Memoir: On Gold Mountain Section 3

MaiNou Vang
Ms. Peifer
Creative Writing hr. 3

In the third section of the book that I have read, the young See family is now all grown up. First, the book was relatively focused on the life of Fong See, the author’s great-great-grandfather but now the book is relatively focused on the life of Fong See’s children and his ex-wife, Letticie. Each son: Ming, Ray, Bennie, and Eddy married Caucasian women. Sissee alone did not marry. Ming married to a woman named Dorothy who was a party-goer, Ray married a woman named Leona, Bennie wed a girl named Bertha, and Eddy married Stella Copeland, the only sister-in-law in the See family that the author really wrote about. Letticie stayed unmarried after the separation with Fong See.

Since the separation, Ming and Ray decided to start a new business of manufacturing furniture and built their own goods. Later, Eddy and along with his two artistic friends, Tyrus and Benji, opened up a restaurant beneath their shop. Even during the Depression, the two businesses attracted customers and resulted in success.

Until now, I discovered that this memoir is also a story of love. Lisa See wanted the readers to understand the relationship of certain couples in the story. Since the separation, Fong See lived his life with his new wife and children, only occasionally meeting with his first family. Through the years, Letticie’s hatred towards Fong See grew but eventually died down and created a hole inside of her. Letticie’s “anger at him had long burned out, to be replaced by grief, then a final, horrible emptiness” (pg 174). Everyone knew that Letticie missed him as she “sat in a wicker chair at the back of her store on Los Angeles Street, looking out the window and wondering if Suie would stop by on his walk either to or from his compound” (pg 174). From this passage, you can see the desperation that Letticie had and how she yearned to be with her ex-husband. Later in the story, the core was based on Eddy and Stella. Stella loved her family but she thought she would live an easy life when she married Eddy because Eddy came from such a wealthy family. But effects of the Depression caused Stella to be a hard-working woman, just like how she used to be living with her intermediate family back then. A hard-working mom and wife, Stella found “a piece of stationary folded over and over again into tiny squares. A feeling of dread crept over her. Somehow she knew what it would be, as she unfolded the paper crease by crease” (pg 200). Eddy had been cheating on her with a married woman named Helen Smith. Stella’s first reaction was to scream. After confronting Helen, Eddy apologized and promised to never see her again. But only a few weeks after that, Stella received anonymous letters informing her that her husband and Helen were still momentarily together. With love and strength, Stella decided she would hang on and wait, “for she knew that if she left, she would not only be losing a husband, but also the only real family she had ever known” (pg 205).

The memoir is intriguing most of the time now. It covers less of the historical facts and focuses on the story and the characters’ lives which I genuinely am interested in.