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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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 on. 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. 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 snow sheds over the tracks. And about 30 years ago, I think, the railroad replaced those wooden snow sheds with concrete.
But today, those tunnels are no longer used for the railroad. And that concrete has now become a canvas for graffiti, unfortunately.
It's 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 and to landmark part of that area so that the area can still be respected and a respectful place to remember our history.
When a man signed up to work on the railroad, he 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.
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.
So after the railroad, some workers continued with 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. 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 cue. 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, L.A., Sacramento, Tacoma, Seattle, Portland.
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 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 U.S. 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.
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.
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 D.C. at this time and be part of the ceremony? That was very moving and very emotional.
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.
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...
In front of the estimated 25,000, 30,000 people who were at Promontory, it 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.
Well, there's an 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.
Showing 41–60 of 63 · page 3 of 4
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