San Francisco Businessman Aims to Raise $400K For Memorial Honoring Chinese Transcontinental Railroad Workers

The iron rails wind through the Sierra-Nevada, snaking along pine trees and granite - boring through mountains and hugging cliff edges. The story of the building of Transcontinental Railroad is a tale of bold ambition - and brutal work executed by a diverse labor force.

Among those burrowing through the mountains were thousands of Chinese immigrants, some tapped from the gold mines, and others recruited from China to carry out some of the railroad’s most dangerous jobs.

“So Chinese had to blast through those mountains to build those tunnels,” said Sue Lee, director of the Chinese Historical Society of America.

The stories and names of those Chinese workers remain like ghosts, lost among the granite and mountain pines. Payroll records kept by railroad companies didn’t list the Chinese workers’ full names. The stories of their work were never recorded.

“When you look at a history book, there’s very little about the Chinese,” said Karene Lee Conlin, a San Francisco woman of Chinese descent. “It’s like it was overlooked, never happened.”

Nearly 150 years after the railroad's completion, a new movement is afoot to give the workers long belated recognition.

A large boulder with a plaque honoring the Chinese laborers sits at a rest stop off of Interstate 80, about 20 minutes west of Tahoe in a place called Gold Run. Towns along the interstate are dotted with vestiges of the history of the railroad laborers.

But San Francisco businessman Steven Lee doesn't think the plaque is an adequate testament to the story of the Chinese laborers. He’s trying to raise $400,000 to create a larger memorial to the workers at the rest stop.

Lee put out a call to hundreds of artists to generate proposals for a memorial, and is currently sifting through some 30 ideas.

“I think they’re deserving to have some place that we can go to a reference point,” Lee said. “And maybe offer a prayer and offer some kind of thought to the people who actually built the railroad in the Sierras.”

Lee hopes to have the memorial built by 2019 which will mark the 150th anniversary of the railroad’s completion. He hopes to erect a smaller version of the memorial someplace in San Francisco.

“Hopefully with a monument,” he said. “Now we can finally tell the story.”

Stanford University recently launched a project to collect stories of the Chinese railroad workers, that might’ve been passed down through generations.

Sue Lee said the project has also set the 150th anniversary as a target date to compile a list of the workers’ stories.

“So we want to be able to say who they were,” Lee said. “Where they lived, who they married - tell stories about their children.”

At Donner pass, the snow-capped mountains reveal Summit Tunnel, a chewed-out railroad tunnel blasted through with dynamite by Chinese laborers. Thousands of the workers were believed to have been killed by the blasts, although the Pacific Railroad Company didn’t keep an official count.

Roxene Lee, who is scouring her own family history for a connection to the railroad workers, said their story needs to be told.

“That’s one of the things that we want to do is put our little stamp, maybe it’s a little stamp,” Lee said. “To tell people, not just Chinese but everyone, how we played a part in America.”

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