Episode 3: California

[MUSIC] Just north of the great Salt Lake in what is now the state of Utah, you'll find Permanentory Summit. There on May 10, 1869, thousands of people gathered to watch Leelon Stanford. Co-founder and president of the Central Pacific Railroad, Hammer a symbolic solid gold spike to commemorate the completion of America's first transcontinental railroad, which connected our nation from east to west. We have a population increasingly divided and in fact then caught in a fractricidal civil war. So the completion of the railroad in 1869 is the completion of a promise to build a bridge. That moment was commemorated in a photograph. In the center of the frame, a central Pacific line train from Sacramento meets one from the Union Pacific line, which originated just outside of Omaha. And all around the locomotives are the smiling faces of fathers and sons reveling in the feet. Railroad executives toasting their accomplishments and workers, many of Irish descent as we learned in our last episode about New York, taking a load off after a job well done. Present at Permanentory Summit that day, but excluded from the photo were Chinese railroad workers who had made up over 80% of the central Pacific line's labor force as track was laid eastward from Sacramento. We know little about who these people were, what they did in their free time, and the songs they carried to settle their spirits and remind them of home. After their own arduous journeys across the Pacific, Chinese and later Japanese immigrants sacrificed their homelands, families, and way of life. But as we see in the photo from Permanentory Summit, the contributions of Chinese railroad workers were sidelined and silenced in the historical record. The trans-conrad railroad itself was celebrated multiple times on anniversaries, the 50s, the 100s, the 150th anniversaries. We have the records of the celebrations, the secretary of interior, the secretary of transportation coming from Washington DC, zero mention of Chinese. In this episode, we'll hear the story of over 25,000 Chinese and Japanese laborers who built the trans-continental railroad, and how academics and artists are using scholarship and song to honor them. From Silk Road and PRX, welcome aboard the American Railroad. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Haruka Fuji. I'm a percussionist and I am percussionist of the Silk Road Ensemble and also associate artistic director of Silk Road Ensemble. I'm the sort of facilitator between all parts of Silk Road, including office, including board members, and I try to incorporate everyone's ideas and wishes. There are so many people working on different things, but my job is to oversee the whole thing and try to make the direction strong and powerful and going forward alongside with Rianan. Haruka is from Japan. Her mother is a Marimba player. Her younger sister is a Marimba player. She's a Marimba player. It's a family business. So Marimba is this huge instrument. How many feet I always forget? 10 feet or so? Little less than 10 feet. She's got five octaves and it's a keyboard percussion and the keyboard part is made with rosewood and it just spreads out like a huge table and then it has that metal resonators on the bottom. An ancestor of it comes from Africa. It's called Bala Fon and that's the ancestor part of Marimba. It floats from Africa to South America, Central and comes to North America. And again, this instrument has become part of classical music world around 100 years old or so. Another stream starts from South East Asia with either bamboo or metal instruments. There is another stream of keyboard percussion that starts in South East Asia, Indonesia, to Java, to that area. And then that floats along the Silk Road, goes into China, Korea and then gets to Japan early 1600 or so. Our aim at Silk Road in this project is to make art that celebrates the forgotten ones who connected this country. And as musicians and artists, we're often learning about our own heritage as we go. I wanted to weave a musical story telling of who actually made American railroad, transcontinental railroad, who got to use it and who actually got to take the credit. Aside from that, who were the ones who were affected by it and who were the ones who actually made the rails. Over a few years, residences happened. We called it actually a retreat. There was a New York retreat that focused on learning about the Irish immigrants' environments. And then we also had San Francisco retreat that really focused on Chinese immigrants and also that really gave me an opportunity to start really digging into what about Japanese people, where we involved. That golden spike that Lee Lens Stanford drove into the line at Promontory Summit is now housed at his namesake Stanford University in California's Bay Area. The university was founded in 1885, after Lee Lens stent as president of Central Pacific Railroad and his term as governor of California. Stanford University is also home to the Chinese railroad workers in North America project, where Professor Roland Chou, who we heard at the top of the episode, served as the director of research. The project sought to create an accurate and comprehensive collection of Chinese railroad worker history to formally acknowledge their contributions, including building the last leg of the Transcontinental Railroad. It was known