For fifteen year's Sam Share's black and white photo of Paperson's
1950 fourth of July picnic hung on the walls of most Chinese American
households. The picture, which appeared on Life magazine's Miscellany
page, should have merited a thousand words, at least according to
that tradition of Chinese proverbs that only Americans seem to quote.
Instead, it got a two sentence caption.
“The town of Paperson celebrates the 4th of July and both
the American revolution and the Chinese revolution of 1911. This year's
picnic in America's last self-contained Chinatown raised over ten
thousand dollars for the cause of democracy in China.”
This is what was in the picture. A statue of Dr. Sun Yat Sen holds
the center. A Chinese boy in a baseball uniform and a girl twirling
a baton sit on his lap and turn Dr. Sun into a cross between a Chinese
George Washington and Santa Claus. Behind Dr. Sun a group of Chinese
men dressed in sportshirts and women in bermuda shorts and sundresses
wave a mixture of American and Nationalist flags. In one corner a
woman hands out slices of watermelon next to a table filled with bottles
of soda and cups of tea. A man in an apron grills hamburgers and hot
dogs while those in line carry paper plates filled with a mixture
of chow mein, rice, and cole slaw. In another corner, an impromptu
baseball game is being played. If you look closely, the bases are
twenty pound sacks of rice. There are almost as many women as men.
Young families outnumber the handful of elderly men. It must be noon
because there are no shadows.
This is what isn't in the picture. Three quarters of the population
of Paperson was male and over the age of fifty five. The gambling
house, the heart of the town's economy, can't be seen. Several of
the women in the photo were prostitutes recruited to pose for the
picture for five dollars each. Most of the children came from Sacramento
and Stockton. The photographer chalked an “O” on the grass
where each child was to pose just to keep the spacing right. Henry
Luce was angry at Madame Chiang for raising millions in the United
States for Chinese relief and then finding that almost none of the
money made it to China. It devastated Luce that the country he had
been born in as the son of American protestant missionaries was now
communist. My grandfather hired a publicist to encourage Chinese families
to settle in Paperson. For three thousand dollars, the publicist got
a hold of Sam Share, the man who had photographed the explosion of
the Hindenburg. The editors at Life saw a way to make Luce happy about
promoting democracy in China without invoking Mr. and Mrs. Chiang
Kai Shek. The watermelon slices were painted wood, because they held
their shape better in the heat. The photo was done night for day with
bright spotlights to make for sharper outlines than natural light
could provide. In actuality, it is all shadows.
This is what I learned from Sam Share's photo. This is not a picture
of Paperson at all. Despite the many times he sat for pictures with
various members of the family, this is the most revealing portrait
ever taken of my grandfather even if he isn't actually in the photo.
My grandmother refused to have anything to do with the photograph.
She was angry at my grandfather for having given the ten thousand
dollars to a charity that would never use the money to fight communists
or help refugees. None of the old men in the photo ever returned to
China. A few of the children grew up and visited after ping pong and
Richard Nixon made it possible to return. One of them was astonished
to find a faded copy of the photo in his cousin's old photo album.
“Why did you keep this picture? When we'd never even met?”
he asked. “How could you have saved this from the Red Guard?
Why didn't you throw it out? You could have been killed.”
“It was my dream of America. When they forced us to move to
the village for reeducation, I told myself that I would survive and
someday move to Paperson.”
I had a framed copy of the photo once myself. I tried to hang it
in my hallway, using a pencil to make an “X” exactly 24
inches from the last stud the way my grandfather once showed me with
his wooden ruler with Chinese numbers on one side and English on the
other. He would measure first in Chinese then turn it over to convince
me that it really was the same. Somehow, I kept missing the center
of the stud and I left so many holes it looked like acupuncture. My
eyes hurt, I had stared too long as what never was eclipsed what might
have been. It was as if nothing could line up the picture except that
one wooden ruler.
Marko Fong lives in Sebastapol, California.
