In opposition to an unlimited wash of sagebrush and volcanic rock in Utah’s West Desert, Chris Merritt, an archaeologist with the State Historic Preservation Workplace, took me on a tour of the outdated Transcontinental Railroad’s route via Promontory Summit, from Corinne to Umbria Junction. The road was changed throughout World Struggle II by the Lucin Cutoff, which now runs straight via the Nice Salt Lake, shearing off among the unique line’s distance and permitting its iron tracks to be recycled for warfare munitions. That change turned all the Promontory Summit settlements into ghost cities.
I used to be visiting these websites all through 2018 and 2019 as analysis for a poem commissioned by The Spike 150 committee to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Transcontinental’s completion in 1869. On the time, I used to be Utah’s poet laureate — the primary individual of Asian descent to carry the position. I wished to put in writing a poem primarily based on the letters and diaries of the Central Pacific Railroad’s Chinese language staff, which, I assumed, had been absolutely someplace within the firm’s archive. However the CPR’s data — absorbed way back into the Union Pacific’s, after the CPR’s buy — had no such supplies. So far, not a single written doc by a Chinese language Transcontinental employee has been discovered. Absent any file, then, I turned to the panorama.
And the panorama supplied a lot. As we walked the ghost city of Terrace, the period’s inflexible racial segregation was nonetheless obvious: All of the Chinese language artifacts, the buried remnants of its Chinatown, had been discovered close to the city’s dump. Merritt identified fragments of damaged opium pipes and dishes floor down within the sand. I dug up buttons and bits of glass. Some rice bowl shards had been embellished with the 4 Seasons or Bamboo patterns well-liked on Chinese language dishware within the late nineteenth century.
Absent any file, I turned to the panorama. And the panorama supplied a lot.
Merritt mentioned you may discover comparable bowls in any of the Western ghost cities the place Chinese language miners and railroad staff lived. It suggests the paucity of fabric selection for them, sure, but additionally the shut ties they developed with the identical buying and selling companions — doubtless different Chinese language migrants wanting to earn cash within the U.S. by supplying plum wine, rice, soy sauce and dishes to the Chinese language staff that white retailers wouldn’t promote to.
As I thumbed a rice bowl shard, a phrase returned to me, one widespread to Chinese language and Chinese language Individuals households: Chi ku — “to eat bitterness” — a stark reminder that all of us should undergo life’s accidents with out criticism. It was my mom’s grasp philosophy for succeeding in America: Hold your head down and chin up, blind to setbacks and deaf to racist remarks. Through the first months of a educating job the place an older colleague informed me, in a hissed hallway dialog, that I used to be simply one other in a protracted string of “variety hires,” I thought-about bringing a criticism to the division chair. However my mom batted it down. “You’ll by no means get promoted,” she warned. “Simply work laborious and ignore him.”
Consuming bitterness is an idea acquainted to many immigrant households. The philosophy itself just isn’t that unique. What is exclusive is its delicate glorification of ache, the usage of the verb “to eat” somewhat than “to endure.” To eat is to feed, to maintain: It’s to develop the soul itself. Struggling represents, on this sense, a form of energy — one which nourishes what it threatens to destroy.
However these rice bowl shards additionally jogged my memory how a lot these Chinese language staff desired to protect their tradition, to remain Chinese language. It’s a delusion of American exceptionalism that the Chinese language Transcontinental staff wished to turn into American themselves. Most ate bitterness for cash, not citizenship. Just like the Chinese language staff, the retailers who equipped them in all probability had little curiosity in staying within the U.S. As an alternative, they noticed themselves as “sojourners” — vacationers keen to exploit America for cash, simply as America was keen to exploit a war-torn, famine-stricken southern China for reasonable labor.
We all know this from extra archaeological proof. Many nineteenth century Chinese language graves throughout the West are empty, a part of an elaborate loss of life ritual. Chinese language males within the U.S. paid a huiguan, a district affiliation, to bury their our bodies after which have a bone collector exhume them months later, scraping away the flesh and breaking the bones to suit into earthen jars or steel containers. These had been shipped to the Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong, which distributed the stays to the employees’ households. The Shasta Courier in 1897 cited the containers as proof of Chinese language staff’ unsanitary, disease-spreading habits.
Not each physique that arrived in Hong Kong, nevertheless, was collected. The hospital nonetheless hosts many unclaimed containers from the final two centuries — stacks of males left to languish on the border of house.
