← American History Tellers
Loading summary
Transcript152 lines
- [00:01]
Lindsey Graham
Picture this. You're transported back in time, witnessing history unfold right before your eyes without any modern day interruptions. That's the magic of Wondery Plus.
- [00:09]
Immerse yourself in the stories that shaped.
- [00:11]
Our nation with ad free episodes, early access to new seasons and exclusive bonus content. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts and experience American history like never before.
- [00:34]
Imagine it's a sunny, warm afternoon on May 10, 1869, and you're standing on the summit of a large hill near Promontory, Utah. You shield your eyes from the midday sun as you and dozens of your fellow railroad workers toast in celebration. You've just witnessed the ceremonial golden spike being driven into the final rail of the transcontinental railroad and your head is swirling with excitement. You take a swig from a bottle of whiskey and then hand it to your friend standing beside you. He gives you a nod of thanks. You know, while I was breaking my back trying to dig this damn thing, I didn't think this day would ever come. Sure glad I was wrong. Me too. For the last two years, it feels like I've done nothing but swing a sledgehammer. But here we are at last. Your friend hands the bottle of whiskey back to you and you gesture in the direction of a photographer who's setting up his equipment. Well, looks like they're going to try and memorialize the moment with a picture. Maybe we'll get in the paper. Well, that would be something. I bet my wife and boy would be so proud. Well, come on, let's make sure we're not left out. You and your friend make your way over to two large locomotive engines that have been positioned facing each other on the track to mark the occasion and squeeze into the crowd surrounding them. Just then, though, you notice a group of Chinese workers standing to the side. You think they're going to get in the picture too? How should I know? They'll do whatever they want, I suppose. Well, they ought to be in the picture. They do the most dangerous work and get paid less than us too, I guess. Go invite them, but you'll lose out on a good spot. Your friend starts climbing up the side of one of the engines, eager to get a more prominent place in the photograph. You look back and see the photographer's assistant ushering the Chinese workers further away from the group. You want to say something, but you're also afraid you'll lose your place. So you scramble up next to your friend and just as you manage to find your footing, you hear a loud pop and see the flash of a photographer's bulb. You smile, knowing you managed to make your way into the history books. But you also feel a pang of guilt as you think of everyone who's being left out.
- [02:34]
Narrator
Audible's best of 2024 picks are here. Discover the year's top audiobooks, podcasts and originals in all your favorite genres, from memoirs and sci fi to mysteries and thrillers. Audible' curated list in every category is the best way to hear 2024's best in audio entertainment, like a stunning new full cast production of George Orwell's 1984 heartfelt memoirs like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's lovely one. The year's best fiction, like the Women by Kristin Hannah and Percival Everett's brilliantly subversive James. Another worthwhile listen is Amy Tintero's thrilling and twisting whodunit. Listen for the Lie. This laugh out loud, funny tale follows Lucy, a woman who needs to clear her own name after a true crime podcast decides to probe into the worst night of her life, one she conveniently can't remember. Audible there's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com wondrypod and discover all the years best waiting for you.
- [03:35]
Holiday magic is in the air, and DSW's got all the shoes to make your season extra merry. Believe you've got parties to attend and lists to check twice, so DSW is taking care of the details, like gifts to make their eyes all aglow. Styles that bring joy to your world. Brands everyone wants, like Ugg, Nike, Birkenstock and more. And deals to make your budget bright. Find the perfect shoes for you and yours at a DSW store near you or dsw.com.
- [04:11]
Lindsey Graham
From wondery I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history Your Story On May 10, 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was finally completed. Leading figures of both the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies gathered at Promontory Summit, Utah, to watch. As president of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford drove a symbolic golden spike into the final rail of track. Also present that day were scores of workers whose labor had made the railroad a reality, including a group of Chinese laborers from the Central Pacific who'd moved the final rail into position before the completion ceremony. Initially hired during a labor shortage, thousands of Chinese men worked under harsh conditions while facing daily discrimination. Chinese workers were paid lower wages and assigned the most dangerous tasks, including blasting tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountains. But they persevered despite these challenges and their hard work and resilience proved instrumental in completing the railroad. But over the years, their contribution has often been undervalued or overlooked entirely. Here with me to discuss recent efforts to recognize Chinese railroad workers contributions to the transcontinental railroad is Sue Lee, historian and former executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America. She's the co editor with Connie Young Yu of Voices from the Railroad Stories by descendants of Chinese railroad Workers. Our conversation is next.