that there were a significant number of Chinese who performed a much of the work of constructing the Transcontinental Railroad, but there were a lot of cross and conflicting explanations of who they were, how they performed this, why they were the ones chosen, and where they went afterwards. Before Stanford University established the project in 2012, much of this history was collected and shared by descendants of the workers and amateur historians. So when a historian hears that there's evidence of someone was here, but there's confusion or sort of cross narratives that don't seem supported by the evidence, we step up. And that's really the first step. We were using some of the same material that other amateur historians had used, but using it much more systematically. The Chinese railroad workers in North America project spanned six years and included the findings of 40 scholars from universities in North America, Europe, and Asia. The team used primary sources like payroll records with contract labor companies, newspaper clippings, interviews with descendants and items left behind by workers at camps to give us an idea of who these men were. We had a treasure trove of material actually from the company that built the Transcontinental Railroad. The company did not actually know the names and identities of the workers they were paying, but they did keep records of the names and identity of the Chinese subcontractors who knew who they were employ. And from that, we're able to sort of, you could say, reverse engineer our understanding that the employers, the supervisors of the workers were likely not able to communicate with the workers. So that instead they were able to communicate with a select few number of Chinese individuals who had facility in English. We know this from other written records. Published newspaper clippings provided to us by wonderful archivists in the region of the Sierra Nevada. Notice to railroad, turnpike, and mining companies. I will furnish any number of Chinese laborers to work on railroads, wagon roads, or mining claims at the lowest cash rate. Having experienced in the business, I have facilities for obtaining any required number of men. References William McDaniel, Auburn, signed "Hungwa" in the plaster heralds, August 29, 1863. But how did these thousands of Chinese men get to the west coast in the first place? On a quest for gold. In 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, about 40 miles outside of present-day Sacramento. This news led to the 1849 gold rush. The Chinese, most likely during the time of mid-19th century, were coming first and foremost for mining, for the gold rush, and especially silver mines. That's where much of the material wealth was being extracted. This year in Nevada range. Between 1848 and 1855, over 300,000 people, immigrants and Americans alike, would make California their home, with Sacramento serving as the brand new state's capital and economic center. Aside from gold, people were also in search of land. Other parts of the Western United States grew after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which provided settlers with stolen land if they moved there to develop it. As you can imagine, this was not popular with the indigenous populations who already lived there, and we'll cover that on our next episode. But now all of these new people needed a more efficient way to move themselves and their goods around. While there was an extensive network of rail and placed through the Midwest and the East Coast in the mid-1800s, the Wild Wild West was wide open. Before the railroads, it could take months to get something from New York to Sacramento, either by land or by sea. To transport any kind of people or goods was wagon train or to ship goods from the East Coast around Cape Horn or possibly carry them by mule across the isthmus of Panama for months on end, transform that to a seven-day trip, load your rail train, hop on. In addition to increasing opportunities for population growth and trade out West, President Lincoln was especially motivated to finish the Transcontinental Railroad Project to reestablish a sense of national identity. The Civil War was raging in the early 1860s and Lincoln saw the railroad as a way to physically and symbolically connect the nation. The federal government provided money and land grants to railroad companies, including Leeland Stanford Central Pacific to fast track the project. This is a time of great division in the North American project of building a country. Lincoln's view of kind of globalizing the reach of this country industrially and socially, building faster and bigger transport ships across the Pacific. So that we could bridge through just technology of transportation. But if we look inland to the continent, we have a population increasingly divided and in fact then caught in a fractal civil war. But with a good chunk of the nation's young men conscripted for the war, the railroad companies recruited Chinese migrants for the ambitious project. The Central Pacific's section of the railroad would cover nearly 700 miles of track between Sacramento and Promontory Summit in Utah. The project broke ground in January 1863 in Sacramento. And the work began in earnest. A day in the life of a Chinese labor of working on the construction of a transcontinental railroad would include long hours for little