Nental Railroad, Stanford: Stanford Sion of Fully Capturing the Forgotten Rail- University Press 2019, 539 P

426 | Rezensionen | Reviews absence of concrete sources. Their way of Gordon H. Chang / Shelley Fisher dealing with the problem is best described Fishkin (eds.): The Chinese and the as a method of multi-angular “approach- Iron Road. Building the Transconti- ing”. The 21 essays never create the illu- nental Railroad, Stanford: Stanford sion of fully capturing the forgotten rail- University Press 2019, 539 p. way workers. Instead, the contributors encircle their subjects and observe them from a distance: through photos, through Reviewed by accounts of white acquaintances, through Thorben Pelzer, Leipzig oral histories of descendants, through ma- terial excavations at the camps, or through cultural memory found in novels. Subtracting the chapters introducing the In 1869, Leland Stanford’s “golden spike” historical background, the editors ar- joined the rails of the Central Pacific and ranged the essays into four analytical parts. the Union Pacific, forming the first trans- The three authors of the first cluster return continental railroad of the United States. to the Chinese coastal regions in search for The two lines quickened passenger flow clues about the railway workers’ finances. and economically vitalised the American Zhang explains the schemes of labour West. Much has been written about sym- contractors in China. Workers accrued bolic meanings and practical consequences debt to finance their emigration. Creditors of the infrastructure, as well as about the were often member of the expatriate’s clan “Big Four” railroad entrepreneurs behind and saw the labour as a form of investment the enterprise. The manual labourers how- (p. 62). Native places absorbed not only ever, many of them Chinese emigrants, wealth but also culture of the returnees. have remained an unknown quantity. As Yuan’s and Liu’s studies focus on remit- discriminations against class and race in- tances the workers sent back home. While tersected, historical sources are generally in the early years, returnees acted as couri- scarce. The workers left behind no known ers, soon “Gold Mountain trading firms” documents detailing their points of view. offered remittance services to the railway For the vast majority, not even their names labourers. These companies did not trans- were recorded. fer money to the Mainland directly but The lengthy edited volume at hand is an invested it in their import-export business. outcome of the “Chinese Railroad Work- The next cluster of texts is composed of ers in North America” project at Stanford eight studies most directly concerned University. The interdisciplinary team in- with recovering the reality of the railroad cludes, among others, the historian Gor- workers. They include the chapters of the don H. Chang, the literary scholar Shel- archaeological group of the Stanford pro- ley Fisher Fishkin, and the archaeologist ject. Spatial analysis of the working camps Barbara Voss. The group faced the equally points at a racist segregation, with Chinese daunting and exciting task to capture the workers residing on uneven, mosquito- life of the Chinese railway workers in the ridden terrains. Abandoned everyday Rezensionen | Reviews | 427 tools support the idea of ethnic division using positive and negative attributes and and distinction, as the tools of consump- described their relation to the white work- tion resembled those of the Chinatowns ers. and their native home villages. As Voss The following three chapters deal with describes, the household utensils reveal the cultural memory of the railway and global commodity chains that reached “the its labourers. Gow provides an interesting most remote locations” (p. 113). Ritualis- study of US-American history textbooks. tic and ludic items, such as incense burners After 1900, the railroad worker became and improvised gaming tokens, also reveal “the primary symbol of Chinese immi- practices of native traditions. Using bio- grant labor” and embodied the “hopes archaeological data from skeletal remains, and anxieties” of the white population (p. Kennedy et al. go into detail about health 238). Only in the 1960s, a move from oth- and healthcare of the railroad workers. ering to inclusion began. Yuan’s article acts They boiled tea, hunted game, caught fish, as a counterpart in that it analyses Main- and prepared a large variety of vegetables, land Chinese historiography. In the early resulting in a diet that was more nutritious Communist histories of the 1950s, rail- than that of workers from other ethnici- road workers were interpreted as an exam- ties. Describing San Francisco Chinatown ple of labour exploitation. More recently, temples, Gin Lum describes religious wor- since the 1980s, historians have instead shipping practices of immigrants and their focused on the empire-building function fear of not having their bodies returned of the