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'I've Been Workin' on the Railroad'
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18645 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
4,358 Words |
| Author
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Sue Fawn Chung
Sue Fawn Chung is associate professor of history at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas. |
In 1964, the city of Reno, Nevada, honored Woo Loung Wah, age 105, as the last survivor of the largely forgotten 10,000 to 12,000 Chinese workers employed during the peak of construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, between 1865 and 1869. Woo experienced firsthand the conditions and events described in Frank Chin's novel, Donald Duk. Woo undoubtedly also shared the Chinese workers' sense of accomplishment and pride, as related in Donald Duk, when the Donner Summit route through the treacherous Sierra Nevadas was completed, and when the Chinese workers, assisted by eight Irish coworkers, were victorious in the contest to lay more than ten miles of track in a single day.
Frank Chin transports us back to this period through the dreams of a 12-year-old Chinese American boy named Donald Duk, who is living in contemporary San Francisco's Chinatown. After finding an old photograph showing his great-great-grandfather working on the Central Pacific, the boy visits a library to embark on a quest to discover the historical truth about the role of the Chinese railroad workers, and on another level, to come to terms with his identity and heritage as a Chinese American. In a sequence of dreams, Donald imagines that he has taken his great-great-grandfather's place as part of a Chinese work crew on the Central Pacific. Through this device, the author attempts to let us examine the past through twentieth-century eyes.
'Crocker's pets'
The incident that led to the employment of the first Chinese workers by the Central Pacific was a wildcat strike in support of a demand for higher wages by the Irish Brotherhood of Masonry Workers, which occurred just as the Central Pacific road construction began to climb into the Sierra foothills near Auburn, California. The decision to hire Chinese workers as strikebreakers was made in 1865 by Charles Crocker (1822-1888), chief contractor of construction and one of the Big Four owners of the Central Pacific.
Crocker's decision was met by strong objections from James Harvey Strobridge (1827-1921), the able but arrogant construction superintendent. Strobridge asserted that the Chinese were not physically strong enough and were not masons. Crocker retorted that the Chinese had built the Great Wall, the greatest piece of masonry in the world, and he felt confident that they could do the job. Strobridge finally agreed to hire 50 Chinese on a trial basis, primarily to perform simple tasks such as filling dump carts, but he quickly realized that they worked willingly and diligently and were eager to take on
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