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RETRACING HISTORY
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.
LISA SEE’S DONATION SHARES MOMENTS OF CHINESE AMERICAN CULTURE IN CALIFORNIA
BY ANDREW CHECCHIA
For 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
that year, about 500 Los Angeles residents — at the time meaning 1 in every 10 men — surrounded the neighborhood and stormed it, killing almost 20 locals, some by lynching.
“After the massacre, this was the time of a land boom in Southern California, so the city fathers had to take the position that this was a safe city, but I don’t think overnight it was like, ‘Oh, this is a safe city,’” says See, connecting the historical violence to the current increase in attacks against Asian Americans.
“One of the things I think is important is we don’t really learn from our mistakes. We don’t really learn from history.”
See and Yang hope these photos will help fill in gaps, turning the historical narrative from a solely tragic story to one with humanity. They believe these photos, which feature previously unseen moments in the daily lives of Chinese Americans, help paint a more vibrant picture of the folks who once lived in the marginalized neighborhood.
Overall, the pictures fall into three main categories. First there are the scenes of daily life. These include street shots of school children and workers, as well as more intimate images of local shopkeepers and restaurant owners.
One photo features a woman in motion as she crosses the street, a woman See described as of “ill repute,” referencing a stereotype, at the time, that assumed many Chinese women were prostitutes. This bias likely came from what Yang called a “huge gender imbalance,” then because the United States’ strict immigration laws made it nearly impossible for nonlaborers to enter the country legally. Instead, many women were kidnapped from China and forced into labor, sometimes brought or pressured into sex work.
“They wanted to market Chinatown and Chinese culture,” Yang says about the reasons for the candid photography. “People visited Chinatown as if they were visiting Disneyland (today).”
The second category comprised a set of formal studio portraits. When these photos were taken, mostly during the late 1800s to the early 1900s, photography underwent a kind of popular awakening. The era saw the rise of glass negatives, the first technology which allowed the public a degree of cheap, popular access to photography. After establishing themselves in the neighborhood, Chinese Americans would go to studios for family portraits.
“They would send it back home to China to say, ‘Look how well I’m doing,’” See says about the studio portraits.
See’s collection also includes what See and Yang speculate to be sample shots for studio customers — almost like early stock photos displayed as examples for backgrounds and costumes.
In the last major category in the set, there are formal immigration photos. These passport-style pictures were necessary during the period of legal Chinese Exclusion. This set of laws made it illegal for Chinese to immigrate to the United States, own property, or marry outside of their race and required all Chinese residents to “check in” with the government every six months. That process required a photo.
Aside from these, there are assorted photos of white Americans in studio settings, street scenes outside of Chinatown and a set from the 1880s during La Fiesta de Los Angeles, a festival that preceded the Rose Parade. The parade featured Chinese Americans celebrating their culture.
“The Chinese actually asked to participate to show off the multiculturalism of Los Angeles,” Yang says about the parade.
As a set, See’s photos aren’t quite ready for public viewing, still requiring the necessary cataloguing to put them in proper context. But as the Huntington opens up more in-person research opportunities, it hopes to reintroduce the public to its library exhibitions.
However, Yang hopes See’s photos can be displayed in tandem with other artifacts from Los Angeles’ Chinese American history. Along with scholars like Bill Deverell, who is the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, Yang envisions a historical map that highlights important photos in important locations around the city.
“That’s why this collection would be so vital. No one’s ever seen them before outside of Lisa’s family,” Yang says.
Yang was unable to give an exact timeline on the project’s completion but hopes to let the public see the works as soon as possible.
