Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  If this is not Hung Wah of the Transcontinental, the story also ends sadly, but in a different way: Hung Wah of Auburn disappears from history entirely. There is no further mention of him in newspapers or public records, including of his death, in Auburn, except for the completion and apparently the final destruction of his entrepreneurial efforts. And for almost 150 years, his role in building the Transcontinental went unrecognized.

  Here is the last that we know. After the completion of the Transcontinental, labor contractor Hung Wah made his way back to Auburn, where he continued his business activities. He leased acres of land, again contracted out labor, and ran a grocery store carrying Chinese goods. As one of the most prominent Chinese in town, however, he also encountered direct violence in 1880 as the racial mood in the state turned ugly. In the dead of night in July, a “thunderous” explosion, according to the local newspaper, shook the entire town, waking sleeping residents, breaking glass, and lifting structures from the ground. The sound was described as like that of an artillery explosion or an earthquake. Unknown villains had used black powder to blow up Hung Wah’s wash house.

  Located near the CPRR station, Hung Wah and his cousin’s business had made a success washing laundry for nearby hotels, and the local newspaper surmised that “resentment” was the reason for the act. The explosion was so strong that “there was not a stick or timber of any kind left standing, and there was not a single board left whole.” Hung Wah suffered a complete loss, and though he had at first thought about the expensive proposition of rebuilding, he abandoned the idea. Villains could always strike again. The reporter described him as “much depressed.” No arrests were made, “nor are there likely to be any, we think, for public sentiment appears to be not greatly outraged by the affair.” Maybe it was then that Hung Wah had had enough of Auburn and moved away for good, perhaps to Placerville, not far away, but far enough from Auburn and its festering anti-Chinese climate.

  More uplifting are accounts of Railroad Chinese lives that come from Chinese Americans who have uncovered family histories. With some documentation and lore handed down through generations, the stories they have collected in recent years about their railroad ancestors, the first in their families to come to America, confirm that the foundations of the Chinese American community are inseparable from the Transcontinental. They also show that, while the ghosts of Gold Mountain remain silent in so many other contexts, they live on in the spirit and stories of their descendants who proudly cherish their ancestry and help keep history alive.

  One such descendant is Gene O. Chan, a retired rocket propulsion designer. In 1855 his great-great-grandfather Jow Kee took two months to travel from southern China across the Pacific to land in San Francisco. He first went to work for mining companies, and his employers encouraged him to learn English. He Anglicized his name to Jim King, and in 1865, with his experience as a foreman and interpreter, he signed on with the CPRR. Chan, who uncovered his Railroad Chinese history over many years of effort, assumes that the railroad must have offered his ancestor wages and working conditions that were sufficiently attractive to lure him away from mining. Others in the mines must have followed suit as well, for Chan’s ancestor is found on CPRR payroll records as “Jim King, Contracting Co.,” similar to the way Hung Wah’s labor contracting business was listed.

  After working on the CPRR and gathering resources, Jim King settled in the Sacramento River delta, where he became a farmer and married a woman known as Hel Shee, with whom he had eight children. She is recalled as a “hard-working, wise and very frugal woman” who earned income from making fishing nets and sewing. They had success in farming and running gambling establishments. But as with other Railroad Chinese, tragedy struck. One day in 1898 or 1899, Jim King went missing. He was never seen again. Even today the family suspects foul play, as the region was awash with anti-Chinese violence then. But they can only speculate, for Jim King’s body was never found.