pay. The Chinese workers would have been able to eat provisions that were made by a Chinese cook using ingredients that were imported from China. And then would have picked up the hand tools, the heavy iron bars that they used to gouge away granite in order to make incisions to put nitric glycerin, would have picked up the heavy pickaxes for chopping the wood that they used to make the railroad ties all by hand. Chinese workers were split into different work groups, laying and bending the rails onto ties. They would be digging the road beds. They would be setting up the camps, driving the ox carts to bring supplies and the like. And finally, at the end of the day was the second meal. And that's six days a week of then slip into your tent to start again the next day. Unlike the African-American and Irish workers in North Carolina and New York, who we learned about in our first two episodes, we don't have a good sense of what songs the Chinese workers sang during the work day or what they did on their one day off. But researchers can imagine based on archaeological findings unearthed at their work sites. The Chinese were engaged in the activities that would have helped them socialize with each other. We do find archaeological evidence of games, the remnants of gambling, dice and opium pipes. We don't have evidence that we can find of how they may have sung or performed. Because that would be ephemeral. When the last, we actually aren't able to say, this is how they had music in their everyday life. If you're imagining that you're high up in this era, you're not going to have a lot of opportunities to bring musical instruments, let's say, up there, type of thing. You're pretty much going to be very limited in terms of what you can bring with you, what you can carry as your voice with you. That's Professor Anna Eng. She's a historian focused on Chinese American history in the 19th and 20th centuries. She teaches at San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley. Her forefathers on both sides of her family came to the United States from China and found work on the railroads. I have records from my grandfather's immigration files or my great grandfather's immigration files, where he documents, working for quite a number of years in towns and cities along the various railroads, 10 years here, five years there. Working on the railroads was inherently transient. Workers followed the line as it moved forward from Sacramento, high up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Chinese workers faced subpar living conditions compared to their white counterparts. The Chinese workers were housed in tent conditions compared to Caucasian workers, which were able to sleep in beds with heating on railroad cars. We also know that that Chinese worker had to pay out of his own wages for those tools compared to the Caucasian workers where those tools were provided by the company. One of the most daunting aspects of the construction was carving a path through the Sierra Nevada Mountains that occupied the space between Eastern California and Western Nevada. The work was grueling. Crews blasted 15 tunnels through the high searas, including the nearly 1700-foot-long summit tunnel. These are men who were digging through the tunnels and dynamiting through Zala Granite Rock, six and 7,000 feet up in the mountains, literally going through and tunneling through. They worked through the winters. There was snow up in the mountains. These tunnels were dark, damp. They lived out in tents and camped out along the work sites. After years of working their way east, including one day when they laid 10 miles of track, the Central Pacific Railroad met the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit. The railroad executives in that photo were celebrating big things like economic growth. They were celebrating a future where new things were possible, like food, grown in California, ending up in meals in New York. Soon, people would be able to send letters and have them reach family on the opposite coast within a week, instead of months with the pony express. The completion of the railroad in 1869 is the completion of a promise to build a bridge across land and across peoples. And it changed the lives and population distribution of our country from primarily east coast up through what was the western edge of civilization in the Ohio River. And yet, at least eight Chinese workers remained at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, and they were excluded from the photo. And they would soon be excluded from immigrating to the US at all. As the total population grew on the west coast, tensions between Americans and Chinese immigrants increased. Dr. Xu says that. To recognize that for most Chinese who came and contributed such tremendous value industrially, politically to the reunification of a country torn by civil war, is to also recognize at the time then, the Chinese were ostracized, thought to be a contaminant. Literally, the language was used to describe the Chinese presence as a contaminant in our culture, as a menace, as a wave to, in that way, dehumanize and block a differentiation of individuals. Some of the Chinese immigrants continued working to maintain the railroads, while others establish businesses. Here's Anna Ing. They were gold miners in many of the towns after the end of the railroads. They were