railroad and the importance which to China in case of death. Huang’s article Chinese labourers played in accomplish- provides interesting contemplations on ing this feat. Last in the cluster, Feng reads the encounters between Chinese workers the novels Donald Duk (1991) by Frank and Native Americans. She describes a Chin (b. 1940) and Dragon’s Gate (1993) complex relationship, marked by similar by Laurence Yep (b. 1948). For Feng, both sufferings, and argues that the indigenous works present a “a common desire” of Chi- and the diasporic constitute “mirror im- nese American writers to compensate for ages” (p. 180). The essay also includes the railway workers’ absence in historical examples of interracial intimacy and Chi- sources through the means of fiction. nese inclusion into Native families. Khor’s Five historical studies about the herit- article analyses photographs, especially the age and aftereffects of the Chinese labour stereoviews of the transcontinental rail- migration conclude the volume. As Chen road’s official photographer Alfred A. Hart points out, labour migration fostered the (1816–1908). She argues that even though first Chinese community organisations the Chinese workers appear on the photos, and the spread of secret societies. Chung they were often “dwarfed” and “subsumed follows the Chinese influence towards the in relation to nature and the machine” (p. development of railway towns in Nevada, 200). Finally, Robinson analyses accounts while Lew-Williams follows the tracks of of Europeans who travelled and worked Chin Gee Hee (1844–1929), a railroader- in the States during the time. The travel- turned-entrepreneur who later invested lers essentialised the Chinese immigrants in the development of railways in China. 428 | Rezensionen | Reviews Chang’s essay on the reception of Leland rules of Chinese Pinyin hyphenation. The Stanford is a great way to conclude the vol- volume’s high point is the archaeological ume. The railway entrepreneur’s “deeply section, which provide fascinating insights conflicted and often contradictory atti- into the labourers’ everyday life and inter- tude” (p. 347) reflects the public reception actions. The articles focusing on cultural of Chinese labour migration. and popular memories likewise provide The assemblage of so many different ap- creative entry points to analyse what proaches is innovative and unquestionably Chinese railroad labourers have eventu- of value. This being the case, the authors ally become to symbolise, even when their make it transparent that not every research historical conclusiveness is limited by de- is new from the ground up. Some chap- sign. The historical articles display a great ters are digests of existing studies recon- attention to meticulous details. However, figured to meet the railroad topic. Other they often end with very short conclusions contributors make clear that they profit which barely leave the descriptive level. from existing research. Facing a lack of The edited volume is a much-welcomed historical sources, the authors needed to contribution towards approaching the get creative. Most of the 21 studies suc- subject of Chinese railway workers in the ceed in providing puzzle pieces towards United States. Sometimes, the legitimate creating an image of the Chinese railroad desire to vindicate the forgotten Chinese workers. However, some approaches are railroad workers falls into the trap of af- rather far-fetched. The inclusion of a study firming essentialisms – e. g. when Fisher on Cuban sugar plantation workers seems Fishkin maintains that the heterogenous justified to some degree, even though the group of Chinese immigrants “performed author admits the “speculative” nature (p. herculean feats of endurance and strength” 43). But how much can an analysis of re- (p. 293). However, given the historical mittance schemes of the “somewhat later” absence of individual voices, such gener- 1940s possibly “extrapolate” about the re- alisations may have been almost unavoid- ality of manual labourers in the 1860s (pp. able. The volume reminds its readers that 76, 82)? there are still blank spaces in the history Anyone reading the volume cover to cover from below, especially when dealing with will encounter frequent repetitions. To infrastructures and mobilities. The Chi- some extent this problem is inevitable. nese railway workers were exemplary for a Each chapter aspires to stand on its own modern, globalised world. The contribu- while sharing the common topic, conse- tors recognise this and rehabilitate them as quently retelling parts of the same story. the human actors they were. Nonetheless, a greater streamlining would have been desirable. Furthermore, not all chapters are of equal quality. A reader studying the bibliographical notes will find Robinson and Shu guilty of citing the internet encyclopaedias Wikipedia and Baidu Baike. The latter also ignores basic .

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