In History: California’s Early Chinese Culture
May 25, 2016 09:41AM ● By Jerrie Beard
They called it Gam Saan, or Golden Mountain. For the Chinese, and thousands of other immigrants who came during the Gold Rush, California held the promise of a better life. Few Chinese found Golden Mountain, instead encountering hard work, low wages and racism. From the Foreign Miners Tax to the Chinese Exclusion Act, it became clear that the Chinese were not welcome. At the peak, the Chinese made up between 20 and 50 percent of the population in many towns and cities. By the turn of the 20th century that number had dwindled significantly.
In the 1850s, the Chinese were well established in Fiddletown, which was part of El Dorado County until 1855. The Chew Kee Store’s two-foot-thick walls were built by firmly packing soil between wooden forms—a traditional Chinese building technique called rammed-earth adobe. The store, located on Main Street, is now a museum and one of two rammed-earth structures still standing in Fiddletown.
The store was Yee Fung Cheung’s pharmacy and home. Cheung, whose descendants still reside in the Sacramento area, was an herbal doctor who served Chinese communities in Fiddletown, Sacramento and Virginia City. His remedies contained combinations of herbs, roots, barks, gums, nuts and flowers imported from China that were brewed into a tea for consumption; small drawers marked with the names of herbs are still visible in the store.
Cheung hired an assistant, Chew Kee, who had a wife named Sigh Choy. When Cheung returned to China in 1884, Kee took over the store, adding general merchandise and groceries imported from China. The store also provided a gathering place for the Chinese community. Letters could be sent and received, as well as written and read for those who were illiterate. Lottery tickets and other games of chance were played, and opium was smoked. Kee also built wooden additions—two kitchens, a living space and two bedrooms—at the store’s back.
The couple became the guardians of Fong Chow Yow, a boy born in Fiddletown in 1885 to Chinese parents who returned to China. Although they didn’t officially adopt him until 1902, he lived as their son and inherited the store when Kee died in 1913.
Yow earned the nickname of Jimmy Chow while attending the all-white school in Fiddletown. When he started school, he wore the traditional Chinese ponytail called a queue. When the school required him to cut it, he kept it under his mattress for the rest of his life.
Chow lived in the store most of his life and did odd jobs around town. He was well-liked by the residents of Fiddletown, who replaced his roof in the 1950s when he was too crippled from arthritis to do it. He acted as a caretaker for the store and its contents—keeping everything intact. When he passed away in 1965, the extent of the collection was discovered when archeologists examined and inventoried the items. Chow was buried in the Fiddletown Cemetery, the only person of Chinese descent to be buried there.
After his death, ownership of the store bounced between the county, state and Fiddletown Preservation Society. In 1978, Fiddletown was designated as a historic district and the store recognized as a historically significant building. In 1980, Fiddletown’s Preservation Society began opening the store on weekends as a museum. A comprehensive restoration of the building began in 1987 with grant money from the State Parks and Recreation Department and the Office of Historic Preservation, and donations from Chinese organizations and Dr. Herbert Yee, a descendent of Cheung. The store is open on Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m., April through October.