A R T S A N D C U LT U R E
RETRACING
History
LISA SEE’S DONATION SHARES MOMENTS OF CHINESE AMERICAN CULTURE IN CALIFORNIA
The Huntington Library, a research hub associated with the popular San Marino museum and botanical gardens complex.
Li Wei Yang, the curator of the Huntington’s Pacific Rim Collections, stands by a series of prints from author Lisa See’s donated collection.
or years, the research and scholarly arm of the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino has sought out artifacts to preserve the legacy of Chinese American culture in California, with a focus on the development and transformation of Los Angeles’ Chinatown. Recently, thanks to a donation by author Lisa See, the Huntington received more than 100 glass photograph negatives that capture the history of the now-demolished Old Chinatown. Researchers at the Huntington are studying, developing and preparing the photographs for public viewing. See is the author of “On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family,” a popular account of her family’s history, including their immigration from China to the United States. See donated the photographs after realizing the negatives’ fragility. They were passed down from her grandfather to her father, then to her. While the hefty box had been in her family for years, a series of firerelated evacuations made her nervous about the photos’ safety. After evacuating her home twice in the past two years, she contacted the Huntington Library. See trusted the institution because she visited there to find her family’s immigration documents for her book in the library’s Y.C. Hong Collection. “If you were a scholar looking to do research on Los Angeles’ Chinatown, where would you go? I think it’s safe to say you’d come (to the Huntington),” See says. “(And) I knew that these were things that people haven’t seen.” Given the institution’s reputation, See felt comfortable working with curators like Li Wei Yang, who heads up the Huntington’s Pacific Rim Collections. Once he received See’s box of glass plates, Yang used the Huntington’s “state-of-the-art” photo lab to develop them into high-resolution digital images. They amazed See after her years of straining to see the delicate images by holding them up to windows. Once digitized, the images will be preserved and catalogued — the latter process requiring lengthy periods of scholarly collaboration to identify the people, places and events in the pictures. “It takes a lot of resources to keep (glass plate negatives) safe,” Yang says. “In a way, we’re in a race against time. These things aren’t going to last forever, no matter how good you take care of them.” Fortunately, See’s family took good care of them. But the origins of how her grandfather and father received the photos is unclear. Two theories are likely. First, her grandfather and father — who owned the F. Suie One Co., the oldest Asian antique store in Los Angeles — may have gone scavenging around Old Chinatown after parts of it were abandoned but before they were torn down. They may have stumbled across the heavy box and taken it back with them. “My father and grandfather just kind of went scavenging,” See says. “One of the things (they found) was a box of glass plate negatives.” Alternatively, See thinks her family might have discovered the photos while working at F. Suie One, which, at the time, was located at 510 Los Angeles Street. Some of the photos are marked with that address and “the name of a photo studio,” meaning the box could have been left behind by a previous tenant. Old Chinatown comprised the blocks near Downtown Los Angeles, where Union Station now stands. Most of the blocks were demolished during the station’s construction, so the historical record of the neighborhood’s daily culture remains fuzzy at best. The popular understanding of its history is largely informed by the 1871 massacre that took place there. In October of
Photos by Andrew Checchia
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BY ANDREW CHECCHIA
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