Genealogy Books - On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family

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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: What a great family history written as a novel
Comment: I enjoyed this book very much. Amazing to read about one man's dreams and hard work from 4
generations ago still leaves a legacy and a still-running store to this day. I was broken-hearted
reading about the treatment of the Chinese during the railroad building era of the West. Bigotry and
racism are not new to America, and not limited to just Africans. I got confused sometimes with all
the names, and had to refer to the family tree in the beginning of the book, but it was a wonderful
story.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A Scrutable Family Success
Comment: There's not much magic realism or mystic exoticism about this blunt, detailed, multi-generational
history of an immigrant family. If you're looking for a novel, you'll find that Lisa See has written
several. I repeat, this is a history, and it will be of interest chiefly to historians and other
social scientists, professional or arm-chair.

Ms. See's great-great-grandfather arrived
in America in 1867. The shabby treatment that he and other Chinese immigrants received is part of
American history, but here in this book it becomes more vivid because See includes the reader in her
"family album." Suffice it to say that the Fong/See family shrugged off indignities, worked hard,
brought kinfolk to share the work despite arbitrary and unfair hurdles, took root in America, and
succeeded more or less to the measure of their immigrant dreams. So it was with my mother's
immigrant family from North Europe, and so it has been with every immigrant complement to America's
cultural universality. Quite a few of the Fong/See second-comers spent time at the detention center
of Angel Island, as described in the book "Island" which I reviewed a few days ago.
/>The drama in this history of the branching See family - what makes this book memorable - is a love
story, the secret and perilous marriage of Fong See, the son of the 1867 immigrant, to a woman of
European heritage, Letticie Pruett. Interracial marriage was illegal for decades in California, as
in many states, and the penalties were a lot more severe than mere annulment. The Fong See clan ran
the risk of deportation, and the couple had reason to fear ostracism and personal violence. />
There's a sheaf of family photos in the center of the book. There's a snapshot of Richard
See - fourth generation, I believe - with his buddies in Levis and Pendletons, getting ready for a
fishing trip. Then there's Lisa herself as a girl in Chinese silks, but gasp! Lisa has wide European
eyes, long blonde hair, and freckles!

My mother's sister and her Norwegian-American
husband Jim, the last of my Minnesota kin to live on a homestead farm, came to visit me in San
Francisco in the 1970s. One evening I took them, with other relatives and friends, to a Chinese
restaurant. Jim is not what you'd call loquacious; he was sitting with his back to the room and
paying more heed to the talk at other tables than to us. Just behind him, a family was talking about
visits to colleges, arguing the merits of Cal Tech versus MIT. Jim got curious and turned around -
discretely? oh yeah! - to see what the family looked like. Then he gaped at me and whispered "them
folks are Chinese!" "Well," said I, "what do you expect in a Chinese restaurant?" "But they're
speakin' English!" quoth he.

The heart and soul of Lisa See's history of her extended
family is exactly what my uncle didn't understand. The Chinese who came to America were not
insidious strangers and inscrutable menaces to European American culture. They were just plain folk.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Enjoyable read, a history lesson
Comment: I had read "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" and just loved it. This book is just as absorbing. The
reader is transported to another time and place. I enjoy historical fiction. This is a good story
based on the history of Lisa See's family. It was obviously a labor of love for her. I would
recommend it especially to those who are interested in West Coast history, from the late 19th
century to WWII-era.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Truly relocating you to a different time, a different place
Comment: I cannot express what wonderful storytelling of 100 years odyssey this book was. It was filled with
historic detail, from China to the United States, as they referred to it as Gold Mountain. The
patriach, Fong See was a merchant, and you will learn plenty of the business side of the family. He
rented furniture to Hollywood studios. The many descriptive characters stories are well-tracked,
and clearly identified. There is no confusion.

Lisa is with interracial heritage,
which makes the telling of the past more interesting as we learn that aspect of her family's life.
Although a long read, it was insightful, informative, intriguing with mystery, concubines, romance,
business, immigration, travel, etc. This book is an enthralling read with every chapter advancing
to more.

Customer Rating:

Summary: The diversity of living
Comment: I read On Gold Mountain slowly, with days between chapters to think about new ideas. On Gold
Mountain was many things to me. A true story, it captures the diversity of life: hopeful and
heartbreaking; success and failure; riches and poverty; love, courage and pride. In the many lives
of the See family and other Chinese immigrants, opportunity, danger, effort and chance all play a
role in deciding who will be rich, who will live and who will die.

It was an
eye-opening revelation to me of how racist our laws and immigration policies were towards the
Chinese, up until our recently.

It was an amazing journey into Chinese society both in
America and in China.

It was an uplifting and hopeful account of how, in spite of
everything, Chinese immigrants were able to come to America, work, and prosper.

It was
a heart-breaking indictment of the treatment of the Chinese by our government and big business,
particularly the railroads. The suffering and death of so many people has gone too long unnoticed in
our history books.

It was an amusing commentary on the foibles of human nature, and how
love truly can triumph over it all, down through the generations.

It was an incredibly
well-researched, well-documented and remarkably frank story of one Chinese immigrant and his
numerous descendants.

In the developing field of social history, and using social
history to illuminate a genealogy, On Gold Mountain is a seminal work, published five years prior to
the ground-breaking "Bringing Your Family History to Life through social history" by Katherine Scott
Sturdevant. As such, it is a remarkable example of the professional standards to which the social
historian/genealogist may aspire.

Although the family history is rife with bi-racial
marriage, multiple wives and concubines, infidelity and divorce, Lisa See presents the story in a
sympathetic and factual manner, and avoids sensationalizing her family history. It is as much about
the family business of importing Asian art, furniture and folk items, and other businesses the
younger generations developed, as it is about the personal history of the family.

I
would recommend Lisa See's book to anyone planning to write a social history; to all high school and
college students in classes on U. S. Government, sociology, immigration, and capitalism. I would
also recommend it to anyone who likes a good work of non-fiction about real people.

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