Transcontinental Railroad | The Iron Road | 5

Chinese laborers did much of the toughest work building the Central Pacific Railroad. That included blasting tunnels through the granite of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to eventually connect to the Union Pacific line at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. Today, Lindsay is joined by Sue Lee, historian and former executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America. She and historian Connie Young Yu edited Voices from the Railroad: Stories by descendants of Chinese railroad workers. Order your copy of the new American History Tellers book, The Hidden History of the White House, for behind-the-scenes stories of some of the most dramatic events in American history—set right inside the house where it happened. Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletter Listen to American History Tellers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season. Unlock exclusive early access by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting wondery.com/links/american-history-tellers/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Lindsay Graham?

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• 0:23Lindsay Graham?

  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.

• 1:05Lindsay Graham?

  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 gonna 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 gonna 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.

• 1:48Lindsay Graham?

  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 bolt. 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.

• 2:24Speaker 01

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• 2:36Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Cassie Depeckel, host of Against the Odds from Audible Originals. In our latest series, when a fur trapper named Hugh Glass is brutally mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead, he fights for survival and his chance for revenge. Listen to Against the Odds on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:59Lindsay Graham?

  From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers: Our History, Your Story.

• 3:21Lindsay Graham?

  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 had 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.

• 4:06Lindsay Graham?

  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 Su Li, historian and former executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America. She's a co-editor with Connie Young Yu of Voices from the Railroad: Stories by Descendants of Chinese Railroad Workers. Our conversation is next.

• 4:43Lindsay Graham?

  Su Li, welcome to American History Tellers.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.

• 4:49Lindsay 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?

• 5:14Speaker 03

  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. The Central Pacific had actually completed its part of the line for the May 10 celebration. The Union Pacific was late. 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 then, actual number of Central Pacific workers at Promontory for that May 10 celebration was very small.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  But if you look at the photograph as just a normal person, you go, well, wait a minute, there are no Chinese there. 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, 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.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  The work that that 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.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  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 gonna include you in anything. 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.

• 7:56Lindsay Graham?

  In 1969, 50 years before your book came out, there was a centennial ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah, 100 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?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  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 10.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  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. And so when 2019 came around and it was time to celebrate the 150th, the Asian community

• 9:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:44Lindsay 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?

• 9:56Speaker 03

  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 and we put out the word to the community, four 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 you know, we know that that's how long we've been here.

• 10:41Lindsay Graham?

  What do you think was behind the difficulty in finding the details about Chinese laborers?

• 10:46Speaker 03

  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 5,000 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 Lam Ah Chu. He was a cook at the Summit Tunnel and there's actually a payroll record with Ah Chu on it. The Lam Ah Chu family claims that as documentation of their ancestor because who's to say that it wasn't him?

• 11:30Speaker 03

  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. The way that Chinese names were listed was with a prefix "Ah" and a nickname. So rather than Lindsay Graham, it'd be Ah Lindsey, or Ah Graham, or Su Li, it'd be Ah Su or Ah Li. 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

• 12:13Speaker 03

  on the railroad as whatever. So much of this is through oral history.

• 12:19Lindsay 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?

• 12:45Speaker 03

  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 US 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, 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

• 13:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:39Lindsay 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 it have been like for them to arrive in California and work?

• 13:55Speaker 03

  So the estimate is that fifteen to twenty thousand 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, eighteen sixty-four, they were already here. They may have come for the gold rush. 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 head, literally, for the hills for more lucrative mining work or other work. And the leaders of the Central Pacific were very leery

• 14:39Speaker 03

  of hiring Chinese workers in the area. It was out of desperation that the Central Pacific in eighteen sixty-four 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.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  They came because their kinsmen came. And 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. 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 thirty. There was kinship. There was teamwork. Those workers stayed together.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  They weren't indentured. They had contracts. So they might work a month, two months, a season, a year, and leave for other work.

• 16:22Speaker 04

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• 17:30Lindsay 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?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  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 fresh vegetables in their diet. The railroad company used vendors, it was Sison and Wallace and another fellow named Koopman Shop, 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. So either one of the men may have been trained as an herb doctor before coming and then

• 19:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:28Lindsay 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?

