Growing up in San Francisco’s Miraloma neighborhood, Kelvin Yee always wondered if the stories his father told him about the oil painting hanging in his family’s home were true. The unsigned and undated portrait depicts a young Chinese boy in rough brushstrokes.
“It has a rudely hewn, unfinished, Rodin quality,” Kelvin Yee said. His father, Kong Yee, called the artwork “China Boy” and said it was by a well-known artist whose work hung in museums.
He also told his son that he was the young boy in the portrait. It was painted, as he learned in his childhood, when his father was working as a houseboy on a wealthy estate in Santa Barbara during the Great Depression.
How Kong Yee arrived in the United States is its own story, one that is emblematic of the Asian American experience. His grandfather had come to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad and pan for gold, but the Chinese Exclusion Act put settling here out of reach. Instead, he sent money home and eventually returned to China where he started his own family, which included his son Wee Ham Yee and his grandson Kong Yee. The son and grandson came to the United States from the Guangdong Province when Kong Yee was just nine years old.
“He was told he was going on a trip, but he didn’t really fathom where he was going,” Kelvin Yee said. “His mother was standing on the dock, getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and he did not realize at the time that he would never see her again.”
Wee Ham Yee and his son settled in Santa Barbara, where there was a small Chinese community. While Wee Ham Yee worked as a cook on an estate in Montecito, his young son lived in the back of the Sun Tong laundry and would only see his dad once a week. A few years later, Kong Yee began working as a houseboy at the well-to-do Probert estate. That’s where “China Boy” was painted.
“The painter had been hired by the family for portraiture,” Kelvin Yee said. “He saw my father walking by and he saw for that time and place an exotic face, a striking face.”
“He said, ‘Will you sit down and let me paint you?’ and he gave this rough copy of the work to my father as payment,” Kelvin Yee said.
It wasn’t only the painting that stayed with Kong Yee as a forever memory of his time as a houseboy. Kong Yee attributed his lifelong love of classical music to his special friendship with the estate owner’s daughter.
“She played Turandot on the piano and Puccini,” Kelvin Yee said.
Yet Kong Yee didn’t admire just the music — he had fallen in love with the girl, too.
When Kelvin Yee was going through his father’s belongings after his death, he found a lock of blonde hair from the estate owner’s daughter labeled with the pet name Cio Cio, likely drawn from the opera “Madame Butterfly.” Both “Turandot” and “Madame Butterfly,” Yeet notes, are operas that deal with themes of East meets West.
Kelvin Yee also inherited the oil painting portrait after his father’s death — and the questions that came with it. He began to wonder if what his father had told him was true and, if so, who the painter was.
Last year, with the help of friends, Kelvin Yee found the painting online and learned it had hung in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The artist, Charles Cabot Daniels, was born in 1889 in Nebraska, graduated cum laude from Harvard University and studied in Italy. Daniels was an award-winning artist who taught at the Santa Barbara Art School.
The museum had acquired the artwork in 1985 as a gift from Mark Piel; in 2011, it left the museum.
“The painting was sold via Christie’s based in part on the painting’s condition,” said Lindsey Garrison, the museum’s director of marketing and communications.
The museum held another painting by Daniels, a self-portrait of the artist, which was sold in 2005 in an effort to diversify the museum’s collection.
While images of “China Boy,” which is titled online as “Chinese Boy – Kong” have proliferated online, the story seems to have additional chapters. Daniels had won awards in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara for his artworks, including a prize for “Chinese Girl,” according to a 1936 article in the Morning Press newspaper. No photographs of the painting remain. Who this girl was or what she looked like is unknown, left to an anonymity in an era that didn’t recognize Asian Americans by their proper names.
Perhaps there is more to learn about Kong Yee and his experience in California.
“A painting is a way of telling a story,” Yee said. “It’s the novel, it’s the history lesson.”