- [05:54]
Su Li, welcome to American History Tellers.
- [05:57]
Sue Li
Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.
- [06:00]
Lindsey Graham
Now there is this very famous photograph taken at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869, the one where the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines meet. There appear to be plenty of white men there, but it does not look like any of the Chinese workers who labored so hard on the railroad made it into this photo. Is your 2019 book, Voices from the Railroad perhaps an attempt to correct the record?
- [06:25]
Connie Young Yu
So the photograph is the famous champagne photo with one worker's bottle of champagne raised over his head with the two engines coming together at Promontory Point. And you have all these people surrounding the two engines.
- [06:42]
Sue Li
The Central Pacific had actually completed its part of the line for the May 10 celebration. The union Pacific was late.
- [06:51]
Connie Young Yu
So what the Central Pacific did was.
- [06:53]
Sue Li
It sent most of its work crew back down the line to clean up the rail line. So the actual number of Central Pacific workers at promontory for that May 10th celebration was very small.
- [07:08]
Connie Young Yu
But if you look at the photograph as just a normal person, you go, well, wait a minute, there are no Chinese there.
- [07:16]
Sue Li
And in fact, if you look at that photograph very, very carefully under a microscope, you can see one or two Chinese workers with their heads turned and their backs to the camera.
- [07:29]
Connie Young Yu
So there were few Central Pacific workers and even fewer Chinese workers, though the Central Pacific kept a crew of eight. An eight man gang of Chinese workers were at Promontory, or stationed at Promontory, if you will, by the Central Pacific for the celebration itself. The work that the eight man gang was supposed to do was to nail in the last tie of the construction and to do cleanup. And they were actually invited by James Strobridge, the superintendent of all of the work of the Central Pacific, to his train car to be acknowledged at the celebration to thank them for their work. But in those days, it wasn't like a photo op that you do today and everybody knows that you have to be in the photo at a certain time, right? It just happened that the photographers were there, there was the crowd, people were there, they took the photo and then they went away. I can't imagine that they would have called particular workers or people to be in the photos. But the fact that Chinese were in that photo whitewashes our history and says, you guys aren't important. We're not going to include you in anything.
- [08:50]
Sue Li
We at the Chinese Historical Society felt that it was time to set the record straight and to clarify what had happened 150 years ago and begin recovering our stories and to tell the stories through the voices of descendants of actual workers.
- [09:08]
Lindsey Graham
In 1969, 50 years before your book came out, there was a centennial ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah, a hundred years after the golden spike ceremony. And the head of the Chinese Historical Society of America went and was scheduled to deliver a speech. How did that go?
- [09:25]
Sue Li
It didn't go well at all. 1969 was really important to the Chinese American community. Folks felt that here we are, 100 years after the completion of the transcontinental. There's going to be this celebration. We should be there to bring attention to the contributions of Chinese. The Historical Society worked many months in advance of that celebration, had fundraisers to create memorial plaques to be installed, one at Promontory and one in Sacramento, where the Central Pacific began. And the head of the Historical Society, Phil Choi, was actually invited to present the plaque at Promontory on May 10th. And when he got there, the organizers.
- [10:10]
Connie Young Yu
Said, oh, Mr. Choi, we're so sorry.
- [10:12]
Sue Li
But we don't have time on the agenda for you. And that was because John Wayne was there to promote his new film, True Grit. So it was a real snub of the Chinese community in 1969. And that snub really festered in the kind of communal psyche of the Chinese American. Asian American community. And so when 2019 came around and it was time to celebrate the 150th, the Asian community kind of linked arms and began to organize to make sure that the 150th paid due respect and acknowledgement of the Chinese contribution to the transcontinental.
- [10:56]
Lindsey Graham
Of course, your efforts in 2019 are now 150 years old, 50 years further than that first centennial. How did you go about piecing together the history of these workers?
