![]() Many of the workers were literate tens of thousands of letters were known to have crossed the Pacific in the mid- to late 19th century, according to records of the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. Indeed, the dearth of material was bewildering. In 2012, he and his colleagues began a systematic search of repositories around the country, identified descendants of railroad workers whose families might have documentary material, and reached out to colleagues in China, especially in Guangdong (Canton), the region northwest of Hong Kong from which the railroad workers came. ![]() “But we looked for the tape and couldn’t find it.” “So I knew the chances of unearthing something that no one had found before were slim.” But there were “tantalizing leads,” he says - a mention by another historian of a taped interview with a railroad worker in the 1930s, for instance. “Through the years, with other colleagues, I tried to locate documentary material, but never with success,” Chang, a fourth-generation Californian, told me. ![]() ![]() In fact, in some instances Chinese are written out of the story altogether.”Ĭhang began a concerted effort to redress the balance in 2012, when he and his Stanford colleague Shelley Fisher Fishkin organized the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford and put out a call for documents, including family papers, here and in China. Chang writes in his forthcoming book “Ghosts of Gold Mountain,” these workers have been rendered “all but invisible…. ![]()
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