"Chinese in Mendocino County" by Lorraine Hee-Chorley in Conversation

The book was written many years ago at the request of Arcadia Press to write about the Chinese in Mendocino County. The author wanted to write in first person as the history was passed down by her father. She felt excluded from the organization that researched the town's history. Mendocino used to be a logging town and is now a tourist destination. The area had anti-Chinese sentiments and there were incidents of violence against Chinese immigrants. The author doesn't have much information about the Chinese railroad workers, but there were instances of discrimination and violence against them. The book was written, oh gosh, I can't even, it's many years ago, and it really was written because Arcadia Press had asked if I would write, you know, a brief book, basically, because it had to be briefed based on their guidelines, about the Chinese in Mendocino County. And I agreed, and they only agreed because I had to specify that I could use first person when I was writing, because one of their requirements is that you weren't, it was a no-no to write in first person, but because a good majority of the history that I know is history that has been passed down by my father through oral conversations with him. And so, there was, the only way to be realistic and also to really come from the heart was to write in first person about the history that I remembered, you know, from our conversations. So, I take it your father passed away? Yeah, my father passed away just a few months after I finished graduate school in the 70s, in the late 70s. What did you study in graduate school? I had studied communications, and I'm actually a graduate. The college name has been changed several times. It's called Cal Poly of Humboldt, but at the time that I attended it, it was Humboldt State University. And even though my discipline and my degree is under the communications of the humanities aspect of it, it was a combination of basically communications and social science, technically. Humboldt was a unique college in the sense that I was able to actually combine a couple of disciplines to be able to write about the theory that I wanted to write about in regards to my master's degree. And so, I kind of created, you know, pulled courses from the communications field, but also from social science as well as history to create the degree sort of, you know, study, degree of study that I wanted to pursue, and my actual committee allowed that to happen. And you wrote the book several decades later. Absolutely, yeah. And basically, the book was, you know, the whole purpose of the book was to write from the point of view of descendants that grew up in Mendocino County. And I was really kind of tired of hearing from perspectives of other individuals that were non-Asians and giving their viewpoints of what was right and what was wrong. And unfortunately, when I was away at college, there was an organization that was formed in the town of Mendocino, and they were doing all the research about the town of Mendocino. They did interview my dad, but I felt it was like a slap in the face that when they created their very first book about the town of Mendocino and its history, it made everybody who they interviewed an honorary member of their organization, with the exception of my father, who was Chinese. Everybody else was white. What was the organization? And no offense, because it's changed over time. It was called the Kelly House. At the time, it was called Mendocino Historical Research. And what year would that have been? Oh, gosh, I don't know. In the late 70s, in about 1978, 79. Okay, and that was in Mendocino, so you were aware of Kelly House. Correct. You grew up kind of near it and felt excluded from it. Technically, yes. We literally only lived about a block away. Okay. Yeah, I did notice that in a lot of the photographs in your book, the presence of one Chinese person in a crowd of otherwise Caucasian people was kind of the norm rather than any sort of exception. Yes. The only actual pictures of the Chinese would be pictures that family relatives have had over the years. But historically, a lot of pictures weren't taken of the Chinese back at that time period. And if you go to the Kelly House, who has now an extensive historic background photographs, that there really isn't a whole lot of photographs available, you know, in relationship to the Chinese. I wanted to ask about Mendocino. I've been to Mendocino. It's a surfing town. Is that right? Sort of. It's not designed to be a surfing town because the town itself is about 90 feet above the ocean sea level. Okay. Then that's something else I might be thinking of. I've been up there, like above San Francisco a few times, and one time it was because my friend was going surfing. But another time it could have been something a little higher up. So maybe I'm confusing it a little bit. But I wanted to ask just from your perspective how its activity industry relates to the rest of the region, the Bay Area. Basically, Mendocino has been sort of labeled, the whole coastal area has been labeled as a tourist destination. And historically, it was a very active logging town and supplied a lot of lumber to the rest of the area down, especially in the San Francisco area, you know, for building. But now, because of the way the economy has, is that we are basically pretty rural. So we are like three and a half hours, depending on how you drive, three to three and a half hours north of San Francisco. And it's not a straight stretch. Basically, to come over to the coast, you actually have to go over very curvy roads. And even though the roads are up, the upkeep is fairly decent, and they are state highways, it still can be kind of treacherous. Like, for example, a couple weeks ago, one of the access into the town of Mendocino was cut off because at the Navarro River, the sandbar was built up so high that it was flooding the highway. Because part of the highway is almost relatively level to the water level of the river. And so when the sandbar