• 19:39Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  They understood teamwork, and so they were very effective in those gangs of thirty men working on the railroad. And can you imagine drilling holes and filling The holes with black powder and 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 thirty five dollars a month and board would be covered. But it said that even having to pay their own board, Chinese workers were able to save twenty dollars a month. Summit Camp is the camp where the Chinese worked for over two years.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Summit Tunnel is the largest of the fifteen 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.

• 21:33Lindsay 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 eighteen sixty seven to protest the conditions in the Sierras. What did these striking workers want and did they get it?

• 21:56Speaker 03

  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 eighteen sixty seven, they stopped work along this thirty mile stretch at the same time. So they were extremely organized. They had good communication between the work camps. So they laid down their tools and didn't go to work. Which scared the hell out of the Central Pacific World 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,

• 22:41Speaker 03

  the Central Pacific stopped the supplies to these work camps. So, they basically starved them out. So, the strike ended. 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.

• 23:03Lindsay 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?

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Well, 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 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. 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.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  And then you think, how in the world did these Chinese build it? 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 to blow up the granite to allow a train to go through. 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.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  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 snowsheds over the tracks. And about 30 years ago, I think, the railroad replaced those wooden snowsheds with concrete. But today, those tunnels are no longer used for the railroad. And that concrete has now become a canvas for graffiti, unfortunately. 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

• 25:39Speaker 03

  and to landmark part of that area so that the area can still be respected and a respectful place to remember our history.

• 25:49Lindsay 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 1,000 Chinese laborers died building the railroad. But when their bodies could be recovered, what happened to them? They were a long way from home.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  They were a long way from home. When a man signed up to work on the railroad, 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. 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.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:13Speaker 05

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• 27:16Speaker 06

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• 27:33Speaker 06

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• 29:21Lindsay 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?

• 29:35Speaker 03

  So after the railroad, some workers continued 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 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.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  One of the things that the Manchu Dynasty required was that a Chinese man had to wear a q, a braid. 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 q. 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, LA, Sacramento, Tacoma, Seattle, Portland.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  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. 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

• 31:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 32:18Lindsay 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?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:12Lindsay Graham?

  And he wasn't the only one interested in correcting the record. In 2014, the US Department of Labor moved to set the record straight as well. What did the federal government do to recognize these Chinese laborers?

• 33:25Speaker 03

  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. 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 DC at this time and be part of the ceremony?" That was very moving and very emotional.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  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."

• 34:23Lindsay Graham?

  Your co-editor of Voices from the Railroad is historian Connie Young 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 talks 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.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  My great-grandfather, Li Wong Sang, came to the United States in 1866 from Guangdong Province, a village in Taishan, to work on the transcontinental railroad. He was 19 years old. My mother, his granddaughter, told me, she goes, "Your great-grandfather worked on the iron road." And she said this in Chinese. Her familiar language was Cantonese, so she said, "Nega dai gong jo tiit lo." "Tiit 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,

• 35:32Speaker 03

  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, coulee 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,

• 36:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  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 Yang Yu. I'm an American and a descendant of a Chinese railroad worker.

• 37:29Lindsay Graham?

  I'd love to hear your reflections on what Connie said and just what it meant to you.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 38:22Lindsay Graham?

  You mentioned earlier the state of disrepair that the more modern concrete snowsheds 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?

• 38:37Speaker 03

  Well, there's a 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. 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.

• 39:13Lindsay 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?

• 39:27Speaker 03

  That there's these thousands of Chinese who've 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.

• 39:49Lindsay Graham?

  Su Li, thank you so much for joining us on American History Tellers.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 39:54Lindsay 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 Railroad: Stories by Descendants of Chinese Railroad Workers.

• 40:09Lindsay Graham?

  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.

• 40:45Lindsay Graham?

  American History Tellers is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American History Tellers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.

• 41:21Lindsay Graham?

  American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach. Music by Lindsay Graham. This episode was produced by Paulie Stryker and Alita Rosansky. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Managing producer Desi Blaylock. Senior managing producer Callum Pluse. Senior producer Annie Herman. And executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Marshall Louie, and Aaron O'Flaherty for Wondery.

• 41:56Speaker 01

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• 42:40Speaker 01

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