IF WE CAN IMAGINE how the Chinese language felt about America from their loss of life rituals, we would additionally intuit one thing about their lives from what they ate. Layers of trash and coprolites from websites like Terrace may be learn as an archive. Apart from plum wine and opium, the Chinese language appeared to stay to grains and greens acquainted from house. However there are some attention-grabbing discrepancies: The trash is suffering from bones from subsistence meat like jackrabbit and with pine nuts.
Pine nuts are utilized in southern Chinese language dishes and are additionally a staple of the Paiutes, one of many Nice Basin’s Indigenous nations. The seedpods are shiny and hard: You need to cut up them together with your tooth to succeed in the nut — candy and oily, not bitter like its Asian cousin. You need to decide and decide to maintain your self fed; it’s a subsistence food plan, and the railroad staff wouldn’t have had the time. Did they commerce with touring Paiutes or purchase from Cantonese retailers? With out written data, it’s laborious to say whether or not the nuts counsel cross-cultural alternate or insularity. Doubtless the latter: Up to date studies counsel the Chinese language had been as afraid of Indigenous folks as white railroaders had been. Like their Anglo counterparts, they had been prejudiced towards anybody they noticed as “different.”
In 1852, Norman Asing, a Chinese language restaurant proprietor in San Francisco, wrote to California Gov. John Bigler after the state enacted insurance policies to forestall Chinese language from coming into. Asing chides that immigration “transferred (your nation) … from childhood to manhood and made you nice and respectable all through the nations of the earth.” And he reminds Bigler that he, too, is the descendant of immigrants, since he would absolutely “not boast of being a descendant of the crimson man.” Asing brags that the Chinese language “exercised many of the arts and virtues of civilized life; that we’re possessed of a language and a literature, and that males expert in science and the humanities are quite a few amongst us.” Their cultural achievements, he argues, make it inconceivable to match the Chinese language to Black folks. “We aren’t,” he declares, “the degraded race you’ll make us.”
Not a lot is understood about Asing, however his letter reveals how profoundly the Chinese language understood that their id was triangulated towards Black and white, and that their very own bid to be handled as equals relied on presenting themselves as ethnically and racially superior. That is the darkish underbelly of consuming bitterness: the suggestion that anybody who presents himself as a mannequin sufferer turns into, too, a mannequin citizen. If the promised energy of chi ku is success, then consuming bitterness calls for that you just reside on the margin of politics and energy to realize it. You turn into, at finest, a shadow of the highly effective, replicating their arbitrary hierarchies and guidelines. It’s subsistence nourishment, simply as railroading is subsistence labor. Ache is the ultimate results of each.
AFTER OUR VISIT TO TERRACE, Merritt drove me to see a well-known 10-mile part of observe that was laid down in a single day, principally by Chinese language staff — the longest part accomplished within the shortest period of time— and I each marveled and winced on the achievement. For an instantaneous, on that shelterless plain, buffeted by an infinite wind, I understood what it meant to say that each foot of the Transcontinental’s trestle and inch of grade was constructed by people.
Struggling is the definition of such work, and it’s much more bitterly astonishing to know the Chinese language weren’t even the CPR’s first option to do it. Charles Crocker, one of many railroad’s companions, urged his co-owners to rent younger males from Guangzhou as a result of they might be cheaper than whites. Most Individuals on the time considered the Chinese language both as direct rivals, or as “much less” than males. Chinese language males wore robes that resembled girls’s attire, their black hair tied in lengthy braids known as queues. As a result of many — particularly after the Gold Rush petered out — labored as domestics, washers in laundries or cooks in eating places, they garnered the stereotype of being like girls: weak, homebound, small.
Asing brags that the Chinese language “exercised many of the arts and virtues of civilized life; that we’re possessed of a language and a literature, and that males expert in science and the humanities are quite a few amongst us.”
The 1875 Web page Act successfully banned immigration by Chinese language girls by assuming they had been all coming to work in prostitution, however it additionally implicitly aimed to forestall Chinese language males from marrying and elevating Chinese language households on American shores. The lads needed to reside in close-quartered, segregated “bachelor societies,” additional convincing their Anglo detractors that they had been sexually perverse — effete homosexuals or opium-addicted rapists. CPR co-owner Leland Stanford didn’t assume Chinese language males had been match for the harmful work of railroading. However they had been seemingly much less risky than white staff as they didn’t drink, weren’t recognized to frequent the prostitutes that trailed the railroad, and saved to themselves. Solely the Mormons, employed by the Union Pacific, had been as hard-working and reliable. Most significantly, Chinese language staff had been low-cost. The CPR solely paid them about $26 a month for 12-hour workdays, they usually had to purchase their very own provides and meals. The Irish, in contrast, had been paid $35 and had their bills coated.
