Bowen Lyam Lee
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About Moon Chest Stories
These historical fiction books on Chinese American history are based on my own family of pioneers who settled in California.
The first book, Bug Holds Up the Universe, is written for a young adult audience, age 16 and up. It is a YA crossover book, as the content is adult and the protagonist a young adult. The book follows our protagonist from childhood to his early twenties.
The Moon Chest was given to me by my parents, who got it from my father’s mother, who got it from her mother, who was born in California in the 1890s. The chest is carved of cedar, one of those trees, like the redwood and the maple, that grow and thrive on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. It represents the Chinese diaspora that grew and prospered on two continents across a vast ocean.
The interior of the chest has many compartments that fit into one another like a puzzle. It holds memorabilia from the past: clothes, trinkets, photographs. These objects are from different eras, representing five generations of my family in the United States. A water pipe that was my great great grandfather’s. Shawls my great grandmother wore. Beaded sweaters of my grandmother’s and photographs of my parents as young people. All these objects have stories to tell.
The outside of the chest is ornately carved with landscapes and figures in vignettes. Each section is a story unfolding to the beholder. Are the stories separate or do they tell one epic tale altogether? Like the stories contained inside the chest, the stories carved on its exterior tease the imagination. At least, if you are a storyteller.
Book One
First Generation: Bug Holds Up the Universe
First Generation - 1847
My grandmother told me my great great great grandfather came to California before the Gold Rush. She said he was a missionary’s servant, and he must have found gold before “that Marshall” at Sutter’s Mill. Otherwise, how could so many Chinese know about the gold so quickly, and arrive in Gold Mountain right away? My great great great grandfather had a store in Coloma, and it is still there at the Gold DIscovery State Park in Coloma, California. The Chinese stores are museums now. One of the two Chinese stores that are there contains artifacts from the 19th century, set up as a Chinese store of that time would have looked like.
My Father's Mother's Family - The Hings
The U.S. Census of 1880 lists four Chinese people living in a store in Coloma. They are Hing Sis (spelling uncertain), who was a male 40 years old, his partner, Ah, a wife, and a hired man. The occupation is store keeper. The handwriting and sparse entry make it hard to decipher.
These are the sketchy bits of information I have had to go on in spinning this yarn about the first of my family to live in the United States of America. He came before California was even a state in the union, when it was raw and in transition from being a sleepy Mexican territory to the place where the WIld West was born. This is a chronicle of what the times were like, and an imagined story of how my family might have begun as pioneer Chinese Americans.
Read the first installment of Book One: First Generation: Bug Holds Up the Universe here for free, then please subscribe for all installments.
Chapter One
In folktales the third son is the lucky one, the one who succeeds where the other brothers fail. Maybe that myth is what protected me. I surely didn’t have, as they say here in Gold Rush country, “a Chinaman’s chance,” in inheriting from my father, his land and property, being Son Number Three. So I was groomed instead to inherit his principles, my father’s openly belligerent disdain of injustice and an unfair balance of power. Although, it was what happened to my father that taught me to temper that disdain with prudence, and with patience.
The Hing family village, of which my father was patriarch and village head, lay nestled in a green valley between rolling hills. Rice paddies on the hillsides, layered like thin slices of fruit on a plate, caught the rain that would otherwise drain into our village. It was a favorable location, always plenty of water, even in recent times of drought, and a hundred li from the big city of Canton, far enough away not to be bothered by city ways and city dwellers, but close enough for trade. We did well in our village, but it was small, only a dozen houses of grandparents and uncles and cousins living within the village walls. Because we were Hakka, our homes were built facing each other, with an open space where we could all gather for celebrations and important communications. The elders and the women could stay on the balconies of the second floor of the houses overlooking the courtyard and did not have to leave their homes to converse with each other or watch what was going on in the gathering place. It was a favorable place to be a third son. I always had a chance of making good no matter my order of birth.
In the Hing family village everyone had their place carved out for them. My older brothers would inherit my father’s land and buildings. My sisters would all be wed and travel to another village to live with their husband’s family. My younger brother would live with my older brothers and help them farm, or strike out on his own with a trade he had learned and come back to the village plying that trade, blacksmith, carpenter, or go to another village that needed his services. At first, that was to be my fate, to learn a useful trade and either stay or go. But then I learned to read.
One day my father came across me scratching characters into the road as we children played a game of hide and seek. Instead of just marking the ground with an “x”, I was writing the word for “home”, meaning this was the spot to come to before your hiding place was discovered. This was the spot you could come to to be safe in the game. Seeing me carefully inscribe the earth as if it were the most important task in the world, he decided I was to be a scholar.