- [11:08]
Sue Li
Well, we in the community actually didn't have much information about the workers. Like everybody else in America, we go to school and we learn about the transcontinental, and we kind of hear that the Chinese worked on the railroad, and.
- [11:22]
Connie Young Yu
That'S the end of the story.
- [11:23]
Sue Li
There are no specifics. There are no details. So about five years before the 2019 celebration. We started organizing and we put out.
- [11:34]
Connie Young Yu
The word to the community for descendants.
- [11:37]
Sue Li
Of Chinese railroad workers. And people came forward and said, I'm a member of a family that's been here for four generations. And we have an ancestor who worked on the railroad. We don't really know that much about him. But, you know, we know that that's how long we've been here.
- [11:53]
Lindsey Graham
What do you think was behind the difficulty in finding the details about Chinese laborers?
- [11:58]
Connie Young Yu
We don't have names of Chinese workers because they were not recorded. Chinese were hired in gangs of 30. 30 Chinese names. Are 30 too many to write on a piece of paper when you're hiring like 5 to 10,000 of them. There are individual names of, let's say, a cook on an individual payroll. So one of the descendants stories, invoices from the railroad is of Lum Ah Chew. He was a cook at the Summit Tunnel. And there's actually a payroll record with ah choose on it. The Lamachu family claims that as documentation of their ancestor. Because who's to say that wasn't him? But that's very rare. The names were simply not recorded. Because they were hired through middlemen. And it was the middlemen who would handle the payrolls.
- [12:54]
Sue Li
The way that Chinese names were listed was with a prefix ah and a nickname.
- [13:02]
Connie Young Yu
So rather than Lindsey Graham, it'd be Ah Lindsey or Ah Graham or Su Li, it'd be Ah sue or Ah Lee. The ah is used as a kind of informal title. How would you find people that way? It's not their full name. There are also no diaries or letters from individuals back home saying they're working on the railroad as whatever. So much of this is through oral history.
- [13:31]
Lindsey Graham
So it seems like there were quite a few obstacles in the way of finding the true Chinese story of the railroad for you. But I'm interested in what you knew of it before you started this adventure. Your grandfather came to San Francisco himself from China in 1915 and worked in a cigar factory. What were you taught at home about the contributions of the Chinese to building the transcontinental railroad? Or what were you taught at school growing up?
- [13:58]
Connie Young Yu
I don't recall my family talking at.
- [14:00]
Sue Li
All about the railroad.
- [14:01]
Connie Young Yu
Because that wasn't anything that my family had any association with. Coming to the US As a merchant was one of the ways of getting.
- [14:12]
Sue Li
Around the Exclusion Act.
- [14:13]
Connie Young Yu
So if you were a partner in a business, you could legally enter the country. So that's how my grandfather came and went into the cigar business. Which is a reason why my family didn't talk about the railroads because we didn't have any association. And also, the area where my grandfather came from wasn't an area where railroad workers came from. While there are other villages nearby that may have been railroad villages where groups of Chinese would have come as workers. The village that my grandfather came from wasn't one of those villages. So there was no reference to the railroad.
- [14:50]
Lindsey Graham
I'm glad you bring up the ancestral villages in China, because we say things like, Chinese laborers built the railroad, but China is a very large, diverse country. What part of China did many of these workers come from? What would have been like for them to arrive in California and work?
- [15:07]
Sue Li
So the estimate is that 15 to 20,000 Chinese work on the transcontinental railroad, primarily on the Central Pacific side.
- [15:16]
Connie Young Yu
The Chinese who initially worked on the railroad, let's say in the beginning, 1864, they were already here. They may have come for the gold rush.
- [15:25]
Sue Li
Initially, the Central Pacific didn't want Chinese workers at all. At the time that the Central Pacific began its construction, they had great difficulty hiring white workers. White workers would work through one payroll or two payrolls and then to head literally for the hills for more lucrative mining work or other work.
- [15:46]
Connie Young Yu
And the leaders of the Central Pacific.