The Chinese language protested this injustice throughout an 1867 strike. That they had struggled that summer season to finish the toughest work on the western half of the road, working from daybreak until nightfall, blasting via the Sierras. The Chinese language demanded 10-hour workdays and a pay enhance to $35 a month. “The reality is, they’re getting sensible,” wrote E. B. Crocker, Charles’s brother and CPR’s authorized counsel. The actual reality was that they weren’t sensible sufficient: The Chinese language by no means allied with the Irish or Black railroaders due to the teams’ mutual prejudice and racism. When Charles Crocker reduce off meals for the Chinese language, it broke the strike.
It’s uncanny how usually meals and its metaphors for energy and violence intertwine within the story of the Chinese language in America. Starvation begins a strike, hunger stops it. Famine sends males fleeing from Hong Kong; American mines and railroads devour their labor. Starvation is the thread that binds us. After the Transcontinental was accomplished, some Chinese language staff stayed in Salt Lake, rising gardens and promoting produce to the Mormons, who regarded the gardeners with suspicion at the same time as they grew to become depending on their enterprise. In 1893, a white 17-year-old crushed a Chinese language vegetable peddler’s head with a stone, killing him. In 1900, one other vegetable vendor named Tom Loung was shot and robbed.
When Merritt and I walked alongside the observe to the signal commemorating that well-known 10-mile part, I felt each delight and dismay on the Chinese language staff’ achievement. It was undeniably astonishing to see their legacy bodily carved into the panorama. However later, listening to the staticky voice of the president shouting about Chinese language viruses, Wuhan and journey bans over my automotive radio, I thought of that part of observe. What was the aim, I questioned as I drove house, of working so laborious for individuals who refused to work laborious for us? What was the aim of ache, if the one individuals who remembered it continued to undergo?
IF FOOD AND PAIN are the entwining metaphor for Chinese language American resilience, find out how to interpret the truth that a lot of Chinese language political resistance has revolved round meals manufacturing and eating places? Asing was a restaurateur. So was Wong Kim Ark, born in 1873 in San Francisco, who labored as a prepare dinner in a Chinese language restaurant earlier than suing the U.S. for the best to re-enter as a citizen after visiting China — the case that established what, till the final election, we understood because the precept of birthright citizenship.
Or maybe it is sensible that Chinese language agitators sprang from the restaurant trade, since eating places, like laundromats (through which my grandfather labored), are widespread in Chinese language American households. The tongs, the spine of Cantonese labor tradition in America, equipped them with staff. Tongs are benevolent societies that assist younger males discover work, with membership primarily based on the person’s house district, household title or dialect. In late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, nearly all male Chinese language migrants joined tongs for bodily safety, from the police in addition to from white mobs. However because the tongs gained energy, some turned to organized crime.
Due to the Web page Act, tongs understood that ladies had turn into a commodity that, like opium, might be offered all through the West. An exceptionally enticing lady purchased for a couple of hundred {dollars} in Canton might convey as a lot as $3,000 in San Francisco. The tongs trafficked Chinese language ladies who thought they had been coming to the States to marry eligible males. Many believed they’d entered an indentured servant system that required them to function prostitutes for a time frame. Ladies couldn’t learn, so that they signed contracts they didn’t perceive. Women who didn’t find yourself in fancier parlor homes had been locked into barred, street-facing cells known as “cribs.” Simply 25 cents might buy a lady for a couple of minutes; prostitutes had been pushed to service as many males as they may in an hour.
Who eats bitterness, and who forces others to? Who doesn’t eat bitterness in any respect? The extra I attempt to perceive the cultural resonances of chi ku, the extra historical past itself complicates the boundaries of struggling and success. The novelist Tom Lin, whose The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu recasts the basic Western with a Chinese language outlaw protagonist, has argued that ache was itself the topic of the Western and that struggling is glorified as a result of it was required to settle the land. That’s why the West’s fictionalized landscapes are depicted as bleak, he says, its violence random and relentless. For Lin, “consuming bitterness” is the topic of the style itself. Why not see these novels, then, as a part of a Chinese language American literary custom, simply as I would argue that the Transcontinental was Chinese language infrastructure, and the Chinese language the folks that lastly colonized the West?