actually builds up, it blocks the water from flowing out to sea, and so it has no place to go but to expand. And so that road was actually closed for over a week before it was breached. The sandbar was breached, and then it opened the area up again, and people could use 128. And while it was closed off, they would have to actually take a roundabout way to travel into the town of Mendocino, which took them about 15 or 20 minutes, depending, again, how you drive, length of time, additional length of time. And, again, that was a very curvy road that really is a county road and not a state highway. So it's a very narrow road. I lived in the Bay Area for about four years in Palo Alto, and as a graduate student at Leland Stanford Junior University. And one of the things that brought me to your book was keyword searches in historical newspaper archives for the history of the area in the 19th century. So one of the things that one of my graduate advisors was working on was the effective enslavement, I think, of Chinese people as railroad workers on the orders or the dime of Leland Stanford. He also implemented a quarantine in San Francisco in the 19th century, or tried to, at least. I don't know if it really went into effect. That was, of course, like, Palo Alto is almost like as south of San Francisco as Mendocino is north. What do you know about, like, the Chinese railroad workers? Very little, because there really isn't a direct connection with railroads in our area to Leland Stanford, even though his attitude did permeate up to the north coast. And basically, the attitudes of the anti-Chinese movement did reach up to the north coast and took hold pretty firmly in various communities, such as Point Arena and Westport and Fort Bragg. And basically, Point Arena had monthly meetings that actually their focus was to figure out how they could get rid of the Chinese. And they actually had an elected official from Point Arena that would go to Sacramento to the big organization of the anti-Chinese movement. Whereas in Westport, one of the things that they did was they just actively just tried to burn them out. Any time a Chinese person would come to reside and they had a building, Westport community would actually literally go and burn the buildings down. I've had reports from a gentleman who lives down the block from me talk about his uncle, used to talk to him about bragging about when his uncle was young, that he and his friends on the weekend would go down to the town of Mendocino and burn buildings down in Chinatown in the town of Mendocino. Fort Bragg, again, was pretty active as well. Maybe not on a daily basis, but one of the things that they're really noted for is in 1992, and it was January 1st, the Union Lumber Company had brought Chinese laborers in from San Francisco area to dig the tunnels to create a rail line crossing Fort Bragg all the way over to Willis so that they could ship their lumber that way instead of shipping all the lumber by sea. And when they brought these special laborers in, because these men had experience working on the railroads and digging through tunnels without dynamite, that they employed these men to come up and do the same thing as dig these tunnels that the Sierra Railroad now owns to be able to create this rail line. And so when they were brought in the night that they arrived on the ship and brought into the camps right out on the outskirts of where they were to dig, that the group of citizens, and there were councilmen in there as well as citizens, and then, as the newspaper says, it was really outsiders. I don't necessarily agree with the newspaper, but they met these laborers and beat them up and then escorted them down to the Noyle River and told them to keep walking south and don't return. So these Chinese men, laborers, did walk down to the town of Mendocino, and there were several people within the town of Mendocino that actually took them in and got them medical help. And basically they stayed, according to the history, is that they stayed at the Carson Hotel, which was down in the Chinatown area. But the next day it was, because the Union Lumber Company was the major financial backer of the city of Fort Bragg, they had those laborers brought back to Fort Bragg to complete their job, but they were brought back under protective custody by the county sheriff. And the judge had ordered that they be brought back under protective custody so that they could complete their job. And unfortunately, the judge and the sheriff weren't reelected, of course, because of the attitude of the community, but these Chinese laborers did finish digging that tunnel through the mountains so that the rail line could be completed. Unfortunately, as of today, about five years ago, those tunnels actually were caved in through, you know, they're about 150 years old, and Sierra Railroad has not repaired those tunnels. And they keep saying they're going to, but I don't think that they have any intention of opening the tunnels up so that the railroad, the rail line can go from Fort Bragg to Willits again and be active. Thank you. Another question about sort of the regional dynamics has to do with interaction, to whatever extent there was or wasn't, between immigrants from China and Latinos in the area. There wasn't a whole lot of, as far as I know in terms of the research that I've done, I really have not come across a lot of information about the Latinos in the 19th century there in Fort Bragg and Mendocino. A lot more interaction with, in terms of the Portuguese and the Chinese, because the majority of the population that were residing in Fort Bragg and Mendocino were basically Finnish, Portuguese, and also residents from New England. But again, I've never run across any articles about the Hispanics. Today, that is the case, because I would say at least 25%, and I think that's very low, of the population within the Mendocino as well as the Fort Bragg area is Hispanic. And that the population of the Chinese or Asian in general is very small. It's less than 1%. One of the things I found really special about