North Pacific Coast RR Construction at Corte Madera (1898) | California Historical Society / CC BY-NC 2.0
The transcontinental railroad—one of the great engineering feats of US history—was laid thanks to the labor of Chinese immigrants: between 1865 and 1869, some 12,000 Chinese workers constructed the western line. Yet very little evidence remains in the words of the workers themselves. “This is not to say there are no records,” writes poet Paisley Rekdal:
What is a quote but a fragment of history? What is a newspaper, a land grant act, but one community speaking to another it wishes to convert? Much can be made of any document, and its language of conformity or deviance, by the reader written into it or out of it.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven collections of poetry. Her accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship. Between 2017 and 2022, she served as Utah’s Poet Laureate, during which time she was commissioned by the Spike 150 Foundation to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion.
In West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), Rekdal reconstructs that history starting with a fragment—a poem found on the walls of California’s Angel Island Immigration Station elegizing a detained Chinese migrant who committed suicide awaiting deportation. Rekdal, the daughter of a Chinese American mother and a Norwegian father, translates each Chinese character from that anonymous elegy as a prompt for the poems and lyrics essays in this hybrid collection.
Braiding personal and political histories, Rekdal brings in the voices of Irish and Chinese workers alike—along with railroad company owners, law enforcers, newspaper correspondents, immigration officers and legislators. By representing the communities and interests of the era as characters within a narrative, she encourages her readers to engage with history at a personal level. She also created a website to accompany the book, which showcases how the project is informed by both contemporary landscape and historical records, including footage of railroad workers from the time.
From the very first poem, Rekdal situates West within a history of racial hegemony and hypocrisy in the United States. Alongside her depiction of railroad workers, she highlights the pomp and show, for instance, with which Lincoln’s body is paraded across states so that the nation can mourn him—while the hanged bodies of 38 Sioux are tossed into mass graves.
These contradictions reappear throughout the collection. Rekdal presents President Andrew Johnson’s incendiary speeches and the Chinese Exclusion Act (implemented 13 years after the transcontinental line was completed) side-by-side with President Donald J. Trump’s incendiary speeches during the COVID-19 outbreak and the sharp rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
The landscape of West is vast and complicated: between 1820 and 1860, the arrival of the Irish railroad workers coincided with multiple outbreaks of cholera, prompting unwarranted, ill-informed stigmatization of Irish immigrants. The Irish, Rekdal writes, were very much like the Chinese in the occupations they undertook and the prejudice they encountered. Yet the Irish were never inflicted with an Irish Exclusion Act.
West is one of a number of recent poetry collections to question how we think about the people we live alongside. Her poem “Not,” for instance, samples speeches by Dennis Kearney, an Irish immigrant and labor champion who started the Workingmen’s Party of California along with J. G. Day and H. L. Knight. After they won a significant number of seats in the California State Assembly, the party denied voting rights to Chinese workers. Rekdal’s depiction of this failure of solidarity and scapegoating of “otherness” reminded me of Monica Youn’s contemporaneous poetry collection, From From (Graywolf Press, 2023), which reckons with Asian American desires and the various ways they are constrained. Like Rekdal, Youn collages myths and histories alongside contemporary scenarios to make her point. Her series of lyric essays called “In the Passive Voice” raise the stakes with anecdotes from the moment we are in right now. She narrates an encounter in which a white man pretends to shoot at her, and she turns to a buff cyclist, who is Black, for support:
“We don’t want this racist shit in our neighborhood!” I yell.
“Right?” I prompt the cyclist. “Um, yeah. … Right.”
In noting the hesitation in the guy’s response, Youn underscores the continuing challenge of facing up to racism and building community with our neighbors.
As I was reading West, I was also thinking about Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (Graywolf Press, 2020), a series of lyric essays in which the poet meditates on the courage and vulnerability it takes her to engage with the privilege of whiteness. In one passage, Rankine goes to watch a play by a Black playwright, with a white female friend. Toward the end of the play, a character breaks the fourth wall and asks the white members of the audience to make their way to the stage. Rankine’s friend does not budge and this disturbs her: she wants the playwright’s intention to be honored. She writes,
Is my identification with the playwright because she’s black, or because she’s a woman, or because she’s an artist? It’s impossible to dissect. My tension begins to couple with a building resentment against my white friend. I feel betrayed by her.
Rankine’s exploration of complex racial power structures made me think of Rekdal’s poem, “Indeed”, which brings in the voice of E. B. Crocker (who served as the legal counsel for the Central Pacific while they were building the first transcontinental) speaking of the Chinese:
… they shall not walk
on our sidewalks or marry
a white man or woman all this
and they shall keep the Negro
steady
West, From From, and Just Us all inspect the harms of American racial politics and the possibility of allyship and community. In West: A Translation, Rekdal notes that the Irish accepted higher wages and lodging for the same work done by Chinese laborers. But protecting only our own ethnic community doesn’t ultimately mean we’re better off. In the essay “Miss Home” Rekdal notes that Union Pacific Coal Company solidified its position by keeping an active wage competition going, driving down earnings for all workers. Lynchings of Chinese mine workers and Black farm workers happened alike. Could these losses have been avoided if the oppressor was challenged by a united front from the oppressed?
Rekdal’s undertaking with this book seems to point toward the answer. “In the body of the present lies the body of the past,” she observes, pointing to the fact that history matters because it enables us to see the conditions of our present more clearly. On paper, racial segregation has ended, emancipation has been achieved. Rekdal’s West magnifies the fine print, revealing a very different story.
