Sue Lee
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Sue Lee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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.
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. 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So much of this is through oral history.
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.
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.
So there was no reference to the railroad.
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