The regulation of energy and race in America has lengthy been achieved via violence or its menace. It’s a narrative as outdated because the Western itself, and with the identical unhappy message behind it: Teams which may see one another as allies vilify one another as enemies, jealously guarding an ever-shrinking territory bordered on one hand by racist legal guidelines and on the opposite by rising class divisions between generations of immigrants. That’s what occurred to my household, at the very least. I’m not the identical form of Chinese language American that my mom and my grandmother had been, nor are we like my grandfather, who was born and raised in Guangzhou. Whilst I’m distinctly a outcome of all of them, I’m, I acknowledge, now not Chinese language in any respect.
Nonetheless, I’m evidently what my grandparents wished, as a result of my mom and uncles converse no Chinese language, and so their kids converse no Chinese language. We left our Chinese language enclaves and had been inspired to toughen up when bullied. At this time, we eat sticky rice with roast beef at birthday events; our Christmas tables groan with platters of ham and Peking duck and Santa-shaped sugar cookies. We eat Dungeness crab smothered in five-spice gravy. We intermarry and power our white spouses to eat steamed egg custards laced with smelly black beans. We purchase however now not make dong tay. We eat the tradition that’s been constructed for us, shedding an increasing number of of our heritage with a purpose to turn into what our dad and mom hungered for us to be: residents with passports and reminiscences unshaped by grief.
PERHAPS THE INEVITABLE RESULT of chi ku is debilitating rage. If we can’t let ourselves protest what constrains us, we flip to the vocabulary of cruelty. We lash out at these we do have energy over, and our anger turns into the bitterness they swallow in flip. My mom had a contentious relationship together with her mom, my Po Po, who handled my mom with the imperiousness of any Chinese language matriarch overseeing her daughter’s coaching. It was one thing my mom, an bold lady who wished to turn into a physician, couldn’t stand. Whereas my mom went to varsity (to turn into a trainer) and likewise graduate faculty, she was raised with the assumption that she must be a servant in her personal home, caring for her brothers and father, placing apart her ambitions at occasions to be an obedient and docile helpmeet.
Maybe the inevitable results of chi ku is debilitating rage.
However exterior the home, my mom encountered an America convulsed by feminism. Her intelligence and drive opened up a world of journey and work prospects unavailable to girls like my Po Po. The cognitive dissonance of dwelling between worlds, caught between my grandmother’s needs and her personal, was, I consider, deeply painful to my mom. Struggling to achieve her personal ingrained sense of Chineseness whereas additionally pleasing herself, and struggling, too, to behave like the peerlessly competent housewife at house, despatched my mom into near-frenzied rages. At occasions of stress, she alternated between screaming tantrums and ice-cold silence — matches of rage my father and I might neither anticipate nor interpret. Whilst a baby, I sensed this anger had little to do with me and extra to do with one thing my mom privately endured. In public, she appeared excellent: polished and clever, affable and hard-working. Solely at house might she let herself specific the trend that was denied her.
I bear in mind as soon as being in a grocery retailer with my mom after I was a baby, watching the checkout cashier converse to her in pidgin. My mom, a girl who was not solely fluent in English, however who had been born on this nation, who had a Ph.D., was being talked to love an illiterate youngster. She smiled tightly on the cashier, picked up our sack of groceries, and walked me to the automotive. She mentioned nothing all the best way house, however later — whereas I used to be practising piano — she kicked in a small glass panel of our kitchen door.
Maybe rage is an try and reclaim energy, a rejection lastly of chi ku’s “female” endurance of ache in favor of the assumed masculine capacity to inflict it.
OF COURSE, this historical past is itself quickly altering. When the New York Instances assigned me to put in writing about Bing Kong Tong, a Transcontinental holdover in Salt Lake Metropolis, Willy Chun, its 92-year-old chief, informed me that tongs like his had been dying out. Bing Kong Tong was now not linked to organized crime; it’s a social membership that helps with scholarships and provides prayers for the lifeless Transcontinental staff. On the tong’s assembly corridor on State Avenue, Willy pulled out a battered briefcase to indicate me the paperwork the tong had collected for the previous century. The papers had been a messy stack, photographs and enrollments and constitution paperwork tossed collectively. The tong’s remaining members, restaurant cooks and building staff, sat in a nook, smoking and taking part in mah jong on the brand new mechanized desk Willy had purchased them. They regarded embarrassed after I approached, as a result of they didn’t converse a lot English, and I can’t converse Cantonese.