used to do a lot of the excavation of land. They built the levees in the Sacramento Delta. The Chinese were responsible for planting the 100-year-old grapevine. in the napkins and the number of alleys, that history has been lost. Chinese immigrants lived together in Chinatowns because of their shared culture, but racism from Americans forced them to stay there. And even this segregation was not enough. Calls from Americans to get rid of Chinese immigrants continued to grow. In 1877, there was even a riot in San Francisco's Chinatown. This all culminated in the Federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law was a near-total ban on Chinese immigration to the United States and forced immigrants already in the country to carry papers affirming their legal status. It was the first significant immigration policy aimed at a specific ethnic group, and it set the stage for discriminatory laws that persist against other racial and ethnic groups to this day. As a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act, many of the single men who'd come to America to work on the nation's railroads returned home to their families in China, while other state, including generations of Anna Aeng's forefathers on both sides of her family. In this early period, it was relatively open immigration. Between the 1840s and the 1870s, you could essentially sail up the Pacific Coast, land, and arrive. The Chinese Exclusion Act pretty much barred the Chinese from entering into the country if you were a laborer, and the only classes that they would allow to come in would be if you were a diplomat, a teacher, a student, or a merchant, even as a laborer who are already in the country like my great-great-grandfather or a great-grandfather. If you left the country, it would be very, very hard for you to come back. That separated people for quite a long time. Although the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, it was just one route. There was a whole network of rails that needed to link remote towns and territories together across the western United States. Imagine a tree. The Transcontinental Railroad was the main trunk, but the other rail lines were the branches. You could send a letter from New York to Sacramento, but imagine if you could send one from Boseman to San Antonio. A new group of people was needed to do this work, and they happened to be right across the Pacific, too. In 1641, Japan began a practice of isolationism, or limiting contact with outside cultures. Then in 1853, American naval officer Matthew C. Perry, with some gifts and a squadron of Navy ships, forced Japan to open to American trade. By extension, this also brought in the influence of other western cultures and religion. This caused turmoil within the country, and by 1868, a new government was put in place under Emperor Meiji. Power was centralized under his rule, and he began instituting sweeping changes through the country. This was the beginning of the Empire of Japan. I'm Karen Ishizuka, and I'm the chief curator at the Japanese-American Nationalism. Japan was experiencing in the Meiji era, which was a time of westernization. They were very much aware of the encroaching British and other European and American colonization of the world, and very much wanted to stay off that happening in Japan, and thought that by westernizing and modernizing, they would be able to do so. They went very quickly from an agrarian society to a much more industrialized society. Reform after reform occurred. The military was restructured, new technologies were introduced, and many sites of cultural heritage were destroyed. But the main thing that had people leaving? Money. The Japanese economy had slowed. The population had grown, and unemployment grew right along with it. This put pressure on Japan's working class, and they looked for opportunities outside of the country. But this immigration was also encouraged by the Emperor himself. In the charter oath of 1868, Emperor Meiji decreed that "knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule." Many Japanese immigrants ended up in Hawaii on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. But there weren't enough jobs in the islands to go around. The business owners and railroad managers on the mainland noticed. There was a need for another source of cheap labor, and Japanese laborers were contracted. Labor agents in the U.S. also called bosses, would make arrangements for young Japanese men to come to the mainland as contract laborers. The bosses would handle jobs, housing, food, and clothing, and in return they'd get a fee and a percentage of earned wages. In 1902, Edward Diagoto Hashimoto established the ED Hashimoto Company in Salt Lake City. He provided railroads like the Western Pacific and the Denver Rio Grande with the underpaid Japanese workers they needed. There were, you know, I believe, some 13,000 Japanese workers who worked on the railroads by 1906. They filled the gap caused by the earlier anti-Chinese immigration legislation, and that 13,000 was just railroad workers. Between 1901 and 1908, 127,000 Japanese immigrants entered the United States. Much like the Chinese railroad workers, we don't know what music the Japanese immigrants sang on the railroads, but we have a couple of clues of the music they may have been familiar with. Here's Dr. Karen Ishizuka describing a Japanese