Imperial (244 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
About one of these sheets my translators would inform me: “The paper is symmetrically split in half and divided by perforations. Both halves are the same in terms of content. The right side is meant for the person who paid the money. The left side is for the person who received the money and recorded the transaction (treasurer at Wong Kong Ja Tong). After the transaction is made, the paper is then folded in half, and each half is given to the person it is meant for. In between the two halves, a large ‘Number 180’ is partly handwritten, partly pre-printed. That way, when the halves are once again brought together and placed side by side, the perfect match in calligraphy will prove its validity. Not having a perfect match up will prove that one of the people forged the receipt. This was to prevent stealing both inside and outside of the tong.”
In reference to loneliness, I can’t quote you equivalent figures for the Mexicali Valley, but in 1910, the overall sex ratio in the Imperial Valley was 125.5 males per one hundred females. (“There is no female help to be had in that valley.”) For Indians this figure was 104 to one, for Japanese, 562, and for Chinese, an astounding 1,017 to one. For this they could thank the Chinese Exclusion Act. No wonder that so many of the Gold Mountain Songs dwell on the following happy phantasm: “I turn around, and I’m no longer a part of that miserable lot! . . . Right now I can open a bank . . . I will buy land, build a house and get myself a concubine.”
When I was in China, my interpreter said to me: “Every Chinese always believes that every store has a life, but a life longer than people. Never die.”
It is unclear to me as to whether or not the word “Tong” is now considered perjorative. The Ngs used it without discomfort; Clare Ng assured me that it was a “good” word. Carmen Jaham tried to define it for me and couldn’t. Steve Leung said: “Used to be, society, or some sort of a club, a different kind of thing; maybe it’s Mandarin, I’m not really sure, since I just speak Cantonese. I guess they are really more underground society. I guess they are Mafia, actually.” Yet Wong Kong Ja Tong was not considered a Mafia.
The second most popular point of commonality was work (in other words, a Tong could be equivalent to a guild); thirdly, a Tong might support people from the same city or district of origin.
When I read him these two letters, Steve Leung remarked that he considered this “a common case.”
“I think the husband come because those people they are from small village and over there they don’t have the chance to make a big living. They say in the beginning they need to pay for the people taking care of the visa and apply for them. He said in 1990, after they came, first they come on a tourist visa or something, but in 1992 the new Mexican president was really nice to the Chinese, so he said everybody can get a green card over there.”
Jasmine Brambilla Auyón believed that “the Chinese suffered more” than anyone, “because they were the first ones to come to Mexicali. It was uninhabited. They started building, litle by litle, and started establishing the business commerce.”
“That one, its members come from a certain geographic association in China. Others often come from the last name.”
José López from Jalisco sometimes stayed at the Nuevo Pacífico when he was flush, which was rarely; he never rented any of the girls; he liked the safe, clean rooms and the showers. He’d never seen the tunnels which Daniel Ávila mentioned. I had visited the Nuevo Pacífico myself on various nights, and when my companion of the hour led me past the reception desk and far down that U-shaped concrete hall with its stairwells and its closed doors (the ones which were closed for business purposes were so indicated by clots of toilet paper jammed into the doorframe), I also used to watch for darkly mysterious descents, but, as Lupe Vásquez, another habitué of the place remarked, the Nuevo Pacífico was not the kind of place where you’d be allowed to wander around.
She got married in that Methodist church, although she later became a Catholic. About the tunnels she simply remarked: “It was hot, so they slept there.”
Guangdong.
Before his thirty-two-year tenure there must have been many other changes of all kinds. Sad to say, it was right here that the May 1923 fire did its worst. Unlucky Mexicali! First the Colorado River flood of 1905, then this; in 1940 an earthquake would start another fire; there’d be a fire after that. (According to Mr. Auyón, the fire of 1940 was the big fire.) One of the Chinese tunnel letters from 1923 reads: “I recently heard that Huan-Jiang-Xia General Association was burned to ashes; however there was no casualty. What is the insurance?” The writer is worried about his loans, whether paying them back or getting repaid is unclear. Another letter informs us that “Huan-Jiang-Xia General Association is holding its grand opening in the Third City,” which may or may not be Mexicali. Unfortunately, it is undated, so we don’t know whether this was the first opening or a reopening after it arose from its ashes.
When asked, Señorita Xu reassured me that I had not behaved incorrectly, which was a relief; I’d never been welcome; after the first quarter-hour I’d finally invited myself to sit down. José López from Jalisco had been translating, and he later told me that the old Chinese had refused to answer many questions, a difficulty which José had tried to solve by raising his voice and stepping closer and closer to the poor old man, who probably noticed that José didn’t smell so good; José had slept last night in some abandoned buildings by Condominios Montealbán, slept poorly, in fact, because there had been a shootout between district police and federal police after the federal police had gotten drunk in a nightclub; José had worried about getting shot by a stray bullet, and frankly admitted to me that on account of his sleeplessness, his loyal best with Señorita Xu’s uncle might not have been good enough; all the same, the old man might have been more cooperative if only his wife hadn’t been there; it was all her fault. I told him it was all right and invited him into my room at the Hotel Chinesca to take a shower. When I closed my eyes, the old man’s almost wrinkleless face swam before me. I closed my eyes more tightly, and saw blackness.
She knew me and liked me, but refused to let me photograph her down there.