A scholar could be anyone. You didn’t have to be born into a class of scholars to become one. In all other occupations, you were born into what you would be in life. Farmers were farmers, kings were kings. That is why being a younger son was so precarious. Your future was uncertain if there was not enough property or resources by the time you had come of age. But a farmer’s son could be a scholar, even though it was a long shot that it would get him anywhere, as he did not have the advantage of coming from an educated family.
My father wanted a scholar in the family because a scholar had a chance of becoming a government official. That meant my father had a shot at bending the rules in our favor. Even though the Hakka had been settled in Guangdong for over three hundred years, we were still considered the foreign strangers from the mountains by the Han people. We were not liked because we were “newcomers.” The Han had been in southern China since the first dynasty. So the Hakka, in that sense, were relatively new. But Toisan had been our home, our blood, sweat, and tears home, for a hundred generations. My father was adamant that the laws and sentiments against us were unfair.
So it was my father’s intention that I not only become a civil servant, but a government official with enough jurisdiction to protect the rights of the Hakka. I had to become a scholar who could not only pass the government exams, but who would be outstanding enough for high office.
From the age of five my childhood was over. At least the childhood of riding the water buffalo through the marsh, or taking the goats to pasture in the hills above the rice fields. While the sun was shining and the air clean and bright with the promise of freedom, I was indoors, my nose to a scroll or grinding an inkstone on a ceramic dish. My father had given my cousin, a Hing who had not passed the lower exams, but knew enough to be a village teacher, the ordinance to use the switch liberally whenever it was necessary to keep me sharp and attentive.
Teacher Cousin used a willow switch, particularly hard while being flexible, so it struck me on the back of the hand or the nape of my neck with precision, a schoolteacher’s version of a whip. He could be anywhere in the room and if he caught me dawdling, or staring out the window, he could crack that switch at me and bring me instantly back. As I got older and no longer needed to decipher one character from another, this reminder to focus was entirely annoying, as my staring out into space was not inattention, but deep reflection, as I sought to reveal what the words meant, why written in that particular order, and what could it also signify? The classics required interpretation, and I couldn’t just rely on what others said about a text and also pass the exams. I had to be a thinker.
Of course, when I was young, the thoughts that went through my head had to do with what games the other boys were playing and how to beat them at it, and what was my mother making for dinner that night and would it be something I liked.
But as I got older, once I had learned the three classics, the hundred family names, and the thousand character poem, and reading was no longer simply memorizing words, but putting the phrases together to be considered in a dozen ways, I became a true scholar, and thought scholarly thoughts. Why did dragons live in the sea when it was they who made rain in the sky? Why did Confucius honor women but also say they were inferior in all ways? What made people do what they did? My cousin only had the simplest and most common of answers to these queries. When I was eleven, it became apparent, even with his ego and self-importance of being a scholarly man, that he had taught me all he could.
And, naturally, being a boy, my thoughts were still on beating the other boys at their games and hoping my mother would have something good for dinner. But as an older boy I could tuck those thoughts between the weighty concerns of a scholar, and so the switch had been reserved for other children who stumbled over their characters in the schoolroom.
I started on the Four Books and Five Classics when I was seven. Teacher Cousin gave me his copies to study, and it was my task to copy the texts for my own manuscripts to use. Terrible were the times the papers were knocked to the floor and ink spilled on them.This sometimes happened if the other children, who had no patience for study, would rough house when Teacher Cousin would leave the room. Other times it was not an accident, and I tried to use it as an excuse to go outside and play. I protested to my father that the other children could leave to go outside for chores but I had to remain in the school room. Couldn’t it be arranged, and wasn’t it more fair, that when the others were in school, I could go out and get in a little work in the fields, perhaps? But my father insisted my job was to be the scholar, so that was what I had to do all day long. He told me when I became older, learning to write an eight legged essay, I would be studying day and night. So get used to it.
So in the classroom I learned to negotiate. Third Aunty made the best pork buns, so when her son came to the school room it was one bun for every paper I wrote for him. I used my left hand so Teacher Cousin would think it was the awkward way of writing the other children had. Girl cousins would bring the best their kitchens had to offer. All the children in the HIng village learned to read and write at least a little. All the children in the Hing village were related to me, so were called cousins. If they didn’t bring me something that pleased me, I didn’t do their work for them. Over the years my less studious cousins brought frogs and crickets and other fine pets, spinning tops and excellent marbles and a weighted pair of dice. As I got older, my interests changed, and the “trades” reflected an older boy’s interest in knives and tools of good workmanship.