My Father’s Treasure

My father told me that a wise Chinese philosopher once said, “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

I suppose now he was preparing me for the time of his death. He must’ve known it was coming. He was old and fat, with failing health and some days where he was too weak to even get out of bed. My father was a wise man, an excellent scholar and even better teacher. He was a good man too, full of good values. When I was born, all of his friends and family advised him to give me up for adoption so that he could try for another boy. But he would not have it. Be content with what you have; he told them. Rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

I guess I should’ve known it was coming, his death, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the changes that were to follow. Within the next month, my grandparents had scraped up all the money they could spare and sent me and my mother on the next boat to America. My brother was to say in China to finish his studies.

America. I had heard only tales of that place. How there were endless fields of waiving grain and oranges the size of grapefruits. Endless apple orchards, fresh, country air and infinite fields of grass under the bright blue sky. Gold discovered in people’s backyards. It seemed like a fairy tale land, like something that couldn’t exist. I was all too eager to get there.

So in the spring of 1905, I left behind the only place I had ever known and set sail for a land whose people, culture, and language were completely foreign to me. It was a long six weeks on the American built Pacific Mail Steamship that was to deliver me and my mother to our new home.

We arrived in America in early June. As we got off the boat, all I could see was people. People everywhere. Pushing and shoving and shouting in different tongues I couldn’t begin to understand. I saw no waiving fields of grain, no apples and definitely no gold. Just people crowding everywhere, framed against a foggy gray sky. And it was hot, the air so thick it was hard to breathe. As my mother and I shuffled along with the crowd, I saw a sign that said Welcome to the Beautiful San Francisco, California. It would be a long time before I was able to read it.

We shuffled over to a tiny crowded building filled with lines of people who seemed to be waiting for something. What were they waiting for? I never got the chance to ponder the question because the next thing I knew a fat white lady who was pushing around people in front of us approached me and my mother.

“Chinese?” She said with an annoyed tone. My mother nodded quickly, looking scared as if she did not want to anger the lady.

“Over here,” the lady grunted, and grabbed us by our shoulders and shoved us into one of the lines. It was impossibly long; so long I could not see what it led to. I recognized some of the people in line with us who had come over on the same boat as us. But the rest were all strangers. I had never felt so small and alone.

Many hours later we made it to the front of the line. A bored looking lady sat at a desk and stared at us. “Name, please,” she said.

I did not understand. I knew no English at all and I did not know how to respond. I stared at her blankly. She rolled her eyes. “Ming dan,” She said. The Chinese word for name. Oh.

“Bao Lang,” I said. The lady rolled her eyes and muttered something I could not understand. She wrote something on a piece of paper at her desk. I would realize much later that she was writing my name for the records and that she spelled it Bow Lang.

I felt my eyes began to well up with tears. My name was my most prized possession. It means priceless jewel. My father used to call me his Jen, or treasure. And this lady dishonoring my name was also dishonoring my father. I had never felt so alone.

My mother had arranged to meet a Chinese lady who had lived in San Francisco’s “Chinatown” for many years, and had work for my mother and a place for us to sleep. She showed us our tenement home we were to stay in. It was tiny, narrow and crowded, and reeked like old sewers and trash cans. I had never seen so many people cramped into one space. But nonetheless, it was a roof over our heads. We shared an apartment with two other single ladies who worked mending clothes when they could get them. That is what my mother did too, and within a week we were all settled in.

My mother spent most of her waking hours sewing, so instead of being stuck in our tiny tenement home, I decided to go exploring. I was surprised how much Chinatown was like China, complete with the markets and culture.

And the people. It was a relief after the first day to discover that there were so many people there who shared the same background and stories. I no longer felt alone, I even made some friends.

I started school that fall. And while it was still much, much different than the school I was used to, it was a relief to have some regularity back in my life. The school taught us English, and I began to be able to read some of the signs around town. I began to be able to communicate with some of the Americans, although most wanted nothing to do with us. It was like they thought of Chinese as a disease, much like chicken pox and measles. They seemed to want to avoid us as much as possible, and to those with whom we did cross paths, they fixed us with a mean and scornful stare. How dare you enter this country, their eyes seemed to be saying. We were perfectly well off without you. No one asked you to come here; all you are is a trouble and a nuisance. The only thing you are good for is cheap labor. Filthy scums. Get out.

And while their cold eyes and stony expressions offended me, I knew in my heart they were wrong. America was a land of freedom; I wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t. Instead I had pity on them, because it was they who were missing out on the freedom, not me. They were too captured in their own lives, and in their own harsh judgment and criticism, that it was hard for them to see that inside we really were all the same.

As the months passed, I became more and more accustomed to my American life and felt more and more at home in our little tenement. Winter passed, spring came, and I began to be able to feel the muggy warmth that seemed to settle over the city in the summer months. But early one morning in April, everything changed.

The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and the fires that came after were known as one of the worst natural disasters in American history. 80% of the city was destroyed. Nearly 8000 people died, and my mother was one of them. She might’ve made it out alive if it weren’t for the fires, or maybe she was crushed and killed on impact. I will probably never know. All I remember is waking up to the earth shaking so violently I thought surely that the world must be ending, and then feeling the building collapse around me.

I don’t remember crawling out, though I suppose now that I must have. I woke up days later on the side of the road in a horrible pile of ruins that once was my home. I looked around me and saw no one, at least alive. I am sure that if people came looking though here they would’ve thought I was dead too. I managed to pull myself up and stumble around the streets until I found a refuge center.

It was then that I realized my mother was dead. That I would never see her again. That I was an orphan in a land that was still strange and foreign to me. I waited several days for the fires to die down, and tried to figure out how I was to survive on my own. I knew I could take up sewing, like my mother had, but I knew that I would never be satisfied with a life like that. I could cook for the rich ladies on the other side of town, but many of them were cruel and paid unfairly. I could go work on the railroad like many of the Chinese men were doing, but that was man’s work and as good as a death sentence for a woman, especially a young girl such as myself.

Many of the girls I knew from school who had also been orphaned decided to drop out of school and take up sewing like their mothers had. But I remembered how often my father had talked of the importance of education, and how my mother had scraped up everything she earned to send me to school. How hard my brother worked at his studies. Would their efforts go to nothing? I decided then to continue to go to school. To get my full education, and become a successful citizen. I would not be a poor drop out, good for nothing but mending clothes and living on whatever others could spare. I wanted more out of life.

So I went to school in the mornings, walked the streets in the afternoons looking for anyone who might need sewing done. I mended their clothes best I could under a small bridge where I had found refuge. Eventually, after school was out for the summer, I had enough money saved to move into a tenement home of my own.

I graduated two years later. I got a job sewing in a store that made manufactured clothes, and in my free time I studied English. As I learned to speak it, I also learned to write it. I wrote stories, all kinds of stories, whatever that came to mind. One day I decided to write my story.

I started it in China, and told the tale of my father, my brother, and leaving to come to America. I told of the extreme hopes of coming to the land of freedom and the horrible disappointment at the reality of extreme poverty. About having my mother die in an earthquake and becoming an orphan at 16. But I wrote still, of the glimmer of hope that still shone on the horizon. That I knew that one day I would be able to make it. I wanted the people who shared my same story to realize there was still hope. I published it anonymously, and titled it: My Father’s Treasure.