I was happy to learn that the Chinese whom Clare and Rosalyn Ng interviewed for me usually said that most Mexicans were decent to them. For instance, “Tim said that at school, the Spanish and the non-Spanish keep to themselves. Fluent Spanish-speaking Chinese stay with the Mexicans. There is no animosity between them, though. Most of the Mexicans even know all the Cantonese bad words, but do [not] use them with an insulting intention, only jokingly.”
Mr. Leung’s class outlook was multidimensional. On the one hand, he was a successful scion of a small business dynasty. And “in China even though I was in an elementary school, two years I was staying in a boarding religion school, so I didn’t have any hardship, let’s put it that way. I was living with my aunt, in a high medium class society.” On the other hand, he frankly believed that “the Maoist revolution I think was very helpful for Chinese. That first time I went was in 1965. At that time Mexico and China didn’t have any relations. So they took our Mexican passport, my father and I, in Hong Kong, and gave us some sort of credential that we were citizens of Hong Kong, and when we came out of Hong Kong, they give us Chinese citizenship, and then Mexican. We were very closely supervised at that time by somebody. At that time we had a lot of relative in China from my mother’s side; at that time I was in business administration; I had a way to peek into the way they were thinking; they were not too much in agreement with the government, although the older generation was too much happy with the government for giving them a job. But the younger generation, they didn’t know what was an automatic transmission even. So they kind of released some tension with the Cultural Revolution.”
In Los Angeles in 1930, both genders of
unskilled labor, American,
will earn fifty to sixty cents per hour, while
unskilled labor, Mexican,
will make forty-five to fifty cents per hour.
The reader surely remembers that this man is a fiercely compassionate advocate of Imperial Valley field workers. Therefore, the following description of working Latinas should be construed not as an ethnic slur but an artifact of his generation’s (and class’s) interpretation of gender roles. What strikes Taylor as loudness of taste would have been captivatingly vibrant to many men who met the belles of Alta California. As for the cheap jewelry, well,
predominantly Indian
women had not yet ceased being poor.
Department of Water and Power.
The Colorado has been bridged at Yuma for only five years. Catarino Mesina still finds it profitable to run a stage line from Mexicali to the river’s mouth; I suppose that Laguna Dam and Imperial’s thirst have not yet narrowed the Colorado into finitude.
Presumably Elizabeth’s acres, which she will sell off in late 1926, are the Donley lands which her husband had conveyed to her as Superior Court Commissioner. They lie in Township 15 S, Range 16 E, Section 35, and the Larson Ranch consists of either four or five lots over in Range 13 E, Sections 4 and 5.
This was true in part. As we saw, California’s Mexican land grants did get subdivided.
An anomalous shortage of irrigation water may also have affected this decision.
Moreover, 1936 was the most lucrative year for cantaloupes since 1929—no matter that carrots lost money or barely broke even. Imperial’s lettuce-gamblers had lost, but they would have been consoled if an economist explained to them that the booming rewards of our free market must sometimes be paid for by “corrections.”
In 4-5-doz. crates, F.O.B., 6-doz. crates being priced lower.
This distinction remains unclear to many of the attendees—for instance, Don Deol, who must be a small local grower, since none of these titans seem to know him and since he was born here in the Valley. He says straightforwardly and sincerely: “There are a lot of us that only grow forty acres of lettuce—thirty acres of lettuce—fifteen acres of lettuce. Now, if the market is eighty-five cents, or eighty cents or seventy cents, why, we stand a chance to lose, and there are a lot of them small little growers. But if we can have a program where it can be prorated then we’d at least have a chance to say to the companies ‘well, take over my field and pack it and ship it for me.’ ”
The great printmaker-muralist José Clemente Orozco was in New York when it happened, his already bitter sensibility sharpened by the Mexican Revolution, his feelings about Northside enhanced by the loss of a number of his drawings—officials of the United States had seized and destroyed them in order to protect citizens from their moral pollution—and so he reported on the crash with the same mordant coolness as he had done describing the disasters of his own country: “Office boys no longer bet on whether the boss would commit suicide but on whether he would do it before or after lunch.” A Northsider—John Steinbeck, for instance—would have told the tale with more compassion. To a Southsider, it was simply what it was, and what Orozco kept seeing—queues of hungry bankrupts in the snow, “red-faced, hard, desperate, angry men, with opaque eyes and clenched fists”—did perhaps excite his compassion, but also, I should suppose, his cautious realism; he recognized class hatred when he saw it.
Another Northsider puts this more kindly: “Because it had a vested interest in the crucial resource that made its own lands economically useful” . . . the company became “the staunchest defender of Mexico’s rights to an equitable share of Colorado River water at a moderate price—rights that some people north of the border contested . . .”
Imperial County now holds six hundred thousand fertile acres.
According to the Bureau of Reclamation, “the river’s flow can be manipulated in the same fashion as the garden hose on the tap outside your home, and is.”
Formerly called Boulder Dam; hence formerly referred to as such in this book.
The Colorado River Land Company discovered the vast Mexicali aquifer in 1923, and promptly began to tap into it, since no water concessions were needed.
In Edith’s obituary, her daughter describes the marriage: “Happily, the love of her life . . . Jack Donlevy, was then living in Mexicali where he owned Donlevy Bourbon . . . In her later years she loved to tell of going to Mexicali with him . . . It was a town brimming of [
sic
] celebrities and movie stars who would come for legal alcohol, Donlevy Bourbon, gambling and hunting.”