HISTORY: CHINESE WORKERS MADE AMERICA GREAT BY BUILDING THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAY: Their “Reward” From A Racist Nation: Deportation, Exclusion, Bias!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/racists-deported-my-chinese-ancestor-he-still-loved-the-railroad-he-worked-on/2019/05/16/cac91328-75ac-11e9-b7ae-390de4259661_story.html

Ava Chin writes in the Washington Post:

One of the earliest stories I heard as a child was that my immigrant great-great-grandfather worked out West on the first transcontinental railroad. Yuan Son, along with tens of thousands of other Chinese workers, blasted tunnels, carved footholds and laid grade at death-defying heights through the most arduous parts of the Sierra Nevada, miraculously making it out alive. I envisioned him tough and swashbuckling — a cross between my tall, bartender grandfather, who often told me these stories while smoking a Marlboro in our home in Queens, and Yosemite Sam.

My great-great-grandfather and his fellow laborers toiled around the clock in rotating shifts, handling explosive nitroglycerine, blasting through miles of granite, hauling tons of rock and dirt, even in upwards of 30 feet of snow. They endured brutal working conditions we would consider unconscionable today to complete the most difficult sections through the Sierra Nevada — the same terrain that stopped the ill-fated Donner Party in its tracks — and finally out to Nevada and Utah’s blistering desert heat. They were paid less and worked longer hours than their Irish or American counterparts, and they had to provide their own food and accommodations. Although some claimed it could never be done, Yuan Son and other Chinese workers completed the task in record time.

It wasn’t until, as an adult, I traveled to Promontory Summit, Utah, and saw the site of the railroad’s completion with my own eyes that I realized the true weight of this legacy. The railroad is a complicated affair for Chinese American descendants like me: The greatest U.S. engineering feat of the 19th century may have physically unified the country when it was finished in 1869, but this new network of rail also brought scores of white workers to the West, many of whom grew resentful when they saw Chinese holding down jobs they considered rightfully theirs. Not 15 years after the completion of the railroad, this ire, coupled with a severe economic depression, helped usher in the Chinese Exclusion Act — the country’s first major federal law that limited immigration based on race, class and nationality — setting the tone for future wide-reaching restrictive immigration policies.

As a schoolgirl, I scanned the official photograph that came to symbolize the railroad’s completion — engineers shaking hands, flocks of laborers posing for the camera, the champagne toast, a carefully choreographed scene — more than 100 years later, searching for faces like my great-great-grandfather’s. Only white faces stared back. Chinese workers were written out of this triumphant American story.

Their contributions were already being erased when Chinese Exclusion was enacted, and soon followed by a tsunami of anti-Chinese violence that swept across much of the West — lynchings, expulsions, boycotts of Chinese businesses, politicians jumping on the bandwagon. Nativism was as popular and potent then as it is today. Yuan Son, now an entrepreneurial shop owner, had happily settled in Idaho, where, after the railroad’s completion, Chinese made up close to 30 percent of the population. Although he had been living in the country for almost 30 years, one day he was forced out of his home at gunpoint by a band of masked vigilantes.

Despite these hardships, Yuan Son resettled back into life in China and surprisingly spoke of the work he had done on the railroad with great pride. He even taught my grandfather his first words in English: “Central Pacific,” “Southern Pacific” and “Union Pacific.” My chain-smoking grandfather repeated these names back to me through his ringing Cantonese intonations, in our home half a world away, as if he were a conductor calling out stations.

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Like it or not, supporting Trump means “buying in” to  his noxiously false “Whitebread” vision of America’s past and future. It is also to disingenuously decline to recognize our true immigrant heritage and the overwhelming contributions of immigrants of color, enslaved Americans, immigrant women, and native Americans in making America great.

Sadly, the Chinese weren’t the only ones “airbrushed out” of the triumphant picture of the Transcontinental Railroad’s completion. Blacks, women, and Native Americans also made major contributions while suffering disproportionately; yet, they also received little or no appreciation or recognition.

Here’s a “differently take” on the ‘golden spike ceremony.:”

PWS

05-31-19

HISTORY: New Ric Burns/Li-Shin Yu Documentary Film Explores Sordid Side Of Our History: “The Chinese Exclusion Act” — “It was democratic,” explains historian Renqiu Yu in the film. “It was legal. But it was wrong.” — “That’s Why I Become a Lawyer,” Says One U.S. Immigration Judge!

http://caamedia.org/blog/2017/03/13/chinese-exclusion-act-a-new-film-about-a-19th-century-law-with-21st-century-lessons/

Julianne Hing writes in CAAM:

“In the last half of the 19th century, as Reconstruction was collapsing and the country slogged through an economic depression in the 1870s, politicians found easy scapegoats in Chinese immigrants. As a statesman, California Governor Bigler “wrangled a working class white rage at the fact that the Gold Rush had not been a stairway to heaven,” Burns says, “and all this transmogrified into hatred of the ‘other.’” Bigler called Chinese immigrants ignorant about and uninterested in joining American society, and described them as inferior, dishonest, and unassimilable in public addresses.

Passionate anti-Chinese sentiment manifested itself in the passage of punitive local ordinances that sought to criminalize or tax everyday Chinese life. San Francisco’s queue ordinances of the 1870s forbade city prisoners from keeping long braids. Pole ordinances prohibited the use of poles to balance vegetables and other wares; the use of a pole to balance heavy loads was a uniquely Chinese practice. Chinese immigrants were even prohibited from testifying in court against whites.

By the time the Chinese Exclusion Act became the law in 1882, Chinese immigrants were firmly established in the popular imagination as villainous culprits responsible for the country’s every economic woe. The law only codified a seething anti-immigrant sentiment that Americans latched on to. The law made it illegal for Chinese immigrants to come to the U.S., it made it illegal for those who left to re-enter the U.S., and it made it illegal for Chinese nationals to become U.S. citizens. The law was overturned only in the 1940s, and it wasn’t functionally dismantled until 1965 during the Civil Rights era — just 50 years ago.

“It was democratic,” explains historian Renqiu Yu in the film. “It was legal. But it was wrong.” That breach between legality and justice is exactly what Burns and Li-shin Yu sought to explore in their film. “Here’s a story that makes you think about how the way that democracy and jurisprudence work is not equal to justice,” Burns says.

The other chapter of the story of the Chinese Exclusion Act is one of resistance. Li-shin Yu says that in the years of making this film, the stories of resistance stood out to her over and over. “The greatest thing to have learned is that across time, the Chinese were standing up every step of the way,” Yu says.”

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Sadly, some of this sounds all too familiar.  I could just see a racist/white nationalist politician like Rep. Steve King (R-IA) playing the role of Gov. Bigler. It’s important for the rest of us to say “never again.”

PWS

03/14/17