Sue Lee
Appearances
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
What we know about these gangs of Chinese working together was that they lived together, they ate together, they worked together. The gangs worked 24-7. 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 would then have a source for vegetables in their diet.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
The railroad company used vendors. It was Sison and Wallace and another fellow named Koopmanshop who provided all the provisions. Dried shrimp, dried seafood, dried vegetables from China. So the Chinese had their own diet. You'd be cared for sometimes by a herbal doctor.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
They ended up doing the heavy lifting, if you will, on the Central Pacific. They had to carve through the granite of the Sierra Nevada. They had hand tools. They had black powder. And then later on, closer to the end of the construction of the summit tunnel, they had nitroglycerin, which was extremely, extremely dangerous.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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. 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
They understood teamwork. And so they were very effective in those gangs of 30 men working on the railroad. 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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. 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
What triggered the strike, we believe, is 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. So they were extremely organized. They had good communication between the work camps.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
So they laid down their tools and didn't go to work, which scared the hell out of the Central Pacific Railroad 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
But the Central Pacific quietly did raise the wages of the Chinese workers and did cut the work hours by one hour over a couple of months after the strike.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
Well, the China Wall, which is near the Summit Tunnel, it's between, I think, Tunnel 7 and 8, there's nothing between the rocks. There's no mortar. It looks 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
The summit tunnel itself, to make the impact on you emotionally, I think it's kind of crazy, but you should go in the winter when there's still ice in the tunnel. 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 world did these Chinese build it?
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
You have to walk through with flashlights or with headlamps or something because there's no way to walk the length of five football fields without light. And you can see the chisel marks of the tools that were used to chisel away at the rock or to drill the holes by hand to drop in the black powder or the nitroglycerin later on. to blow up the granite to allow a train to go through.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 tunnels were built, the trains had to be protected from the snow. 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
But today, those tunnels are no longer used for the railroad. And that concrete has now become a canvas for graffiti, unfortunately.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
When a man signed up to work on the railroad, he signed 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
So it's through the shipping back of those bones that we have the estimates of 1,000 to 1,200 workers having been killed over the construction of the railroad. Because there really aren't any records.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
They established canneries or established small farming communities. They became kind of the workforce building the American West. But they also became a threat to organized labor in the West and became an easy target. One of the things that the Manchu dynasty required was that a Chinese man had to wear a q, a braid.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
And so if a Chinese man here wanted to return to China at any point to visit family, to marry or whatever, he would have to keep his cue. So that made him easily identified and different. So that contributed to the scapegoating and the violence against Chinese communities. So you have cities, towns, big and small, San Francisco, L.A., Sacramento, Tacoma, Seattle, Portland.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
You know, I 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. They didn't allow Chinese to go into certain occupations. There was like actions against laundries. There was vigilante violence against Chinese.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 U.S. 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
Corky was inspired by that story of 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
In 2014, there was an undersecretary named Christopher Liu, a Chinese-American who moved from the White House to the Department of Labor. So the Department of Labor internally, staff decided to place a plaque on their wall of honoring Chinese railroad workers. No individual names, but just the group of Chinese railroad workers.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
What I did, what we did at the Chinese Historical Society was we put out the word to descendants to say, your ancestor is going to be honored at the Department of Labor. Can you be in D.C. at this time and be part of the ceremony? That was very moving and very emotional.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
I'm a wannabe Chinese railroad descendant because the railroad is one of the cornerstones of Chinese American immigration here. There's the railroad and there's the gold rush. I'm a third generation Chinese American, but my grandfather came in 1915. And so I don't have that connection. So that's always been something that I've been envious of. And to see Connie actually walk across that stage...
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
In front of the estimated 25,000, 30,000 people who were at Promontory, it 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
Well, there's an ongoing effort to place the Summit Tunnel Camp on the National Register of Historic Places. And that application has been making its way through the bureaucracy for the last several years. And it's in its final stages of becoming approved. So it'll become a National Historic Landmark.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
That there's these thousands of Chinese who have been here for four or five, six generations who helped build that railroad and who continue to help build this country. It's as simple as that. And the ability to draw on the legacy of those workers and their contributions is inspiration for the future.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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. Wow. The Central Pacific had actually completed its part of the line for the May 10th celebration. The Union Pacific was late.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
So what the Central Pacific did was 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. But if you look at the photograph as just a normal person, you go, well, wait a minute, there are no Chinese there.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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. So there were few Central Pacific workers and even fewer Chinese workers, though the Central Pacific kept a crew of eight men.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 there. 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?
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 weren't in that photo whitewashes our history and says, you guys aren't important. We're not going to include you in anything.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 to begin recovering our stories and to tell the stories through the voices of descendants of actual workers.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 people.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
And when he got there, the organizers said, Oh, Mr. Choi, we're so sorry, 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 that's the end of the story. There are no specifics. There are no details. So about five years before the 2019 celebration, we started organizing everything.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
And we put out the word to the community for descendants 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 we know that that's how long we've been here.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 descendant stories in Voices from the Railroad is of Lum Ah Choo.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
He was a cook at the Summit Tunnel, and there's actually a payroll record with Ah Choo on On it, the Lamachew 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
The way that Chinese names were listed was with a prefix, ah, and a nickname. So rather than Lindsey Graham, it'd be Ah Lindsey or Ah Graham or Sue Lee, 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
So much of this is through oral history.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
Growing up, I don't recall my family talking at all about the railroad because that wasn't anything that my family had any association with. Coming to the U.S. as a merchant was one of the ways of getting around the Exclusion Act. 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
which is a reason why my family didn't talk about 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.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
So there was no reference to the railroad.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
So the estimate is that 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese worked on the transcontinental railroad, primarily on the Central Pacific side. 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. Initially, the Central Pacific didn't want Chinese workers at all.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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. And the leaders of the Central Pacific were very leery of hiring Chinese workers in the area.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
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 it was easier to recruit groups of Chinese from a particular village.
American History Tellers
Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5
That area has a history of sending their men overseas to send money back to support families. 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.