Why do we no longer turn to epic poetry to portray the majesty and tragedy of history? Michael Auslin, writer and editor, explained, “No art form – and History is ultimately an art – can portray the pathos and grandeur of history quite like epic poetry. Could its return somehow bridge the divide between academics and laymen or between those who no longer seem even to agree on the basic facts of the past? Perhaps it could even re-instill a sense of awe, humility, and gratitude that might dampen the flames of civil discord.”
In Bitter Creek, Teow Lim Goh presents an outstanding engrossing example of the epic poem’s historical power. This epic poem, slated for a May release by Torrey House Press, spans a period of just under 20 years, chronicling Chinese immigrant laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, later worked in the Union Pacific Coal Mines and eventually were ambushed and driven out during the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre in Wyoming.
Bitter Creek’s most distinctive feature is Goh’s unique blend of non-traditional and traditional elements of the epic poem form. Her rendition of the Chinese presence in the American West strikes at an uncomfortable but incontrovertible truth of American history: the unbroken arc of xenophobia that is as virulent and ugly today as it was in 1885.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Goh, a poet and essayist who has been working on recovering the histories of Chinese immigrants in the American West, said that she originally envisioned writing a historical novel to explore the emotional states of characters. Eventually, she turned to the genre of epic poem for a story that encompassed the explanatory roots that culminated in the Rock Springs Massacre. She set aside an early draft for several years before returning to it, adding “that I had decided to work from intuition and not an outline.”
In a short section at the end of the book, Goh offers a nicely detailed account of the historical sources and rationale for her decisions about creative nonfiction that humanized the infrastructure of facts, historical details and statistics underpinning the story. She quoted Muriel Rukeyser: “Two kinds of reaching in poetry: one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes—with strength of expression and skill and luck—reach that place where things are shared and we recognize the secrets.”
As with many other massacre events in American history, the available extant research about Chinese immigrants in the 19th century and the Rock Springs Massacre, in particular, does not ease the task challenges for the author. Some are problematic for their dismissive attitude toward issues of racial prejudice and immigration politics even when they are comprehensive. Evidence about whether or not the attack against the Chinese laborers was organized or spontaneous is inconclusive. Goh also accessed an 1885 report prepared for Charles Adams, who at the time was the Union Pacific Railroad president. She also examined histories about the Transcontinental Railroad as well as some materials regarding Chinese immigrants in Colorado and labor organizing among Union Pacific workers.
As for primary source materials about Chinese immigrants, there are no known letters or diaries. Goh studied folk rhymes that were part of Chinese poetry clubs in San Francisco during the early 1900s. Museum, newspaper and university archives rounded out the research along with jail records and other information from relevant historical societies.
One historical source that makes for a wonderful companion to Goh’s epic poem is Gordon Chang’s Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. In an interview with High Country News shortly after the book was published in 2019, Chang said, “This is a story of sacrifice, of suffering, of tragedy, but also of heroism. This is a heroic endeavor and accomplishment. They didn’t brag about it, but I feel like I can brag for them today. They should be acknowledged for their extraordinary effort, even if though they may not have thought of themselves as heroic at the time. They just thought there was work to be done. They were just working hard, suffering, and hoped to get through it alive.” Bitter Creek’s cover image comes from a 2007 Chinese ink on paper artwork by Zhi Lin, titled Bloomer Cut. In 1864, it was the first major construction achievement by Chinese immigrants who worked for the Central Pacific Railroad, and which some marveled at by proclaiming it as the eighth wonder of the world. Incidentally, another book about the Chinese workers involved in the building of the Transcontinental Railroad as well as how they were attacked in the Rock Springs Massacre is set to be released this year by Diversified Publishing: Michael Luo’s Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.
The opening of Bitter Creek is a clarion call for readers to recognize that while we have written histories available, thanks to the materials left behind, we cannot ignore or give up the effort to excavate the points of view or historical patterns that others believed have been rendered obscure or irrecoverable.
The prelude opens with verse carrying the dateline of a “Chinese Camp, December 1866, California.” Among the lines:
I left a white and two boys to come
to America, where I lay track,
blast rock, and I try not to succumb
to the ghosts that visit me at night.
The entire epic poem comprises five sections: Strikebreakers, Roads to Exclusion, Knights of Labor, A Severe Struggle and The Chinese Must Go. Each section contains short poems and several throughout the book are based on found text and source materials. These include Ultimatum, Headlines, Chinese Exclusion Act, On The Wite, Law and Order, The Chinese Problem and A Severe Struggle.
