Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
EDSITEment has several resources that can help you and your students learn more about the contributions made by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders over the last two centuries. AskAsia offers a variety of lesson plans that address the Asian American experience (select "Instructional Resources," then click "Lesson Plans" and select "Asian American"). EDSITEment also has several resources that explore various aspects of Asian culture, including two teaching units on Haiku (Can You Haiku? and The World of Haiku) and a lesson dealing with multiculturalism (In My Other Life).
This month EDSITEment spotlights the contributions Chinese Americans made to one of the most important enterprises undertaken in the nineteenth century, the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Chinese American workers were largely responsible for making a path for the railroad through the nation's most difficult terrain: the mountains of the West. In the following excerpt from her poem "Heaven," Cathy Song, a contemporary American poet of Chinese and Korean descent, lyrically imagines the fate of a 19th-century Chinese railroad worker. The railroad worker "had always meant to go back" to his native country, the speaker of the poem explains, but like many of the men who emigrated from China to build the transcontinental railroad, he never did.
He had never planned to stay,
the boy who helped to build
the railroads for a dollar a day.
He had always meant to go back.
When did he finally know
that each mile of track led him further away,
that he would die in his sleep,
dispossessed,
having seen Gold Mountain,
the icy wind tunneling through it,
these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns?
--- From "Heaven," by Cathy Song
Chinese laborers had heard stories of a land paved with gold where the pay was high. They called this place "Gum Shan," or "Gold Mountain." For these men, Gold Mountain was America, a place where they could achieve economic success and return to China with new riches for their families. Many of them came to California for the Gold Rush.
Many more came to work on the railroad. Those men did not find mountains made of gold; instead, they found themselves blasting paths through the dangerous terrain of the High Sierras and laying track for the transcontinental railroad. They soon learned that work on the railroad was back-breaking and dangerous, and the pay was low.
Despite the difficult work and the escalating anti-Chinese sentiment that took hold during the Gold Rush, the number of Chinese workers who came to the United States increased dramatically. By 1869, over two thirds of the total workforce for the Central Pacific Railroad Company consisted of Chinese labor, and without their efforts, the construction of the transcontinental railroad would have been delayed by years.
For additional resources on the pivotal role played by Chinese American workers in building the railroad through the mountainous terrain of the west, visit The Artillery of Heaven episode available through the EDSITEment-reviewed website New Perspectives on the West.
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