Haoqing's Art Website
The Invisible Chinese Migrant Workers on the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad
by Haoqing Yu
KEY REMIX CONCEPTS:
RO & RW Culture; Educational Benefit; Manovich’s Principles on New Media (Modularity, Automation, Variability); Database & Narrative; Three elements of Creativity (Copy, Combine, and Transform); Minimalism; Bricolage (Constraints)
INTRODUCTION
The theme of my remix art exhibition is the Lost History of the Transcontinental Railroad and the Chinese Migrant Workers. The exhibition has two parts. For Part I, the project used two types of models. The first model was Ayana V Jackson’s Art Exhibition “From the Deep,” which involved multiple layers of stories in the historical context of the slave trade. Similar to the African Slave Trade, the history of the transcontinental railroad also involves many untold stories about these “invisible” Chinese immigrant workers. Another model I used is the bucket model, which has four lists of categories. I expanded the February 26 Remix Exercise by remixing my digitalized ink drawings (I did from 2021 to 2023) with other types of medium via the Miro board. The final result would remix the names of Chinese immigrant workers from the C.P.R.R. payroll sheets, my previous 11 ink abstract (line) drawings, 18 blackout poetry (created by using Apple pen, Procreate, and academic papers and books related to the topic of the Transcontinental Railroad History), the immigrant stories from the blackout poetries, and some existing poems/ballads/songs about Chinese immigrant workers. For Part I, I have made nine pieces of abstract artwork: Moon, The East and the West, Collapse (崩), The Summer Triangle, The Dead Zone/Suicide, Sierra Nevada Mountains, Reunion, Monsters Hid in the Desert, and Intersection (White mobs). Each abstract artwork tells a Chinese immigrant worker’s story or a historical event in the transcontinental railroad history.
Part II, so far, contains thirteen sub-themes, including The Root, Winter, Arsons (Fire), Blood Wall in Prison, River & Ocean, One-Eye Series, Desert, Basket Legend, Barefoot on the Muddy Road, Truckee Town, The Coolie Trade (Disease & Mistreat), Nitroglycerine Explosion, and the Chinese Cosmology (The Strike). I have made new artworks for each category, which include specific stories and life experiences of Chinese migrant workers found in historical and academic sources. In terms of media and materials, I have used Chinese ink, Toned Tan Papers, Procreate, Apple Pencil, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Midjourney, Pattern Brushes, etc, to create each art piece.
Overall, the goal of this remix art exhibition is to “see absence,” “evoke presence” (Hushka et al., S., 2017, p. 31), and make the “invisible” Chinese immigrant workers “visible” via abstract art. Compared with representational art, abstract art can give form and power to the absent Chinese migrant workers since “it is impossible to represent a non-representational issue” (Hushka et al., S., 2017, p. 12).
Archives (Description):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LmOGorXESWlmdjLmWW-9MCX23tlwTCVE?usp=sharing
This Google Drive folder contains all the books, academic articles, Chinese immigrant workers' names, poetries, and my abstract ink drawings/patterns I remixed for this remix research project.
Descriptions of some archives (other archives will be discussed and included in each of my artwork's analysis and description):
- The book "Ghosts of Gold Mountain" addresses the "inadequacy," "amnesia," and "insults" that have marginalized the Chinese migrant workers for over a century. It presents a complete account of thousands of Chinese migrant workers who worked on the Transcontinental railroad and their stories as "lived experiences" (Chang, 2019, p. 7). This book presents challenging questions: "How does one give voice to the voiceless? How does one recover a sense of lived experiences if there is nothing from the central actors themselves?" (Chang, 2019, p. 9). There is extensive business documentation, including C.P.R.R. payroll sheets, private correspondence and notes among the railroad magnates, the names, job categories, pay rates, etc. (Chang, 2019, p. 9). Besides, a considerable amount of material culture is left (Chang, 2019, p. 9) by the Chinese migrant workers. These are all the things I plan to study in the future.
- The book "Zhi Lin: In Search of the Lost History of Chinese Migrants and the Transcontinental Railroads" contains two academic papers and one interview with the artist Zhi Lin. This book aims to honor and recover the histories of the overlooked Chinese migrant workers in constructing the Transcontinental Railroad.
- The academic journal “The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad” examines the profound impact the Chinese migrant workers had in both America and back in their home villages in China after their return. It also contains some Chinese songs and poems that record these workers' life stories and experiences.
- My ink drawings (abstract patterns) are the past works I did in 2022 and 2023. The materials I used include traditional Chinese ink, Color paper (dark blue, etc.), Strathmore sketch paper (8.5x11'', 9x12''), brushes, Chinese painting pigments, water, Winsor & Newton Ink (White Blanco), Pentel Brush Pen, plastic tape, etc.
- Some of My Blackout Poetries
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
There were about 4,000 men working there in the mountains, 3,000 of them Chinamen, and they all had to get out. Most of the Chinamen came to Truckee and they filled up all the old buildings and sheds that were in Truckee. With the heavy fall of snow one old barn collapsed and killed four Chinamen. A good many were frozen to death. There was a dance at Donner Lake at a hotel, and a sleigh load of us went up from Truckee and on our return, about 9 a.m. next morning, we saw something under a tree by the side of the road, its shape resembling the shape of a man. We stopped and found a frozen Chinaman. As a consequence, we threw him in the sleigh with the rest of us, and took him into town and laid him out by the side of a shed and covered him with a rice mat, the most appropriate thing for the laying out of a Celestial.
A. P. Partridge, Central Pacific Railroad
The Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, was a massive accomplishment of America’s Manifest Destiny and the 19th-century westward movement (Nevada Museum of Art, 2019). The railroad successfully linked the rail lines from the east of the United States to the west coast, allowing for travelling at a speed never seen before. The date, May 10, 1869, has been commemorated by Andrew J. Russell’s well-known 19th-century photography “East and West Shaking Hands”: two large steam engines representing the CPRR (Central Pacific Railroad) and UP (Union Pacific) face head-to-head (Chang, 2019, p. 4).
For the construction of the transcontinental railroad, a total of 20,000 Chinese workers were involved, and around 1,200 Chinese workers died of avalanches, explosions, and accidents when establishing the railroad in the region of Sierra terrain near Donner Summit. These Chinese immigrant workers' stories, contributions, and names have been lost from the mainstream American historical narrative (Lin, Nevada Museum of Art, 2019). In 1969, at the centennial commemoration at Promontory Summit, Secretary of the Interior John Volpe proudly claimed that only the “Americans” made everything possible (Chang, 2019, p. 7).
A San Francisco Chronicle reporter described the reaction to Secretary Volpe's speech: “Who else but Americans could drill tunnels in the mountains 30 feet deep in snow? Who else but Americans could chisel through miles of solid granite? Who else but Americans could have laid ten miles of track in 12 hours?" (Hushka, R., Fishkin, S. F., & Wong, S., 2017, p. 33).
“‘Successful works of art’ that cull from the archive are a ‘cure’ to the dangers of the past” (Russell, 1999, as cited in Horwatt, 2009).
"Do we know the names of dead railroad workers? Do we know where they are buried? Do we know what stories they told when they finally bored through the Summit Tunnel?" (Hushka, R., Fishkin, S. F., & Wong, S., 2017, p. 23-24).