- [15:49]
Sue Li
Were very leery of hiring Chinese workers in the area. It was out of desperation that the Central Pacific in 1864, hired a small group of Chinese workers to do what they deemed was the light work, which was filling carts with rubble and things like that. But once the Central Pacific was convinced that the Chinese could handle the work, they began hiring as many Chinese as they could in the area in California, and eventually hired contractors to go to China to hire workers. The majority of those Chinese came from a really small area of China outside of the city of Guangdong. They came because their kinsmen came, and.
- [16:39]
Connie Young Yu
It was easier to recruit groups of Chinese from a particular village. That area has a history of sending their men overseas to send money back to support families.
- [16:53]
Sue Li
And so the recruiters would bring Chinese here. They'd come by ship. They end up going by ship to Sacramento. And then they'd be put onto rail cars to wherever the end of construction was to begin work on the railroad. And again, they were hired in gangs of 30. There was kinship. There was teamwork. Those workers stayed together. They weren't indentured. They had contracts. So they might work a month, two months, a season, a year, and leave for other work.
- [17:33]
Narrator
The holidays are all about sharing with family. Meals, couches, stories, Grandma's secret pecan pie recipe. And now you can also Share a cart with Instacart Family carts, everyone can add what they want to one group cart from wherever they are so you don't have to go from room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce or whether you should get mini marshmallows for the yams or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then share the meals in the moments. Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes. Plus enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees and terms apply.
- [18:12]
Credit Karma makes building your credit straightforward and stress free with help from our Credit Builder. Sign up today@creditkarma.com and start enhancing your financial health. Credit Karma, your partner in building a brighter financial future Credit Builder plan is serviced by Credit Karma Credit Builder and requires a line of credit and savings account provided by Cross river bank member fdic.
- [18:39]
Lindsey Graham
So I'm interested in life on the railroad. We know the work was hard and grueling and sometimes dangerous. But what was life like in the camps along the line as it stretched from Sacramento to Utah?
- [18:53]
Connie Young Yu
So here you are in a tropical area of southern China where it's hot and humid, no snow, and you come all the way across the Pacific, end up at Donner Lake, right? You've got cold, cold, snowy winters and hot, hot summers, so you end up carving tunnels through the Sierra Nevada. And you live next to the Summit Tunnel.
- [19:18]
Sue Li
What we know about these gangs of Chinese working together was that they lived together, they ate together, they worked together.
- [19:25]
Connie Young Yu
The gangs worked 24, 7.
- [19:28]
Sue Li
Each gang had their own Chinese cook, so they ate a Chinese diet. And there are stories about how perhaps Chinese cooks would plant the seeds of Chinese vegetables along the line and they would then have a source for fresh vegetables in their diet. The railroad company used vendors. There was Sison and Wallace and another fellow named Koopmansha who provided all the provisions. Dried shrimp, dried seafood, dried vegetables from China. So the Chinese had their own diet.
- [20:03]
Connie Young Yu
You'd be cared for sometimes by a herbal doctor. So either one of the men may have been trained as an herb doctor before coming and then became a laborer, or you'd have these itinerant herb doctors that would travel from gang to gang in your off hours. You would play Chinese games, smoke a little opium, try to keep warm in the winter, try to keep cool in the summer. But you'd be working six days a week from dawn to dusk. So it was grueling, grueling work.
- [20:37]
Lindsey Graham
So it sounds like the Chinese lived a very Chinese life or as much as they could in a very foreign land. What was their work like? How did it compare to the other white workers?
- [20:48]
Sue Li
They ended up doing the heavy lifting, if you will, on the Central Pacific. They had to carve through the granite.
- [20:55]
Connie Young Yu
Of the Sierra Nevada. They had hand tools, they had black powder.
- [20:59]
Sue Li
And then later on, closer to the end of the construction of the Summit Tunnel, they had nitroglycerin, which was extremely, extremely dangerous.
- [21:09]
Connie Young Yu
During the winter. There'd be avalanches where entire camps would just disappear. And then the bodies wouldn't be recovered till the next spring because there was so much snow and ice up there. Just horrendous, horrendous stories.
- [21:23]
Sue Li
It's thought that the Chinese who came here who worked on the railroad were illiterate and uneducated. But in fact, they came from all kinds of professions. They understood teamwork. And so they were very effective in Those gangs of 30 men working on the railroad.