  Another family historian and American of Chinese descent, Russell N. Low, a physician, proudly tells the story of one of his ancestors, his great-grandfather Hung Lai Woh, who came to work on the CPRR in the mid-1860s. Though his name is similar to Hung Wah’s, he was not the same person. Hung Lai Woh was accompanied by a brother who also worked on the line and lost an eye in a blasting accident. The two helped build the snow sheds that ran for miles to protect the line in the Sierra. A story circulates in the family about how one day Low’s great-grandfather was walking atop a high wooden trestle when a train engine came right at him. He grabbed hold of a railroad tie and dangled in midair while the train rumbled past on the track above him. After the completion of the railroad, he made his way to San Francisco, where he learned to roll cigars, then a rising industry in the city. Hung Lai Woh later became a shopkeeper and ran his own cigar store in Chinatown. Like Jim King, he married a much younger Chinese woman, Tom Ying, in 1888. They had five children who eventually spread around the country. Low calculates that Hung Lai Woh and Tom Ying have more than one hundred descendants in the United States, including twelve great-great-great-grandchildren. Among them are engineers, military veterans, an opera singer, and a female fighter pilot.

  Lim Lip Hong came from the Siyi to the United States when he was just twelve years old in the mid-1850s. After finding work washing clothes, building stone fences, and digging canals in the Sacramento River delta, he joined the effort to build the Pacific Railway; afterward he joined other lines in Utah, where he worked alongside Mormons. In Nevada he worked in mining and started a family, according to his descendants, with a Native woman, with whom he had several children, though he left them and went to San Francisco. What became of his Native American children is not known, unlike the history of his family resulting from his marriage to a young Chinese woman, Chan Shee, a seventeen-year-old beauty in San Francisco. They had seven children, seen below in the early 1900s with other relatives, and built a successful poultry and butcher business in the city’s Potrero Hill district.

  Lim Lip Hong had achieved success in business and in his personal life. His children were all born in the United States and thus American citizens. One of his great-great-grandsons is Michael Andrew Solorio, whose paternal grandparents were from Mexico and worked in agriculture after coming to the United States. It was at family gatherings on his mother’s side when he was about twelve years old that he learned of Lim Lip Hong and the Transcontinental. Solorio’s curiosity grew over the years, especially as he learned “how the railroad and Chinese migration played a significant role in the nation’s history.” He proudly points out that Chinese immigrants “helped shape today’s United States,” and therefore “feels very American and very engrained in this country.” In 2017 he traveled to China to visit Lim Lip Hong’s ancestral village. “I was so surprised to see how humble his background was,” admits Solorio, who came to better appreciate the hard work of his family over the years that made his own life as a Stanford University undergraduate possible. The connection with history, he says eloquently, “inspires me to work hard and pursue my goals to leave my mark on this world, like my ancestors did.”

  Connie Young Yu, one of the leading and most dedicated historians in the Chinese American community, is an especially keen student of her own great-grandfather Lee Wong Sang. Born in Taishan, Lee left for the United States when he was just nineteen years of age. He joined the railroad, attracted by the high wages he could receive, and worked as a foreman and interpreter. Gold was what the Railroad Chinese valued, and great-grandfather Lee once bought a $20 gold piece with his wages and kept it on his person for good luck. One night, however, after he went to the latrine, he discovered that he had lost the valuable coin. He cried for a month. After his railroad work came to an end, he sent for his wife, whom he had wed before leaving China. Chin Shee, as she was known, did not have bound feet; she was smart and possessed a strong character. She arrived in the United States in the mid-1870s, and soon the couple began to have children, eventually four sons and a daughter. Lee became
a successful merchant in San Francisco, but the memory of the railroad continued to play a prominent role in the family.

  Stories about Chinese and the railroad filtered through the family over the years, but one especially moved Connie. She recalled her father telling her that as a youngster he listened to stories former railroad workers shared with her grandfather when they sat around having tea in the family store in the early decades of the twentieth century. They were old bachelors by then, never having been able to marry, as was the fate of many other nineteenth-century Chinese men in America. They described the hostile anti-Chinese climate they had to endure and their determined efforts to honor their compatriots who had died in building the CPRR. They told of the Chinese district associations sending people into the Sierra to look for the “remains of the Chinese who were killed on the railroad.” They sometimes had maps indicating the location of remains, which when found often included identity and family information written on a piece of cloth placed inside a glass bottle. The representatives carefully packed up the remains in a box for repatriation to China. Connie’s father spoke “very reverently” about this collecting of bones, which affected her deeply as a child. She says that she herself, two generations removed, grew up feeling a “kind of responsibility” to these men and their history. This helps explain her interest in these tales from the past. For her and many others, history is personal.