folk music tradition. They came over, you know, a lot with the folk songs of the day. They came with folk songs as well as some traditions. One was called "Shihin," which was a sort of chanting song. There are recitations of poems, actually. I don't know whether the single men, laborers would sing, but I do know that once there were communities very early on, there was a lot of them, men, that would get up and sing during get-togethers, and it was a form of sort of self-intertainment. Shigin is actually practiced amongst some Japanese here today. Shigin was not the only folk art form practiced in the mainland. I have maternal great-grandparents to great-grandfathers who actually met not in Japan where they came from, but as workers on the railroad, Intercontinental, Transcontinental Railroad. Dr. Kevin Feles is a professor of ethnomusicology at Columbia University in New York City. His grandparents married because their fathers had met on the railroads. They were two among many, and they became friends. They were not from the same village or city, and so I had often wondered how my grandparents got married since they weren't from the same location. And I learned, when I asked around to my mother and grandmother, that, "Oh, your great-grandfathers fathers met while working on the railroads." Dr. Feles doesn't have any Japanese railroad music that was passed down to him, but he does know what was popular with people at the time. So my grandparents' generation, particularly with the men, there's a tradition of Bushi or Song, at least kind of folk songs, that you would improvise very much. I mean, there's folk traditions all over the world where people make up lyrics either to tease another community member or speak to a topical issue through the lyrics. And you know, put on a display of your own wit. It's very similar to hip-hop ciphers today, right? People are just making things up on the spot to speak to things. My speculation is that my great-grandfathers, if there was music around, performed that kind of music, this kind of folk traditions, or you make up the lyrics, you know, maybe Bommone, or the hard-working conditions, right? Or you Bommone, the fact that you're away from family, things like that. Dr. Philes says another place we might look for insight is in the musical practices of the Japanese workers in Hawaii. Now, there's a lot more knowledge about what's called the Hola Hola Bushi tradition in Hawaii among Japanese plantation workers of the late 19th and early 20th century. And it's very much that tradition of folks on where people made up lyrics about the living conditions, the working conditions. Actually, the folk songs in Japan of this nature, they're often very sexualized. There's a lot of sex and lusty for somebody else's, husband or wife or wanting to have a person in your life. And the reason the Holy Holy Bushies better known is because people documented that in Hawaii. So I have a feeling that that was very similar to what happened along the West Coast. Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese railway workers in the US had their cultural practices noted or written down. And the comparison between the two doesn't end there. The Japanese also faced discrimination. I think not many realize that Japan was very much aware of the discrimination against Japanese at the time. The San Francisco public school system was segregating Chinese in Japanese as they did with blacks and other people of color from their schools. And so specifically, this was something that was drawn to the attention of the government. The US and Japan negotiated the gentleman's agreement of 1907 and 1908 as a result. If the US would stop segregating Japanese children in San Francisco schools, then Japan would stop immigrants from traveling to the US. Japanese women were the only exception. They could still immigrate if they were the wives of US residents. Despite this, Japan towns grew near towns with railroads, such as Salt Lake City and San Francisco. As their communities grew, the Japanese workers moved on to other fields like farming or saving up money to start businesses. Because most of them came during the May-G era of Japan, they were kind of stuck in that REC, our first generation immigrants, like my grandparents, continued speaking on May-G era Japanese that soon became outdated in Japan. So it was like time kind of was frozen. Their knowledge and understanding of Japanese culture was kind of frozen in the May-G era as they stayed here in the US. When we come back as historians uncover the forgotten histories of the workers, we at Silk Road honor their memory with music. So I took sort of an inspiration from this long recording and I took few phrases and then I started weaving my own song called "Tumping Song." [MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to American Railroad. I'm Rianne Giddens, artistic director of Silk Road. While preparing for our American Railroad tour, Haruka started researching the music of Japanese railway workers in America, or rather she tried to. I also started digging into if there was any music that's as an archive that has the relation to Japanese railroad workers. I couldn't find anything that's historically recognized as songs in the US sung by Japanese people. But I found this old recording off of YouTube, old recording of Japanese railroad workers in