- [21:40]
Connie Young Yu
And can you imagine drilling holes and filling the holes with black powder and then running for your life before the explosions? They made the equivalent of a dollar a day. But they would have to pay for room and board. The white workers would be making $35 a month and board would be covered. But it said that even having to pay their own board, Chinese workers were able to save $20 a month.
- [22:07]
Sue Li
Summit Camp is the camp where the Chinese worked for over two years. Summit Tunnel is the largest of the 15 tunnels that were carved out of the Sierra Nevada. And it took over the course of two winters to complete. A couple of thousand Chinese camped next to the location of the tunnel. And so that area has been very important in excavating and finding the remnants of the way Chinese lived as they worked.
- [22:42]
Lindsey Graham
You mentioned that the Chinese laborers were good at teamwork and worked well within their gangs. But one thing that was interesting to me, that we learned in our series was that Chinese workers not only were good at teamwork, but were perhaps also good teamsters. They went on strike in 1867 to protest the conditions in the Sierras. What did these striking workers want and did they get it?
- [23:05]
Connie Young Yu
What triggered the strike, we believe is.
- [23:07]
Sue Li
That there was a huge accident, an explosion. And the Chinese workers knew that the white workers were making more money and were working fewer hours per day. So on a Monday in June, 1867, they stopped work along this 30 mile stretch at the same time.
- [23:29]
Connie Young Yu
So they were extremely organized.
- [23:31]
Sue Li
They had good communication between the work camps. So they laid down their tools and didn't go to work, which scared the.
- [23:41]
Connie Young Yu
Hell out of the Central Pacific world.
- [23:43]
Sue Li
Leaders and said, wait a minute, we can't do this. We can't afford for the Chinese to stop work. And so within a week, the Central Pacific stopped the supplies to these work camps. So they basically starved them out. So the strike ended.
- [23:59]
Connie Young Yu
But the Central Pacific quietly did raise.
- [24:04]
Sue Li
The wages of the Chinese workers and did cut the work hours by one hour over a couple of months after the strike.
- [24:12]
Lindsey Graham
We've mentioned a few times Summit Camp and Summit Tunnel and how difficult the work there was. You've been there. And while we tried to convey the conditions in our series, there's nothing quite like visiting the site yourself. I'd love for you to give us an idea of what this tunnel is, the scale and scope of it. And why is there a wall between two tunnels called China Wall?
- [24:35]
Connie Young Yu
Well, the China Wall, which is near the summit tunnel, it's between, I think, tunnel seven and eight. There's nothing between the rocks, there's no mortar. It was like a jigsaw puzzle where they just use rocks to build this 75 foot wall. And, you know, before they took the tracks out, there was a track on it. It's 150 years old. It's amazing, the summit tunnel itself to.
- [24:59]
Sue Li
Make the impact on you emotionally, I think it's kind of crazy, but you should go in the winter when there's.
- [25:08]
Connie Young Yu
Still ice in the tunnel.
- [25:09]
Sue Li
It's a huge, huge tunnel. It's dark as hell and in the winter there's ice in there, it's freezing. And then you think, how in the.
- [25:19]
Connie Young Yu
World did these Chinese build it? You have to walk through with flashlights.
- [25:25]
Sue Li
Or with headlamps or something, because there's.
- [25:27]
Connie Young Yu
No way to walk through the length of five football fields without light. And you can see the chisel marks.
- [25:34]
Sue Li
Of the tools that were used to.
- [25:37]
Connie Young Yu
Chisel away at the rock or to drill the holes by hand, to drop in the black powder or the nitroglycerin.
- [25:48]
Sue Li
Later to blow up the granite to allow a chain to go through.
- [25:52]
Connie Young Yu
It gives me goosebumps just to think about it. And you just feel like you're in this special place, this almost sacred place that was hand built. Also because of the way that the.
- [26:06]
Sue Li
Tunnels were built, the trains had to.
- [26:09]
Connie Young Yu
Be protected from the snow.
