Asian Pacific Heritage Month
EDSITEment has several resources that can help you and your students learn
more about the contributions made by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders over
the last two centuries. AskAsia
offers a variety of lesson plans that address the Asian American experience (select
"Instructional Resources," then click "Lesson Plans" and select "Asian American").
EDSITEment also has several resources that explore various aspects of Asian culture,
including two teaching units on Haiku (Can
You Haiku? and The
World of Haiku) and a lesson dealing with multiculturalism (In
My Other Life). This month EDSITEment spotlights the contributions
Chinese Americans made to one of the most important enterprises undertaken in
the nineteenth century, the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Chinese
American workers were largely responsible for making a path for the railroad through
the nation's most difficult terrain: the mountains of the West. In the following
excerpt from her poem "Heaven," Cathy
Song, a contemporary American poet of Chinese and Korean descent, lyrically
imagines the fate of a 19th-century Chinese railroad worker. The railroad worker
"had always meant to go back" to his native country, the speaker of the poem explains,
but like many of the men who emigrated from China to build the transcontinental
railroad, he never did. He
had never planned to stay, the boy who helped to build the railroads
for a dollar a day. He had always meant to go back. When did he finally
know that each mile of track led him further away, that he would die in
his sleep, dispossessed, having seen Gold Mountain, the icy wind tunneling
through it, these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns?
--- From "Heaven," by Cathy Song
Chinese laborers had heard stories of a land paved with gold where the pay
was high. They called this place "Gum Shan," or "Gold Mountain." For these men,
Gold Mountain was America, a place where they could achieve economic success and
return to China with new riches for their families. Many of them came to California
for the Gold Rush. Many
more came to work on the railroad. Those men did not find mountains made of gold;
instead, they found themselves blasting paths through the dangerous terrain of
the High Sierras and laying track for the transcontinental railroad. They soon
learned that work on the railroad was back-breaking and dangerous, and the pay
was low. Despite the difficult work and the escalating anti-Chinese sentiment
that took hold during the Gold Rush,
the number of Chinese workers who came to the United States increased dramatically.
By 1869, over two thirds of the total workforce for the Central Pacific Railroad
Company consisted of Chinese labor, and without their efforts, the construction
of the transcontinental railroad would have been delayed by years. For
additional resources on the pivotal role played by Chinese American workers in
building the railroad through the mountainous terrain of the west, see the EDSITEment
lesson plan, I
Hear the Locomotives. Information and documents about Chinese Americans are
also available through the EDSITEment-reviewed website New
Perspectives on the West; on this site, see especially The
Artillery of Heaven episode and the lesson plan for grades 6 through 12, The
Transcontinental Railroad
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