Kelvin Yee grew up in Miraloma looking at an unsigned oil portrait his father called "China Boy" — and wondering if the story behind it was real. A Mission Local investigation confirms it: the painting threads through the Transcontinental Railroad, the Chinese Exclusion Act, a Santa Barbara estate, and a Depression-era houseboy who wound up in a museum catalog.

The oil painting that hangs in Kelvin Yee's Miraloma home is unsigned and undated, laid on in the rough brushstrokes he has described — in reporting this morning by Mission Local — as having a "rudely hewn, unfinished, Rodin quality." His father, Kong Yee, called it "China Boy." He said the young boy depicted was himself, painted during the Depression by a well-known artist while he worked as a houseboy on a wealthy estate in Santa Barbara.

Kelvin Yee spent decades wondering whether any of that held up.

It did.

Mission Local reporter Julie Zigoris, in a piece published this morning, traces the full arc of the painting's origin for the first time. The story runs three generations and moves through nearly every major chapter of the Chinese American experience in California: the Transcontinental Railroad, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Depression-era domestic labor economy, and the particular grief of a nine-year-old who watched his mother on a dock in China get smaller and smaller as the ship pulled away, not yet understanding it would be for the last time.

Kong Yee came from Guangdong Province with his father, Wee Ham Yee, whose own father had come to California to build the railroad and pan for gold but had been barred from settling by the Exclusion Act. In Santa Barbara, Wee Ham Yee found work as a cook on a Montecito estate while his young son Kong Yee lived in the back of the Sun Tong laundry, seeing his father once a week. When he was old enough, Kong Yee began working as a houseboy at the Probert estate.

A painter hired by the Probert family for portraiture noticed the boy and asked if he would sit. "He saw my father walking by and he saw for that time and place an exotic face, a striking face," Kelvin Yee told Zigoris. The rough oil that resulted was the payment.

Working with friends last year, Kelvin Yee identified the painter as Charles Cabot Daniels — a Harvard graduate who had studied in Italy, taught at the Santa Barbara Art School, and won prizes at Southern California competitions, including a 1936 award for a work listed as "Chinese Girl." Who that girl was, or what she looked like, is unknown. A work identified as "Chinese Boy – Kong" had hung in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, acquired in 1985 as a gift from a Mark Piel and sold through Christie's in 2011 due to condition.

The rough painting that became "China Boy" — the payment from an estate portraitist to a Depression-era houseboy who would one day raise a family in Miraloma — still hangs on a wall in that neighborhood, doing what it has been doing since Santa Barbara in the 1930s.

"A painting is a way of telling a story," Kelvin Yee told Mission Local. "It's the novel, it's the history lesson."