- [26:10]
Sue Li
So the Chinese also built wooden snow sheds over the tracks. And about 30 years ago, I think the railroad replaced those wooden snow sheds with concrete. But today those tunnels are no longer used for the railroad and that concrete has now become a canvas for graffiti. Unfortunately, it's really a desecration of the work of the people who built those tunnels, which is part of the reason that there's been an effort to bring attention to the tunnels and to landmark part of that area so that the area can still be respected and a respectful place to remember our history.
- [26:58]
Lindsey Graham
Now, one of the obvious and unfortunate consequences of the hard work these laborers were performing are accidents and deaths. It's estimated that over a thousand Chinese laborers died building the railroad. But when their bodies could be recovered, what happened to them? They were a long way from home.
- [27:17]
Sue Li
They were a long way from home.
- [27:19]
Connie Young Yu
When a man signed up to work on the railroad, sign a contract. And one of the conditions of the contract that he wanted was that his body would be sent home to China if he died here. So that responsibility of sending the bodies home became the responsibility of one of the family associations or the six companies.
- [27:41]
Sue Li
So if a worker died on the construction effort, the body would be buried locally. But over a period of time, let's say within a few years, the body would be exhumed, the bones would be cleaned and would be put into a specific kind of container and shipped back to China. So it's through the shipping back of those bones that we have the estimates of 1000 to 1200 workers having been killed over the construction of the railroad.
- [28:13]
Connie Young Yu
Because there really aren't any records.
- [28:22]
Narrator
You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Memorable moments like these are key to building your business and your brand. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real time connections across AI powered email, SMS and more. Making every moment count so you can continue to build smarter, more meaningful relationships with your customers. Build smarter digital relationships with your customers and make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at K l a v I-Y-O.com BFCM Hey prime members, have you heard?
- [28:59]
You can listen to your favorite podcasts ad free.
- [29:02]
Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com adfreepodcast that's Amazon.com ad freepodcast to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.
- [29:29]
Lindsey Graham
So far, we focused our conversation on the Chinese laborers as they worked on the railroad. But in 1869, the work ended. The railroad was completed. What happened to the thousands of Chinese men who had worked so hard to get it done?
- [29:43]
Connie Young Yu
So after the railroad, some workers continued with railroad work because now the Chinese had this reputation of being good railroad workers. So they went to work on all the feeder lines throughout the country. And then others went back to existing Chinese communities or to new communities where they became brokers and did import export. They went into fishing, they established canneries.
- [30:11]
Sue Li
Or established small farming communities. They became kind of the workforce building the American West.
- [30:19]
Connie Young Yu
But they also became a threat to organized labor in the west and became an easy target.
- [30:26]
Sue Li
One of the things that the Manchu.
- [30:29]
Connie Young Yu
Dynasty required was that a Chinese man.
- [30:32]
Sue Li
Had to wear a cue, a braid. And so if a Chinese man here.
- [30:39]
Connie Young Yu
Wanted to return to China at any point to visit family, to marry or.
- [30:44]
Sue Li
Whatever, he would have to keep his cue.
- [30:48]
Connie Young Yu
So that made him easily identified and different.
- [30:53]
Sue Li
So that contributed to the scapegoating and the violence against Chinese communities. So you have cities, towns big and small. San Francisco, Louisiana. Sacramento, Tacoma, Seattle, Portland. You know, it can sit here and name every town in California and give you an example of anti Chinese violence. At that time, laws were passed against Chinese.
- [31:21]
Connie Young Yu
They didn't allow Chinese to go into certain occupations. There was like actions against laundries.
- [31:28]
Sue Li
There was vigilante violence against Chinese.
- [31:32]
Connie Young Yu
The city of Tacoma enacted a law that said all Chinese must be out of town on such and such a date. So all that activity percolated through the 1870s. So by 1882, there was enough sentiment against Chinese for Congress to enact the Chinese Exclusion act, which specifically banned the immigration of Chinese laborers. But there were exceptions, so if you were a Chinese merchant, you could come into the country. The Exclusion act lasted from 1882 to 1943, and the only reason it was repealed was that in 1943, the US and China were allies in World War II. So it didn't seem right to forbid the citizens of your ally from coming into the country.