  Seen collectively, Connie and other descendants’ stories tell of life beyond individual experience. With the names and stories of real people, themes emerge. The descendants’ stories usually describe Railroad Chinese who were acquisitive and entrepreneurial. They appear to have collected resources and knowledge during the construction of the CPRR which they used to establish themselves afterwards in communities large and small around the West. After attaining some financial stability, they decided to stay in America and not return to China as many others did. They were able to marry, usually to much younger women, sometimes even former prostitutes freed from their condition. They maintained close ties with China, returning on occasion, receiving relatives, or sending their own children back for a while for education or careers. Many gave generous financial or political support to China’s efforts to oppose invasion and build itself into a modern nation. And, not surprisingly, all, almost without exception, had been contractors or headmen on the CPRR. They had had a feel for business and passed their drive, ambition, and good fortune on to their descendants. Sadly, few laborers, with little skill or resources for starting a family, left any progeny to tell their stories.

  Railroad descendants’ accounts are also offered with a varying mixture of pride, anguish, celebration, and resentment, as the complex story of the Transcontinental contains elements that sustain a wide range of sentiments. For many descendants, the tremendous contribution their ancestors made to completing the railroad firmly establishes Chinese within the fabric of the modern American nation. The railroad, it is seen, made the country’s boom in the latter nineteenth century possible, and it was Chinese who made the railroad possible. The labor of the Railroad Chinese is thus the purchase of, and the irrefutable claim to, American place and identity. As the acclaimed writer Maxine Hong Kingston has written: “After the Civil War, China Men banded the nation North and South, East and West, with crisscrossing steel. They were the binding and building ancestors of this place.”

  Identification with the Railroad Chinese who suffered brutal working conditions and callous treatment by the CPRR is also reason for lamentation to this day. It is difficult to imagine the reality of the horrific lived experiences of family members long ago without a resulting sense of anguish and anger. What those Railroad Chinese had to endure! Their suffering is almost unimaginable.

  Yet they more than survived; they also triumphed. Unbroken, they went on to build rich lives in America and in China and contribute to society. They were the progenitors of Chinese America and America itself in different ways. Admiration, even celebration, is due them.

  And then there is resentment for the ignorance and prejudice that demeaned the Railroad Chinese and their descendants through the decades. Despite their sacrifice, the Railroad Chinese were tossed aside after the railroad work was done, their stories marginalized or omitted from the histories that followed, and efforts to recover their experience disrespected.

  Railroad Chinese history never disappeared altogether, however, thanks to descendants who cherished their ethnic past and to dedicated writers, researchers, and scholars over many years who refused to abandon the memory of the Railroad Chinese. Because of these efforts, we know more about this history than ever before. Scholars and students in China today are taking up the pursuit of the history. Historical recovery will continue, and one day that elusive letter or diary from a railroad worker telling about his experiences 150 years ago may turn up. What a find that will be!

  Though it is long overdue, in recent years the railroad workers are beginning to receive the recognition and honor they deserve, owing to years of dedicated efforts of community activists to have the history of the Railroad Chinese properly acknowledged. In May 2014 the U.S. Department of Labor formally inducted “Chinese Railroad Workers” into its Hall of Honor. In 2015 President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping of China, during his state visit to the United States, explicitly called attention to the great contributions of the Chinese who worked on the railroad toward constructing early connections between the United States and China.

