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Capturing the Stuff of Dreams

‘Chinatown Dreams: The Life and Photographs of George Lee’

By Terry Hong |Special to AsianWeek

In stark contrast to today’s Santa Cruz — known for its beaches and boardwalk, its sun, surf and sand — the Santa Cruz of the past, from the late 1880s to 1955, was home to four successive Chinatowns in the downtown area. The many generations of the fourth and final Chinatown, which was destroyed when the San Lorenzo River flooded in 1955, are captured in George Lee’s black-and-white images.

George Lee, a second generation Chinese American born in 1922, began taking pictures as a teenager in the 1930s. He served in World War II, then in the Korean War as a military photographer for the U.S. Navy. He took pictures for the Santa Cruz Sentinel and other publications for 30 years, as well as contributing several award-winning images to the Associated Press. When he passed away at age 76 in 1998, the book project was three years in the making.

“George Lee was modest to a fault, and he would downplay the book,” says Dunn, the book’s editor, whose own family ties to George Lee go back 80 years. “But he would also have been very proud of it.”

Chinatown Dreams is a tribute lovingly compiled as a series of personal essays and poems. Designed by San Francisco-based designer Mark Ong, the result is a stunning display of lingering images and loving text. While the majority of the book’s pictures are reminiscent of an extended family album, the history captured within its pages is also very much the story of Chinese America.

“George Lee, I believe, is one of the premiere Chinese American documentary photographers,” says Dunn, “and his collected works are really unique to American documentary photography. I don’t know of any other collections, at least on the West Coast, that document such an extensive array of Chinese American history from the inside.”

More than Chinese American history, Dreams is also a universal immigrants’ tale. “As the son of destitute Russian Jewish immigrants, I am aware of the brutal early years in the U.S. for so many of our families — their sufferings, persecutions, humiliations and especially their dreams of the future for (and through) their children,” says Morton Marcus who contributed the poems “The Immigrant’s Lament” and “The Photographer Remembers” which serve as the bookends for the five personal essays in Dreams. “I was concerned … with the experience of exile — the sense of being a stranger in a strange land, an outsider who carries in his or her soul not only the old ways but now the lost ways of the old country, ways he or she will always long for but are gone forever.…Uncle George caught that estrangement in the faces of the old men and women, and it was that sense of being torn in two directions that I wanted to get across in both my poems,” he adds.

The isolation of previous generations that Lee captures so effectively is the focus of Sandy Lydon’s essay, “Always on the Outside: Santa Cruz and Its Many Chinatowns.” Lydon, author of Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region, juxtaposes the “Chinese muscle [which] built California” with the sense of the utter ostracism that Chinese Americans faced through more than half of the 20th century. But in spite of that difficult history, Lydon remembers Lee as a community magnet: “He was the ‘public Chinese’ in Santa Cruz, the one that everyone knew, the one that every school kid pestered when doing a project about China, the one who was interviewed at the start of every lunar new year. He was the go-between, the conduit between the Chinese community and everyone else. But, his photographs elevated him to the position of a chronicler, preserving the memory of a community that would otherwise slide off into the dustbins of history.”

At the crux of that history is George Ow, Jr., a Santa Cruz native who is also George Lee’s nephew. His essay, “I Remember Chinatown” is the heart of Dreams; indeed, Ow’s dreams have all but come true, much of which he credits to the Chinatown generations that came before him. Pointing to the book’s cover, Ow recalls the legions of elderly “uncles” who populated his Chinatown childhood. These images of the Chinese American men who arrived in the late 19th century who, due to exclusionary racist immigration and anti-miscegenation laws, were condemned to live out their lives as isolated bachelors, represent the book at its most powerful.

“I can be with Ah Fook again as a five-year-old, as he imbues me — look at his hand on my arm — to be his champion in living out his unfulfilled dreams,” says Ow. Indeed, in all his myriad of successes, Ow speaks most passionately about “payback.” He describes his extensive philanthropical ventures as “payback to all the generations before me that helped ensure my successes. I was born under a lucky star. I had the advantages the older generations never did. So I’m paying back by helping to ensure the success of others.”

Like his nephew Ow, Lee, too, was a connector. In “East Side, West Side, All Around the Town,” James D. Houston writes about Lee’s childhood connections to Santa Cruz history. Houston, co-author of Farewell to Manzanar with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, currently lives in the house that Lee frequented as a youngster, in which Lee discovered a long-forgotten darkroom that he used as a teenager, an opportunity that cemented his life-long dedication to photography. Houston’s home, a sprawling Santa Cruz victorian, was previously owned by candy maker James Frazier Reed, the grandson of one of the co-organizers of the ill-fated Donner Party, the most tragic of the westward migrations that began in 1846. Houston published Snow Mountain Passage in 2001, based on the family’s experience. Here the youngest Donner survivor lived her final years. And here, Lee often visited as a child, the honorary grandson the family wished they had had.

These are the kind of connections most important to local diversity consultant Tony Hill, who draws similarities between the Chinese American experience and, in his case, the African American experience. Hill’s essay, “Sharing the American Dream,” refers to a single photo in Lee’s collection of a smiling David Lee Ow (George Ow’s brother) with his African-American friend, Oscar Presley, circa 1948. Hill calls it “an anomaly so significant, so immense, that I can think of no other similar image in the American experience.” The two young boys “are united by the ways in which Asian and African Americans were targeted at the time by mainstream white racism and everyday prejudices. They are ‘allies’ in their marginalization,” writes Hill. More than half a century later, says Hill, those “as yet unfulfilled dreams of equality and ‘justice for all’ [need to] be embraced and reframed.”

Again, racism also affected the family of Ow's cousin, Lisa Liu Grady. In "She Stands," Grady recalls her favorite photo by Lee, which shows Grady's grandmother and her two young sons in front of the house that she had just bought on her own: "the photo captured my grandmother's pride in owning a piece of the American Dream," says Grady. But the underlying tragedy is what is missing from the 1948 picture. Because of the exclusion laws, Grady's grandfather was prevented as a Chinese citizen (albeit married to a U.S. cititzen!) from entering the country and therefore separated from his family for seven years. "My Grandmother, therefore, was raising her children on her own, earning a living for the family, and to have saved enough to own a home was truly an accomplishment, " says Grady.

After seven years, Chinatown Dreams is also such an accomplishment. As an important chronicle of almost-forgotten history, the book is a vision of the past that needs to be preserved for the future. Even though the breakfast club carries on without Lee, his legacy undoubtedly lives on, not only within his extended family and local community, but now for all of posterity to come.

To order Chinatown Dreams, check out www.capitolabook.com or visit your local bookseller.