These males had been caught in historic limbo: neither absolutely built-in into America nor taken with returning to China. Willy emigrated from Guangzhou, the identical place the railroaders had been recruited, working as a busboy for one more tong member in his restaurant till he was promoted to prepare dinner and ultimately opened his personal café. Ten eating places later, Willy is a affluent man, the chief of the tong that after supported him.
Speaking to Willy jogged my memory of a dialog I had with a Chinese language American good friend whereas researching the Transcontinental. He was complaining about Andrew J. Russell’s iconic photograph, East and West Shaking Arms on the Laying of the Final Rail. It was not the absence of Chinese language staff from this photograph that enraged him, although, however the truth that at present’s Chinese language Individuals had been so outraged by it. He’s a rich and profitable entrepreneur in San Francisco, and to him, the Chinese language railroad staff had been a supply not of delight however embarrassment, the ache their our bodies endured merely proof they’d been senseless cogs within the machine of another person’s trade. “Who cares if the Chinese language weren’t photographed?” he mentioned. “These males invented nothing, they owned nothing. Their labor was for others with extra creativeness than them.”
His argument echoed Asing’s letter, with its insistence that solely those that might declare their cultural superiority over others must be supplied the alternatives America promised. I started to see chi ku as a ladder on which we every claw and combat to ascend, rung by rung, all of the whereas demanding these decrease down undergo extra, undergo more durable, undergo in higher silence.
When Willy dies, will he be buried in America or shipped again to Guangzhou? And what about his spouse? Within the nineteenth century, solely males acquired elaborate loss of life rituals. Ladies, kids, suicides, even homicide victims had been buried the place they fell. Even in loss of life, some lives matter greater than others. It’s a lesson I don’t need to consider, although I’ve been taught some model of all of it my life: I’m commendable as a result of I work more durable than others, I’m smarter about weaponizing my skills, I’m uncomplaining and biddable. For all these causes, and since I can endure the worst insults and accidents, I need to be revered.
My father, who’s white, admires this philosophy. He says consuming bitterness is a part of what has made the Chinese language, together with my mom, profitable in America. And it has — simply because it has made me profitable, too. All through my life, I’ve been promoted, given alternatives and reward, partly primarily based on my persistence and uncomplaining perspective. However whereas chi ku has benefited me, I’m wondering what it has price others like me, what my conditioned acceptance of it has meant to folks finding out my conduct? What classes, I’m wondering, am I demonstrating to my feminine and Asian college students via my repute for being an unflappable workhorse? Ultimately, consuming bitterness doesn’t solely imply we endure hardship with out criticism, however that our endurance makes it inconceivable for others in worse circumstances to complain. It limits the vocabulary of care we have now for one another, which limits, too, our connection and duty. In that, paradoxically, consuming bitterness atomizes tradition even because it suggests a shared temperament.
Consuming bitterness doesn’t solely imply we endure hardship with out criticism, however that our endurance makes it inconceivable for others in worse circumstances to complain.
The final time I noticed Willy, I used to be invited to eat with him and the senior tong members at a Chinese language restaurant. The dinner was meant to rejoice Willy and to thank me and the photographer despatched by the Instances to doc the tong. The meals was comforting and acquainted: chicken’s nest soup, a platter of squid and char siu, shrimp with lobster sauce, boiled rooster and duck, a couple of vegetable dishes. I scooped rice into my bowl after I completed my soup, piling meat and greens on prime. The photographer sat again and picked at his meals.
“I’m consuming with my girlfriend later,” he mentioned. I urged him to eat, whispering it will be impolite if he didn’t. “My girlfriend can be indignant,” he replied. I shrugged. One of many tong members, Richard, leaned over and grinned. “I don’t assume you’ve seen meals like this earlier than,” he informed the photographer. Then he turned to me. “However you have got,” he mentioned. “You know the way to eat it.”
I felt a pointy prick of delight. It pale as I regarded across the desk. Willy regarded drained, the senior members contemplative. The restaurant was one in all Willy’s. Servers got here and went, solicitous, smiling at him. The meals, frankly, was not superb. Willy had by no means been taken with cooking as artwork, he’d informed me, simply in making a dwelling. The restaurant, I sensed, wouldn’t final. Whilst we ate and ate this feast he supplied, ours was the one populated desk. The remainder of the restaurant, I noticed, was empty.
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This text appeared within the September 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Consuming bitterness.”
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