San Diego's Mount Hope Cemetery
Mount Hope is a city-owned and operated cemetery and is the final resting place of some of San Diego's most notable citizens.
One of the things I love most about a cemetery is having the opportunity to 'meet' someone new. Ah Quin (1848-1914) is one such introduction. He was an exceptional figure during the early days of Chinese immigration to the U.S. Born in Guangdong, Ah Quin received an English mission education in Canton before being sent to California by his family in 1868. He worked a variety of odd jobs including houseboy and cook across San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Alaska, continuing his religious studies and learning merchandizing along the way. In Alaska, Ah Quin cut off his queue (braid), marking his commitment to making America his home.
Ah Quin’s education and bilingualism opened many doors for him: he worked as a labor broker for the California Southern Railroad in San Diego for five years before branching out into merchandising and real estate. He became a respected leader within the San Diego community, earning him the unofficial title of “Mayor of Chinatown.” Between 1877 and 1910, Ah Quin kept a lengthy diary spanning ten journals in which he described his daily life, largely in English. In addition to these written records, the Quin family has maintained a strong oral history of Ah Quin’s life throughout the generations. Ah Quin’s legacy not only richly portrays the experience of Chinese in America around the turn of the 20th century but demonstrates the importance of social and personal memory in preserving marginalized histories.
In 1946, Raymio and Cissy (Raymond and Pearl) moved to La Jolla. Cissy died in 1954, after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter her cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.
After Cissy's death, Chandler's loneliness worsened his propensity for clinical depression; he returned to drinking alcohol, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of his writing suffered. After a respite in England, he returned to La Jolla. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital in 1959. Chandler is buried here though he wished to be cremated and placed next to Cissy in Cypress View Mausoleum. Instead, he was buried in Mount Hope, because he had left no funeral or burial instructions.
In 2010, Chandler historian Loren Latker, with the assistance of attorney Aissa Wayne (daughter of John Wayne), brought a petition to disinter Cissy's remains and reinter them with Chandler in Mount Hope. Latker's request was granted.
The shared gravestone reads, "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts", a quotation from The Big Sleep. Chandler's original gravestone was placed by Jean Fracasse and her children. Jean, a blued-eyed blonde Australian who worked as an actress and newsreader, answered an ad Chandler placed in the old San Diego Tribune for a secretary in January 1957. Whatever the ad said, the real job was to keep Chandler away from alcohol, to keep him sober enough to complete the novel Playback, and, it turns out, provide him the family he regretted never starting. A somewhat happy ending to a very tragic tale.
Yes, cemeteries are places where stories are told, where secrets are revealed and where strangers become known. I love them so.
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