins to his unrivalled stature as a pillar of our community – highway commissioner, Rotary president, Grand Humbug of the E Clampus Vitus lodge et al. Yet, as Moon repeatedly explained to oral historians in his honored old age, his family only took over the firm because they were too poor to cash out of America like so many luckier Chinese.
An ill-starred mining venture left Moon’s father so deep in debt that he couldn’t decamp for China to flaunt a Trinity-derived fortune. The Louie family, which sold him the store, had presumably fared better in America. But – like almost all the rest of the once-substantial Trinity Chinese population – what scanty trace we have of the Louie’s in local records disappears completely as soon as they head back to their native Taishan district of Canton.
Finding ourselves China-bound a couple of New Years ago, my wife, Mei-lang, and I wondered if we might have a go at filling in some of these blanks from the other side of the Trinity-Taishan equation. It struck us as ironic that, despite Weaverville’s splendid downtown museum and archive full of detailed pioneer memorabilia, the Chinese half of our Trinity heritage should be represented only by a smattering of racist old Journal clippings, a few odd items of kitchenware and apparel, plus a collection of murderous cutlery from the notorious 1858 “tong war.”
The Wing Chong Louie’s seemed as good a place as any to start. Not that they were necessarily definitive of the Trinity Chinese. But they did seem emblematic in a general way, if only because of their eerily traceless, multi-generational sojourn in our midst.
Over the next few weeks, roughly coinciding with the multi-phase Chinese New Year festivities, Ironside Filings will recount our tortuous search for these missing Trinity compatriots. Our quest took us through warrens of federal records, deep into the fortress-like American diplomatic compound in Hongkong, on a wild hydrofoil ride through the glitz (and sludge) of coastal China’s “economic miracle” and into a forgotten, impoverished, rural backwater of the Pearl River delta.
In the process, we met some colorful characters: wannabe wetbacks, repentant Red Guards, quietly subversive bureaucratic saboteurs and cynically pragmatic communist cadres. We never did find any direct, lineal descendents of the Weaverville Louie’s. But – what turned out to be perhaps even more interesting – we met plenty of their stay-at-home cousins, who related harrowing tales of where and why and how “our” Louie’s had made their brief splash back in Taishan and then disappeared yet again.
Their story resonates with some of today’s latest headlines – nativist immigrant-bashing, labor mobility in a downsizing economy, hidden costs of globalization. These grand, macro-themes take on added poignancy in the human, micro-dama between individual fortune-seekers right here in our own county and far away on the other side of the world.
For all the pluck sometimes shown, the story is not, in the end, a happy one – due, in part, to bigoted ignorance on both sides of the Trinity-Taishan nexus so many calendrical cycles ago. And ignorance could dog us anew in this upcoming Year of the Dog, unless we go out of our way to understand more about the seemingly alien “others” among us and where “out there” they might be coming from.
Such a quest takes a certain amount of imagination, flexibility and sheer, dumb, luck, as we found out at the very outset of our search for the Wing Chong Louie’s. Our first stop was the West Coast repository of the U.S. National Archives, which, despite its stately moniker, turned out to be a featureless warehouse in a tacky San Bruno industrial park out behind the San Francisco airport.
Patrons – mostly Asian Americans on geneological safaris of their own – jammed the cramped reception room, jockeying through the microfiche catalogues with intimidating ease. What made the San Bruno repository so enticing for them (and for us) was the vast Mother Lode of paperwork housed there from the 80-odd years of Oriental Exclusion laws, which lasted right up through the 1960’s.
We had precious little to go on, though – just the names Louie, Wing Chong and Weaverville. This might have been enough to start a Google search, but we had no idea how to dig into a microfiche with such scanty clues. We just scrolled up a sheet of “L’s” and started summoning files pretty much at random.
This soon produced a rather irate archivist out of the sealed-off warehouse area. Scanning the lobby for the most obviously clueless patrons, Javier Garcia homed right in on us: “Who’s ordering all this stuff? Don’t you realize there are more Louie’s in Canton than Irishmen in Ireland?”
We sheepishly explained our dilemma, which he met with an appraising look of mingled scorn and pity. “Well, let’s try the stacks,” he shrugged, motioning us over to the freight lift. At level “B1,” the doors clanged open onto a windowless, basketball court-sized vista of angle-iron shelving stacked high with cardboard crates.
“A century of Yellow Peril,” Garcia grandly announced. “Your man is in here for sure, right along with everyone else from Fan Tan Fannie to Sun Yat-sen. But,” he added, eyeing us owlishly over his dollar-store horn-rims, “to find him is gonna take some real archival feng shui.”
Next week: Forklifting a needle out of a haystack.