- [32:27]
Lindsey Graham
We started our conversation with a look at the 1869 photograph of the hammering of the golden spike at Promontory Point. There was another photograph recreating the scene in 2014 from a photographer named Corky Lee. What happened in this rendition?
- [32:44]
Connie Young Yu
Corky was inspired by that story of.
- [32:48]
Sue Li
Phil Choi being snubbed in 1969. I knew Corky, and he decided to go to promontory in 2014 and recreate that historic photograph, but to fill it with Chinese people. So his efforts in educating the more recent immigrants in Utah about what happened at Promontory really was a catalyst to build up to the 2019 celebration to commemorate the Promontory Summit event.
- [33:21]
Lindsey Graham
And he wasn't the only one interested in correcting the record. In 2014, the U.S. department of labor moved to set the record Straight as well. What did the federal government do to recognize these Chinese laborers?
- [33:33]
Sue Li
In 2014, there was an undersecretary named Christopher Lu, a Chinese American who moved.
- [33:39]
Connie Young Yu
From the White House to the Department of Labor. So the Department of Labor internally staff.
- [33:45]
Sue Li
Decided to place a plaque on their wall of honoring Chinese railroad workers.
- [33:51]
Connie Young Yu
No individual names, but just the group.
- [33:54]
Sue Li
Of Chinese railroad workers.
- [33:57]
Connie Young Yu
What I did, what we did at the Chinese Historical Society was we put.
- [34:01]
Sue Li
Out the word to descendants to say.
- [34:04]
Connie Young Yu
Your ancestor is going to be honored at the Department of Labor.
- [34:08]
Sue Li
Can you be in D.C. at this time and be part of the ceremony?
- [34:13]
Connie Young Yu
That was very moving and very emotional.
- [34:16]
Sue Li
We interviewed descendants who showed up that day who were extremely moved and said, you know, this is the first time that there's been official government recognition of the labor of Chinese to building this country.
- [34:32]
Lindsey Graham
Your co editor of Voices from the Railroad is historian Connie Yung Yu, and she is the descendant of a Chinese railroad worker herself. We have a clip talking about her great grandfather, Li Wong Sang, who worked for the Central Pacific Railroad. She talked about being asked to speak at the 150th anniversary at Promontory Point in 2019, when the Chinese contribution was finally recognized. As you know, here it is.
- [34:57]
Connie Young Yu
My great grandfather, Li Wong Tsang, came to the United States in 1866 from Guangdong Province, a village in Toisan, to work on the transcontinental railroad. He was 19 years old. My mother, his granddaughter, told me, she goes, you, great grandfather worked on the iron road. And she said this in Chinese. Her familiar language was Cantonese. So she said, tiet lo T. Lo is iron road. That's why he came to California. And she always said, we were very lucky that he came at the age of 19, in 1866, before the Chinese exclusion law, before the restrictions. And also he had a job. I mean, people talk about the Chinese being exploited, slave labor, coolie labor. That is not how they regarded it. It was an opportunity to work. My mother told me that he knew a few words of English, and she said she thought he was a foreman. I do not have any documentation of where he worked. We just know he had to be in Sacramento, the railhead, and start working from there. We know that, that he was in Sacramento and then going on to Auburn, Truckee, further up into the Sierras. I don't know if he was working on the tunnel, the great summit tunnel that I visited a number of times and went through and imagined that he was there, but he survived and he was able to come back, riding the rails back to Sacramento. And then From Sacramento to San Francisco, where the Lee family, his clan, had a general store. He soon became a manager, and he became the head manager. My great grandfather was so fortunate he was able to send for his wife. He wanted his family. He wanted his family in America. This is the oral history that we have from my mother that was passed down. Our people who were excluded from America, denied naturalization to citizenship. We actually helped build America. So because of the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendant association, because of their advocacy in planning the 150th, finally, the Chinese would be acknowledged very prominently. And I was fortunate and honored to be asked to be the commencement speaker to represent. And I think my first words were, I'm Connie Yong Yu. I'm an American and a descendant of a Chinese railroad worker.
- [37:37]
Lindsey Graham
I'd love to hear your reflections on what Connie said and just what it meant to you.
- [37:42]
Sue Li
I'm a wannabe Chinese railroad descendant because the railroad is one of the cornerstones of Chinese American immigration.