The first poem Goh wrote was the final one appearing in Bitter Creek, which includes the names of those killed during the massacre, as taken from an 1885 report by Huang Sih Chuen, the Chinese consul to New York City at the time. The list is incomplete, as it does not account for those who fled the town but died later while they were hiding in the mountains.
There is an organic flow throughout the intersecting poetic counterpoint of poems taken from found text and source materials and those that Goh imagined in verse, for example, in letters written to family back in China or about experiences in the work and community environments. A prominent character is China Mary, which is based on a woman who lived in Evanston, Wyoming for many years until her death in 1939. She regaled tourists with stories about her life, for the price of a dime. Goh indicated that while there are inconsistencies about basic facts such as her age and when she immigrated, the woman appeared in official Wyoming census counts. She was the first Chinese woman to own property in Evanston and is believed to have lived at one time in Park City, Utah, but the timeline cannot be confirmed. Also, the 1880 U.S. census identifies two Chinese brothels in Evanston and one Chinese woman in Rock Springs, the wife of a Chinese doctor.
One can feel the East and West literary influences in structure and tone in an epic poem that is less pitched as a grand narrative than as an organic mass of origin stories that trace a long simmering rage and the eventual volcanic eruption of xenophobic-based violence. The Rock Springs Massacre was not an isolated or outlying event. The anti-immigration rage is just as intense today, especially against migrants coming from Haiti, Latin America, Muslim countries or green card holders who abide by laws but hold views different from a nativist, populist base.
While the Chinese were initially welcomed to their newly adopted land, competition between Chinese and White laborers intensified into deep rifts and racial tensions that became harder to contain. Racism and discriminatory laws were widespread in the West, where the geographic stage was set for the steamrolling forces of Manifest Destiny. The Chinese Exclusion Act—the only law in U.S. history that banned a particular country for immigration purposes—was enacted in 1882. The events of the 1880s, as captured in Bitter Creek, reverberated for decades in the Chinese community, which would be limited essentially to a “bachelor society” in segregated areas of cities including Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Chinese population declined 41% in the four decades after 1882. The Chinese Exclusion Act was finally struck from the books in 1943, but the Chinese population stayed at low numbers until 1965, the last time the nation has comprehensively revamped its immigration system.
Goh is meticulous about rendering what is materially available in the history with intellectual honesty, while exploring the key thematic questions of what sparks and ignites ordinary people in a community to become monsters looking for retributive punishment. Bitter Creek includes not just the plight of Chinese immigrants but also those of labor struggles. When Chinese laborers were brought in as replacements for striking union miners, white workers looked upon them as corporate lackeys. “I could not write white workers as cowboy villains but instead as humans whose own hopes and dreams for safer working conditions, a sense of dignity and respect had been dashed by their employers.”
Another group of characters in Bitter Creek comprise the railroad executives. Yes, it would have been easy to solely portray horrific faceless corporate figures as sacrificing human resources for maximizing profit like the robber barons we are familiar with in studying American history. In the 1870s, the country suffered one of its most severe economic downturns, spiked in part by Jay Gould’s refusal to pay the huge arrears in taxes assessed against the Union Pacific Railroad. The monumental delinquency was passed to Charles Adams, the descendant of one of the most famous political families in early American history, who was named Union Pacific president.
“Adams inherited a financial mess and they were trying to fix it,” Goh said. “One should not look at actions that led to this atrocity in a silo context. Adams and others were managing a bankrupt company and knew that every decision could put their lives and those of their families on the line.” Thus, an important part of Goh’s research for Bitter Creek included reviewing financial and annual reports of Union Pacific during the period.
The emotional impact of Bitter Creek as an epic poem asks us to stop, contemplate and resolve to act as the genuinely humane selves we imagine ourselves to be, in a forthright, honest way. Unfortunately, even the most conscientious among us conveniently forget this when it comes to comprehending the full-fledged history of the American experience. We cannot be blithe toward or oblivious to current circumstances that sound just as salient, relevant and brutal now as they did in the 1880s. We cannot soothe ourselves by proclaiming ‘we are or we have been better than this’ when the actual history is replete with events frighteningly similar in rage-fueled rhetoric.
Bitter Creek strikes as close to the core of the truth about what transpired in a Wyoming mining town in the 1880s as an eminently researched historical account of the event. As for speaking to our capacity for spiritual intelligence and the collective conscience of our meaning and purpose as humans who live in communities that are diverse and cosmopolitan even if we forget the extent to which they actually are, Bitter Creek clarifies the task of conscience awareness for readers who truly want America to be better than what it has been.
For more information and to preorder the book, see the Torrey House Press website.