The quake that toppled taboos and built a family
AMONG THE MANY aftershocks of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 is one that I am observing this centennial week with equal measures of gravity and gratitude. Just six weeks after the disaster, a wedding party that included four Chinese men and their American brides set off from the Oakland train depot, prepared to violate California law. That small band of romantic rebels included my grandparents.
My grandfather Liu Ch'eng-yu was then 31. He had come to San Francisco three years earlier by a circuitous route. The only son of the late viceroy of Canton under the Qing Dynasty, Ch'eng-yu was classically trained as a poet and scholar, groomed to serve in government. But in his headstrong teens he had resolved instead to overthrow China's imperial system. When his plot to blow up a local armory was exposed, he narrowly escaped beheading. He fled to Tokyo, where he fell under the sway of Sun Yat-sen.
Ch'eng-yu became so enamored with Western-style freedom that he cut off his queue, the pigtail that Chinese men were required to wear as a show of submission to their Manchu rulers. He traded his scholar's robes for waistcoats and a bowler. In 1903, he stood up at a New Year's party and called for democracy in China, causing the Japanese and Manchu officials who were present to lose face. Sun arranged for my grandfather to move on to San Francisco, where he would edit the revolutionary newspaper Ta T'ung Daily.
There was just one problem: The Chinese Exclusion Act, which had been in effect since 1882 (and would not be repealed until 1943), forbade Chinese to enter the United States. Exceptions were made only for merchants with an established record of doing business in the U.S. or for students enrolled in American schools. All other Chinese were treated as laborers who "endangered the good order" of society and were denied entry.
Sun pulled strings to get Ch'eng-yu a student visa. My grandfather would bang the drum of China's revolution by night and attend classes at UC Berkeley by day. But to succeed, Ch'eng-yu needed tutoring in English. The university directed him to another student, Jennie Ella Trescott, then 25, single and living in a boarding house near the college.
Jennie was a slender strawberry blond with luminous blue eyes. Her majestic air belied her origins as the only child of pioneers, born in Fort Dodge, Kan. Her mother died of diphtheria when Jennie was 2. Her father failed first at cattle ranching and then at selling snake oil from a traveling medicine wagon. He loved his daughter but could not support her. She might have married, but Jennie was as headstrong as Ch'eng-yu. She preferred independence.
