Those who died suddenly presumably left small hidden stashes of gold all along the line which must persist even today. But the Chinese workers insisted on being paid in gold. Even their number is unknown, let alone any names. In terms of Chinese belief, the ghosts are those whose remains were never recovered. The remains of many of those who died were shipped back to China as custom demanded, but the data are sparse. There were certainly many fatalities, but Chang can present no accurate figures because the workers were hired indirectly through recruiters and not as individuals. The “ghosts” of the title is alliterative but not particularly literally appropriate. Pay was remitted to the gang bosses, who distributed it to the workers. An interesting corollary is that the managers never knew even the names of the vast majority of their Chinese staff. The managers were completely unable to communicate with the Chinese navvies except through a very, very few bilingual gang bosses, so any complicated work such as carpentry had to be assigned to workers the managers could talk to. Chang explains how this left the way open for the 10% of non-Chinese (overwhelmingly Irish immigrants) to occupy most of the skilled, better-paid jobs. Not one in a thousand had any opportunity to learn even pidgin English until they (some of them) took other employment after the railroad’s completion. Very few of those arriving could write more than a few Chinese characters, and on arrival they went straight to the camps where they associated almost exclusively with others like themselves. How they were assigned to work gangs and the resulting inter-clan relations would be very interesting to understand, but this was apparently the province of the Chinese gang bosses and no source material has yet been found. They were, almost to a man, peasant farmers who migrated or were recruited to California specifically to build the railway. Gordon Chang has certainly set himself a difficult task, as he seeks to document the daily life of the roughly 20,000 Chinese who contributed to building the Central Pacific section of American’s first transcontinental line in the late 1860s.Ĭhang begins his tale in the Toih Saan region of China’s Guangdong Province, the source of the overwhelming majority the workers, describing the everyday life of those tempted to seek their fortunes in America.
Here is the most comprehensive account you are ever likely to find of the building of the western section of America’s transcontinental railway.
0 kommentar(er)
