Huntington Library's new garden celebrates Chinese culture

This is Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, where a carved wooden placard just beyond the entryway informs visitors that Another World Lies Beyond.

In an invitation-only event for hundreds of dignitaries, donors and supporters, the garden was formally dedicated Saturday after many years of work to bring one of the largest classical Chinese gardens outside China to Southern California.

"The garden is a magnificent window that the people of California now have into the Chinese culture, which doesn't exist anywhere else," Huntington board Chairman Stewart R. Smith said after the ceremony.

The garden's $18.3-million first phase was powered by a landmark partnership between the Huntington and the region's fast-growing and increasingly influential Chinese American community. The Huntington, long seen as a staid and largely Eurocentric institution, recognized that ethnic Chinese were rapidly changing the San Marino neighborhood -- and the world -- and sought the ethnic community's help in bringing a 20-year garden vision to fruition, according to Suzy Moser, assistant vice president for advancement.

"The garden is a way the Huntington can throw open its doors to an increasingly Chinese neighborhood and an increasingly Chinese world," she said.

To aid the project, the Chinese American community launched one of its broadest collective efforts to support a mainstream institution. Disregarding political and regional differences that have impeded community projects in the past, many Chinese Americans rallied to volunteer time, raise millions of dollars and use their all-important guanxi, or connections, to tap donors in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

For many of its supporters, the garden has given bloom to personal transformations, reconnections with their heritage, a new appreciation for their ancestors, a desire to pass on China's traditions to their children and the broader public.

Ginko Ching Lee, a 37-year-old artist, says the garden has helped heal her reluctance to fully embrace her Chinese heritage.

For years after immigrating to the United States from her native Hong Kong, Lee said she was slightly embarrassed about her heritage -- her accented English, for instance -- and deliberately sought distance from it by embracing Western design in her art.

The garden has drawn her back, offering comfort amid a successful fight against cancer. Now training to be a docent, Lee said a fragment of Chinese nature poetry she hated learning as a schoolgirl suddenly popped into her mind during a recent garden stroll, refreshing her with a new appreciation for its beauty.

"These Chinese impulses are bubbling out of me, and I don't restrain them," Lee said. "I'm able to accept myself and who I am, and it's a lot more healing."

Others say the garden has helped connect generations through distance and time. Richard Woo, a Portland, Ore., native and part-time consultant to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, learned during a Huntington lecture on Chinese gardens that one of the most famous sites actually belonged to his great-great-grandfather.

Gene Wen, a 38-year-old Beijing native and owner of a technology firm, is looking forward. He donated $10,000 and placed the name of his 6-year-old son, Edmond, on the garden's donor wall. Wen said he hopes the garden will inspire his son, who is bilingual and already learning to recite classic Chinese poetry, to continue embracing his Chinese heritage.

"It will help make this a special place for him," Wen said of the donor wall recognition. "Through that, maybe he'll feel an additional fondness and acceptance of the culture behind his garden."

Some supporters say they particularly appreciate the way the garden showcases an entirely different aspect of China -- a font of rich cultural traditions -- at a time when the country is often seen as a relentless economic competitor battered by news of unsafe toys, contaminated food, environmental crises and human-rights abuses.

Many hope the garden, which will open to the public Saturday, will spark interest and excitement about Chinese traditions among those who have never been exposed to them.

Dominic Ng, the East West Bank president who helped spearhead early fundraising efforts, said he imagines busloads of schoolchildren from all corners of Los Angeles discovering China through garden visits.

"Maybe some of them will say, 'This culture is cool,' and decide to study Chinese in school," said Ng, a native of Hong Kong who pledged $1 million on behalf of the bank and, with his employees, donated $50,000.