Remembering a Debt
Visitors to the “Gum San: Land of the Golden Mountain” exhibit at the Old Courthouse Museum here might expect to see artifacts and photographs from China. Instead, items from Nevada, Montana, Oregon, Washington and California fill the displays.
And that’s the point. The exhibit is designed to highlight the often overlooked contributions of the Chinese in the history of the West. From 1876 to 1890, steamships deposited about 200,000 of them on this coast, including Orange County.
When the show opened June 1, among the first in line were Raymond Jung of Laguna Niguel, whose California ties date to the 1870s, and Ernest Lum of Laguna Beach. The men, both Chinese Americans, said they were eager to see a series of historical black-and-white photographs chronicling the daily life of their ancestors.
The exhibit also incorporates contemporary photographs by Barry Peril, whose work has appeared at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City of places frequented by the Chinese newcomers. His photos depict interior views of temples, gambling houses, council chambers and exterior shots of aging canneries, ranch cook houses and railroad construction sites. One image captures the walls of stacked stone that wound through the gold-mining camps, where many of the immigrants found work.
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Fifty or so artifacts help flesh out the pictures. Clothing, cooking utensils, medicines, incense, Buddhist funeral papers, daggers and an opium pipe all made the trip from the High Desert Museum of Bend, Ore., for which curator Robert Boyd created the exhibit. The California Council for the Humanities sponsored its tour here; next stop, the Napa Valley Museum.
“This is the first time we’ve had such an exhibit here,” said Marshall Duell, curator of the Old Courthouse Museum, which usually confines itself to local history. “It is important because it allows us to provide information for a group that is underrepresented and it allows us to be open to another audience.”
“Gum San” features photos from Orange County, which had a large Chinese community in the 1870s, Duell said. “Santa Ana at one time had a very large Chinatown, and in Anaheim, the Chinese accounted for one-sixth of the population.”
Yong Chen, a UC Irvine professor of history and Asian American studies, said many of the county’s early agricultural workers were Chinese. Today, Chinese Americans account for about 2% of the county’s population, Chen said, while Asian Americans make up about 10%.
“There is an increasing Asian American presence--especially Chinese American--in Orange County,” Chen said. “Most are recent immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, and most are not aware there was a very significant Chinese presence in the county dating back to the 19th century.”
Upon the exhibit’s arrival earlier this month, Paul G. Chace presented a slide lecture, “Dancing With the Dragon--California Style,” that focused on Marysville’s Bok Kai Festival, a century-old tradition marking the Chinese New Year.
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Chace, a specialist in Chinese American history and a former curator of anthropology at San Bernardino County Museum, believes that event has come to symbolize civic harmony and multicultural cooperation. The contemporary Bok Kai Festival, he said, has evolved into a uniquely California historical and cultural event involving people of many heritages.
“[It’s] not about religion, history or business,” he said. “It is a civic festival that depicts the civic harmony of our common humanity. Marysville is an example of California gone right, of everyone living together in harmony.”
* “Gum San: Land of the Golden Mountain” runs through Aug. 28 at the Old Courthouse Museum, 211 W. Santa Ana Blvd., Santa Ana. Mondays-Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (714) 834-3703.