  As we accumulate knowledge and honor the past, the ghosts of Gold Mountain must be feeling some comfort. They are no longer just “silent spikes” or “nameless builders” but are emerging as real historical actors. And recovering history, like the behavior of ghosts, is unpredictable and never really settled. The living continue to grapple with the past. So it is with the history of Railroad Chinese, as recovering their experiences and establishing the meaning of their lives will never end. One day a hungry ghost seeking resolution might lead a researcher to that elusive prize, the diary of a Railroad Chinese.

  Acknowledgments

  Many friends and colleagues helped make this book possible. I have drawn especially from the work of more than a hundred scholars, archivists, and researchers in North America and Asia who contributed to the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University, which I have co-directed with Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Other project leaders include Associate Director Hilton Obenzinger, Director of Research Roland Hsu, Director of Archaeology Barbara L. Voss, and Digital Media Director Erik Steiner. Others who played leading roles in the project include Barre Fong, Teri Hessel, Kevin Hsu, Denise Khor, Gabriel Wolfenstein, and Connie Young Yu. Dongfang Shao and Evelyn Hu-Dehart helped establish the project. Many Stanford students conducted invaluable research in textual and digital materials. I thank all of the wonderful members of the project for their research, scholarship, and intellectual exchange.

  For reading drafts or major portions of early versions of this book, I thank Sue Fawn Chung, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Estelle Freedman, Roland Hsu, Sheila Melvin, Hilton Obenzinger, Phil Sexton, Victoria Sandin, Matt Sommer, Richard White, and Connie Young Yu. I thank them for sharing their knowledge, insight, and commentary.

  I thank many dedicated librarians and archivists who provided invaluable help. Special thanks go to Stanford colleagues Benjamin Stone and Xiaohui Xue at Stanford Libraries, Monica Moore and Rachel Meisels in American Studies, John Groschwitz, Kelley Cortright, and Kristin Kutella-Boyd in the Center for East Asian Studies, and Sik Lee Dennig at East Asian Languages and Cultures; Steve Hindle and Li Wei Yang at the Huntington Library; and the archivists at the National Archives in San Francisco. I wish to thank many others who helped along the way. They include Julie Cain, Preston Carlson, Yong Chen, Zhongping Chen, Pat Chesnut, Mary Cory, Pin-chia Feng, Marilou Ficklin, Wallace Hagaman, Keren He, Annelise Heinz, Madeline Hsu, Hsinya Huang, Laura Jones, Richard Lapierre, Sue Lee, Beth Lew-Williams, Haiming Liu, Liu Jin, Chris Lowman, Sophie McNulty, Calvi
n Miaw, Joseph Ng, Laura Ng, Stephanie Niu, Roger Staab, Chris Suh, Selia Tan, Niuniu Teo, James Thieu, Bryce Tuttle, Nathan Weiser, Vivian Yan, Yuan Ding, Zhai Xiang, Zhang Guoxiong, and Hao Zou.

  I thank the dedicated work of many local historical societies and libraries. Among these are the California State Railroad Museum Library and Archives, Chinese Historical Society of San Francisco, Colfax Railroad Museum, Donner Summit Historical Society, El Dorado County Historical Museum, Placer County Archives and Research Center, and the Searls Historical Library of Nevada County.

  Don Lamm and Melissa Chinchillo provided invaluable help and guidance in representing me, and I am most grateful to them. At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I thank lead editor Alex Littlefield for his keen insights, vision, and assistance. I am grateful to Ivy Givens, Amanda Heller, and Jennifer Freilach for their attentive and careful efforts.

  I want to give special thanks to pioneering Chinese American historians who opened the way forward in recovering the history of Chinese in America. William Hoy, H. K. Wong, Thomas Chinn, Him Mark Lai, and Philip Choy, now all passed, made enormous contributions in preserving, understanding, and interpreting history.

  I could not have traversed the long road in completing this book without the assistance, patience, support, and love of Vicki, Chloe, and Maya. Thank you. The indomitable spirit of the Railroad Chinese runs through your veins.