Fourth of July fireworks celebrate American independence. But they also serve as a reminder that for many decades in the 19th and 20th centuries, fireworks blazed the trail for Merced County's Chinese population.
Chinese New Year traditionally falls in February or late January, according to the Oriental calendar. And the people who invented gunpowder applied it the explosions of sound and color enjoyed by Americans today to their own lunar celebration.
The dramatic and difficult history of the Chinese hereabouts has been comprehensively chronicled by Sarah Lim in her 2000 master's thesis, "Remembering the Merced Chinese: The Builders of the Great Central Valley, 1860-1960."
Mercedians know Sarah as the hard-working and personable director of the Courthouse Museum and from her column in the Sun-Star. Her 204-page thesis for Cal State Stanislaus describes in both scholarly research and humane detail the little-known stories of a century-long presence of thousands of emigrants. They came from "The Middle Kingdom" -- so called because Chinese considered their culture the cradle of civilization -- to "Gold Mountain" -- California.
The thesis outlines the substantial and largely unknown contributions of Chinese people in developing many of the industries we take for granted today.
She focuses on the Chinese presence in five main parts of the county: Snelling, Merced Falls, Plainsburg/Le Grand, the Westside and Merced city. In order, those parts became populated by Chinese because of mining and agriculture; industrial workers and farm hands; mining and farming fields, then the railroad; cooks, fishermen and farm laborers; and the Southern Pacific Railroad Co., which helped lead to Merced's Chinatown.
Sarah sketches the broad historical currents which influenced the flow and ebb of why Chinese settled down where and when they did. National exclusionary laws combined with local ordinances and simple racial prejudice largely decided how many Chinese came here and determined what they did for a living.
And how they spent their spare time.
For instance, those forces caused the county's Chinese population to drop steadily -- from 746 in 1890 to 357 in 1900 to 278 in 1910 and finally to 135 in 1920 (including only 10 women).
Sprinkled throughout her carefully footnoted academic prose, like the gold nuggets that drew the first Chinese to California, are gems of personal stories. Take Lee Hang, a cook on the Kelsey ranch at Snelling from 1924 to 1931, where he made $30 a month. Horace Kelsey Jr. was a little boy when Hang worked at the ranch. He told Sarah the cook brought "beautiful flowers in springtime and firecrackers" after he visited his countrymen at Merced Falls. He made the boy his favorite pancakes. "Lee Hang was really good to me," he recalled to Sarah.
Or Kathleen Gong, a second-generation Chinese born in America who wrote an autobiography, "Inside the Oy Quong Laundry."
Unlike the Kelseys, who treated their Chinese workers with dignity and respect, other Mercedians seemed to go out of their way to make life as tough as they could for Chinese residents. While attending Fremont Grade School, eighth-grader Gong joined the choir. But when it was to perform in front of the whole school, the music teacher told her "just to move her mouth and not to sing at all. Such humiliation killed her love of singing forever. 'Even today, I have such a complex that I don't sing out loud,' she wrote."
Then there was Kam Ah See, who lived in Le Grand for decades, first moving there in 1897. For reasons that Sarah analyzes closely, the man who started as a sheepherder and laundryman morphed into a truck gardener, in 1925 shipping four tons of fruit.
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