- [37:51]
Connie Young Yu
Here.
- [37:52]
Sue Li
There's the railroad and there's the gold rush. I'm a third generation Chinese American, but.
- [37:57]
Connie Young Yu
My grandfather came in 1915, and so I don't have that connection.
- [38:03]
Sue Li
So that's always been something that I've been envious of.
- [38:07]
Connie Young Yu
And to see Connie actually walk across that stage in front of the estimated 25, 30,000 people who were at Promontory was really emotional. It's like, dang, you know, we did it. We're finally able to have our say and to say it in our own words.
- [38:30]
Lindsey Graham
You mentioned earlier the state of disrepair that the more modern concrete snow sheds have fallen into. And I know you were involved in trying to preserve Summit Camp as a whole adjacent to the tunnels. What would you like to see happen there?
- [38:45]
Sue Li
Well, there's a ongoing effort to place the Summit Tunnel Camp on the National.
- [38:53]
Connie Young Yu
Register of Historic Places.
- [38:56]
Sue Li
And that application has been making its.
- [38:58]
Connie Young Yu
Way through the bureaucracy for the last.
- [39:01]
Sue Li
Several years, and it's in its final.
- [39:04]
Connie Young Yu
Stages of becoming approved.
- [39:07]
Sue Li
So it'll become a national historic landmark, and hopefully that'll elevate efforts to preserve it and not allow the desecration, if you will, of the graffiti that's happening up there.
- [39:21]
Lindsey Graham
Now. I don't know how many Chinese Americans view the Transcontinental Railway as this, but it could be seen as their Plymouth Rock. What do you want people to know about the legacy of Chinese railroad workers in America?
- [39:35]
Sue Li
That there's these thousands of Chinese who have been here for four, five, six.
- [39:41]
Connie Young Yu
Generations who helped build that railroad and.
- [39:43]
Sue Li
Who continue to help build this country? It's as simple as that. And the ability to draw on the.
- [39:51]
Connie Young Yu
Legacy of those workers and their contributions is inspiration for the future.
- [39:57]
Lindsey Graham
Su Li, thank you so much for joining us on American History Tellers.
- [40:00]
Sue Li
Thank you very much.
- [40:02]
Lindsey Graham
That was my conversation with Su Li, historian and former executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America. She's also co editor with Connie Young Yu of Voices from the Stories by Descendants of Chinese Railroad Workers from Wondery. This is the fifth and final episode of our series Transcontinental Railroad for American History Tellers. In our next season, we're bringing you an encore presentation of our series on the Boston molasses disaster. In 1919, one of America's strangest tragedies struck Boston's busy North End when a giant storage tank holding more than 2 million gallons of molasses collapsed, sending its contents crashing into the city streets. The ordeal left death and destruction in its wake and sparked a contentious court case to determine who was to blame for the tragedy.
- [40:53]
If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey@wondry.com survey.
- [41:14]
American history tellers is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship Sound design by Molly Bach music by Lindsey Graham. This episode was produced by Paulie Stryker and Alita Rusanski. Our senior Interview producer is Peter Cooney, managing Producer Desi Blaylock, senior Managing Producer, Callum Plews, senior Producer Annie Herman and executive producers are Jenny Lauer, Beckman, Marshall Louie and Erin O'Flaherty.
- [41:38]
For wondering.
- [41:48]
Luke Lamona
Behind the closed doors of government offices and military compounds, there are hidden stories and buried secrets from the darkest corners of history, from COVID experiments pushing the boundaries of science to operations so secretive they were barely whispered about. Each week on Redacted Declassified Mysteries, we pull back the curtain on These hidden histories, 100% true and verifiable stories that expose the shadowy underbelly of power. Consider Operation Paperclip, where former Nazi scientists were brought to America after World War II not as prisoners but as assets to advance US intelligence during the Cold War. These aren't just old conspiracy theories. They're thoroughly investigated accounts that reveal the uncomfortable truths still shaping our world today. The stories are real. The secrets are shocking. Follow Redacted Declassified Mysteries with me, Luke Lamona, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts to listen ad free. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app.