Publisher's Weekly Review
In this ambitious saga, Chang (Fateful Ties), a professor of American history, burrows deep into the margins of history, attempting to reveal the experiences of the Chinese men who labored on the Central Pacific Railroad. He follows them from China's Pearl River Delta to California, through the treacherous Sierra Nevada Mountains and into Nevada and Utah, pausing to examine the workers' strike of 1867, brothels, violence against the Chinese, and other aspects of their lives. A lack of primary sources detailing the lives of the men who built one half of the transcontinental railroad-not a single diary and only a few letters-means Chang is forced to rely on payroll documents, inventory lists, folk songs, and other such sources to piece together his story. His writing is vibrant and passionate; he has searched as widely as he can to try to render his subjects as "vital, living, and feeling human beings who made history," and this account clarifies that the Chinese railroad workers had far more agency than popularly believed. But the sparseness of the historical record means that he has to spend far too long on extrapolation. Readers hoping for a well-sourced account of what it was like to work on the railroads won't find one here, though Chang's history does shed more light on this facet of American history. Agent: Melissa Chinchillo, Fletcher and Company. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A well-researched history of the "Railroad Chinese," those who traveled to the United States to build the transcontinental railway system but were thereafter mostly forgotten.As Chang (History/Stanford Univ.; Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation with China, 2015) notes, the lives and fates of the Chinese railroad workers who labored to build steel lines across mountains and deserts are not well-documented; much is an argument from silence, barring the discovery of "that elusive prize, the diary of a Railroad Chinese." What is certain is that many thousands arrived, traveling freelance or having been recruited from villages and cities in China. Drawing on family memories, government records, archaeological reports, and other materials, Chang reconstructs their difficult work and the social organization that underlay it, with young workers led by somewhat older foremen and labor brokers. Some arrived during the various gold rushes of 19th-century California, where they "frequently worked in teams on claims abandoned by white miners" and learned skills that would prove essential in later railroad work. Praised as "very good working hands," they were also subject to racism at every level of American society and were often the victims of violencee.g., the case of "a Chinaman," as the court record calls a man named Ling Sing, who was repeatedly shot by a white man who escaped punishment thanks to laws that forbade nonwhites from testifying against whites. "Where Ling Sing is buried is not known," writes the author. The identities and pasts of so many others who died in construction accidents are similarly unknown, and although Railroad Chinese participated in strikes and asserted their rights, most disappeared after the lines were built, some to return to China, others to find work as farmers and laborers in places like New Orleans and California's Central Valley.A valuable contribution to the history of the Chinese in North America, allowing the formerly nameless to emerge "as real historical actors." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
SHORTLY AFTER THE driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10,1869, James Strobridge - the construction foreman of the Central Pacific Railroad - held a celebratory meal in his private railcar. With the linking of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railways, crosscountry travel had been cut from several months to a single week. No less important was the symbolism: Only four years after the end of the Civil War, iron rails stitched the United States back together. On hand at Strobridge's gathering were a few Chinese, invited to stand in for thousands of others who had assembled the line. When they entered the car, a newspaper reporter wrote, the other guests "cheered them as the chosen representatives of the race which have greatly helped to build the road." The good feelings would not last. As Gordon H. Chang relates in "Ghosts of Gold Mountain," the "Railroad Chinese" and their countrymen soon became the most despised group in the West, before being largely forgotten. Chang's book is a moving effort to recover their stories and honor their indispensable contribution to the building of modern America. Chang, a historian at Stanford University, begins in the Siyi, a coastal region in southeastern China where social turbulence during the 19 th century pushed waves of immigrants to North American shores. Many went to California (nicknamed jinshan, or "Gold Mountain," because of the Gold Rush), and some found work in the state's early railroad ventures. By the 1860s, officers of the Central Pacific, having abandoned ideas to recruit Mexicans or former slaves, looked to China to meet their enormous labor needs. Chinese workers eventually accounted for 90 percent of the company's construction force. While the contours of this history may be familiar, the lived experience of the Railroad Chinese has long been elusive, partly because no sources written in their own hand survive. Chang thus looks elsewhere for information about their daily lives - how they dressed, what they ate, when they rested - making use of photographs and material objects, in addition to newspaper accounts and business records. From this intrepid research, a composite portrait begins to emerge. Chang's most dramatic passages focus on the work itself. Unlike the route of the Union Pacific, which stretched westward from Omaha across the flat expanse of the Great Plains, the Central Pacific faced daunting topographical challenges, particularly in the crumpled fastnesses of the Sierra Nevada, ft was there, in 1865, that Chinese laborers began construction on the Summit Tunnél, a task that took more than two years of brutal, nonstop toil and required them to build temporary shelters and work spaces beneath towering snowdrifts. As many as several hundred Railroad Chinese may have perished on the job between 1864 and 1869, leaving bereft survivors and family members to repatriate the remains. The poignancy of such stories has preoccupied Chang since he was a child, and so in 2012 he and several colleagues established the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford. Its team of interdisciplinary researchers has combed through archives and interviewed descendants of the workers, for whom - like the author - the story is deeply personal. And yet it is a powerful political project, too. "The labor of the Railroad Chinese," Chang declares, is "the purchase of, and the irrefutable claim to, American place and identity." In our own time, much the same could be said of other immigrant workers as well, especially the millions of Mexicans whose labor puts food on American tables and roofs over American heads.