your book, Chinese in Mendocino County, I mean, is this combination of an extremely rich, comprehensive history from a kind of disciplinary perspective with a unique vantage point of your personal experience and connection to that history. Which is to say, we get to see a lot of family photos, which are, I mean, very rare, like nothing I've ever seen before. And I wanted to ask whether, because this is something that in Anglophone literary studies I have paid a lot of attention to, and it has to do with kind of forming families, but not necessarily. Whether there's any difference from your perspective between gender and sex relations internally in Chinese communities in comparison to in, you know, European communities. I would say yes, but it's kind of, it's difficult for me to say exactly because I was raised in a biracial family. Technically, my mother was white and my father was Chinese. And as I was telling someone the other day, I'm predominantly, my background is basically Chinese because my father played a very pivotal role in our childhood. And because he came from a very strong traditional Chinese family, even though my grandmother was actually born on the property that we were raised on, and she carried that concept of the traditional family of the Asian family onward to my father. And he had hoped that it would be instilled and carried on with us. But as you know, as generations progress, that becomes less and less. And one of the things that my dad really made a point of doing was, you know, by the time we could walk and talk, we knew our family history. We knew exactly where my great-grandfather came from. We knew that we had an obligation and a promise to keep, you know, from not just our great-grandfather, but from our grandmother to our father. Because we have a Taoist temple that is 170 years old, and it's still intact. And as someone said last week that I had given a tour to her, that it's very different from all the buildings in the town of Mendocino. The town of Mendocino is classified as a national landmark and is officially a historic district. So no construction can just happen within the town. It has to go through a special review process. And there's all these special guidelines that one needs to follow. And one of the very specific and stringent guidelines is the paint colors of buildings. And if you walk around Mendocino, or even drive around Mendocino, most of the town colors are very pastel. They're either white, gray, or dusty pink, or very pale blue, etc. And when you drive down Albion Street to the west side of Albion Street, here stands the Taoist temple, and it is the brightest red and green that you can see. And it sticks up all over town. And when you park across the vista point on the south end of the entrance of Mendocino, you can see this temple, the peak of the temple, the red and green building sticking up. Or if you go to the Mendocino Headlands and stand on the farthest point of the Mendocino Headlands and look up, you can see the temple again is bright red and green. And it's, you know, the building has been painted and has been kept that color because of its historic factors. Because if you're familiar with Taoist temples, that I was taught that all Taoist temples are painted red and green. And they're significant in regards to the colors that are utilized, you know, for the temple itself, because red is good luck, or means joy, and green means life or prosperity. And so this temple has always been painted this color as long as I can remember as a child. And so one of the things that's very different, and the one thing that my father made sure he would not assimilate to was to make sure that this building was always painted red and green and stood out within the community, even though at the time I was growing up, the community did not want to acknowledge this structure. That's okay. The interesting thing is that, you know, through all the things of, you know, the fires that have happened within the town, and especially the Chinatown that was on the Mendocino Headlands was basically destroyed by fire. This temple still remains standing and has, and even survived the 1906 earthquake that happened, you know, really, you know, affected San Francisco, but it also affected Mendocino as well, because a lot of buildings were destroyed because of the way they were constructed. But this temple wasn't affected. And it could be because of the god at Housensai. Some people know him as Guangdong. I know him as Guangdai. And he is known as the god of protection. The little translation of him is that he is the god of war, because when he was alive, the general, he was a real-life general, a very successful general in the Chinese culture. And so he is really well known within the Chinese culture for protecting. And so I believe, I believe that he's been doing his job for the last 170 years. I read your book in the Kindle edition, which is freely available on Amazon. There's also a paperback and a hardcover edition. I found the photo quality and access, accessibility quite, quite friendly on the Kindle version. Someone wanted to purchase a paper copy. Is there a significant difference in the quality of the paper and image between the hardcover and the paperback? You know, I, to be honest with you, I've never seen the hardcover. All I have are the paperbacks. And it's not on cheap paper. It's on very high end. The weight of the paper is more than 20 pounds. And it's, and it's, and it's glossy. It's on glossy paper. And that book can be acquired through Amazon. It can be acquired through the Temple's website as well. And in addition to, if you Google it, I'm sure it will pop up, you know, almost anywhere. And it's, and it's also available at the, our local real live book, bookstore that we actually have. We have a very large bookstore in the town of Mendocino. I'll link to the Temple website for purchase in the description for this recording when I upload it. Okay. Okay. Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you. Thank you. Anytime. Anytime. You too. Nice to meet you. Bye.