Japan. [MUSIC PLAYING] And then this one is still sung in some areas of Japan. And they do have like a sightseeing kind of a tourist ceremony that how they used to sing this song with big hummers digging into the ground kind of. [MUSIC PLAYING] So I took sort of an inspiration from this long recording and I took a few phrases and then I started weaving my own song called "Tumping Song." [MUSIC PLAYING] "Tumping" is, I think, it's one of the machines that really comes down to the ground. [MUSIC PLAYING] The song goes like, yo, ito sa no yo ito sa yo. [MUSIC PLAYING] It comes with the motion of people, you know, hammering down things and picking up the big, big rocks. [MUSIC PLAYING] The lyric of "Tumping Song" is a lot of unomatopoeed that's the sound of digging in also. But it talks about we're putting the soul into the rails and tamp down the protection soul and the spirit god into the railroad so that it protects us, that the railroad will be safe. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Haruka wrote "Tumping Song" to evoke different aspects of constructing the railroads. So the first one is the one of the phrase in the opening of the piece that goes along with string players and other instrumentalists sort of representing the sound and motion of the tamping and people digging into the ground. And I even asked the players to bring up the arms way higher than usually so that visually you see the tamping, you know, motion from left to right, like people throwing the arms. And then underneath that, Marimba is representing the drive of the railroad and train going forward. [MUSIC PLAYING] The second one is the digging sound of like just each quarter notes just going into the ground, D, D, D, D. And that's the simple single hits on Marimba. [MUSIC PLAYING] The last one is the melancholic missing home part. And it's supposed to be a cello solo and Marimba sort of embraces the solo sound. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] What's great about SoCroad is that all the players are so talented and they have so much to share, not only musically but personally and historically, culturally. There are so many things that we exchange. And I set the color. I set the introduction. And this is development. And then this is how I want to end. I opened up with the artists. How do you want to develop this? And then they all brought in amazing ideas. And we just cook it together, different international spices into it and made a dish. And then all I had to do was just expand it to the whole bigger ensemble to fit for this American railroad. And I also had the strong image of the voice of Putta Fey and also Riannon. And yeah, the process of making this piece was just-- I wouldn't say easy, but it was so much fun. [MUSIC PLAYING] One of the great joys of working on this music is getting to share it with the historians who's work inspired our compositions. Here's Roland Schoo. Being able to hear today the music of a super ensemble is to kind of be transported back to the imaginative horizon of those who traveled, those who crossed what seemed to be an unbreachable barrier of the Pacific, perhaps never to return, but to contribute wherever they lived. We're not the only ones seeking to write the wrongs of history. Some descendants of Chinese railroad workers visited Permanentory Summit, the site of that famous photo celebrating the joining of the rails to take some pictures of their own. Here's Karen Ishizuka. In 2002, there is a Chinese-American photographer Korki Lee who reenacted that historic moment with descendants of the Chinese workers who had worked on the railroad. So he assembled people there at the same place and tried to revitalize history, if you will, and put the Chinese workers back into a place a work experience that they definitely had and were excluded from. Korki Lee was motivated by a desire to make Asian Americans visible. The work of historians like Karen, Ishizuka, and Roland Shoe celebrates the stories of the immigrants who weren't able to speak for themselves. And we at Silk Road offer our music to imagine their lives and what sounds connected them to each other and to home. [Music] Next time on American Railroad, we're heading to standing rock Indian reservation in the Dakotas. We're an ancient Lakota prophecy foretold of a black snake that would poison the water and consume the world. Our ancestors saw the railroad systems coming and they saw the destruction that followed and from a distance it looked like a black snake and so when these prophecies started to come about they would tell us that this infrastructure project is not going to be good. [Music] American Railroad is a production of Silk Road and PRX. The show is produced by Amber Walker, David Newtown and Perry Gregory, and edited by Genevieve Sponsler and Jocelyn Gonzalez, executive producer of PRX Productions. With additional story editing by Rosalind Tortecilius. Our mix engineer is Tommy Bazarian and our project manager is Tony Carlson. Our recording engineers are Ben Rollins and Jacob Wolfe at the University of Limerick. With additional recording by David Herman and Erica Huang at Good Studio in Brooklyn, New York. Special thanks to Katie McMurrin. For more on Silk Road's American Railroad project, including our tour and album, go to Silk Road.org. I'm Rianne Giddens. See you at the next stop. [Music] [Music] From PRX.