On Gold Mountain

Lisa See reconstructs the history of her Chinese American family from nineteenth-century migration out of Qing China through the development of Los Angeles Chinatown and the social changes of the twentieth century. At the centre is Fong See, who arrived in the United States as a young man, became a merchant and community leader, and formed a family with Letticie “Ticie” Pruett despite laws and customs enforcing racial separation.

Drawing on interviews with nearly one hundred relatives, family papers and public archives, the memoir follows businesses, marriages, separations and generational conflict shaped by Chinese exclusion and anti-Asian prejudice. It presents Gold Mountain as both a promise of reinvention and a society in which commercial success never fully protects Chinese immigrants or their descendants from restrictive law and divided belonging.