Beginning with the California Gold Rush, the Chinese viewed the United States as a land of opportunity, a Gold Mountain. They would also see America as a place of peril.
Oct. 24, 2021, marked the 150th anniversary of the Chinese Massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles Chinatown — one of the deadliest ethnic attacks in U.S. history.
The events read like a Chinese spaghetti western. But this story is real. Amid a dispute between Chinese gangs over a woman, a white policeman and rancher were killed. A mob of 500 whites, Mexican Americans and blacks gathered to avenge the deaths and murdered 19 Chinese residents of Chinatown — 10 percent of all the Chinese living in Los Angeles. They hanged 15 of the bodies. For these crimes, 10 men were prosecuted, eight convicted, but all were freed when their verdicts were overturned.
To bring attention to these ugly events, a nine-episode podcast, “Blood on Gold Mountain,” was produced by Scripps College music professor and concert pianist Hao Huang, and scripted by his son Micah, a writer and multi-instrumentalist for the music group Flower Pistils. Micah also created the music for the podcast, which he and his partner Emma Gies performed.
What follows is edited exchange of emails with father and son about the podcast:
Your name “Huang” is “yellow” like the Wong of most of us from Gom Benn. Where is your family from?
Hao Huang: Our Huang family is Hakka, the old laojia is in Changsha, Hunan (south-central China). We are related to Yunxiang Huang, and my mother’s family is from Foshan, Guangdong. Their surname was Ho.
Why a podcast about the L.A. Chinese Massacre?
HH: I had moved out to teach at the Claremont Colleges but didn’t hear about (the massacre) for over a decade. It was in 2010, after rooting around for local histories of L.A. Chinatown, that I found out about the 1871 massacre. The fact that this history has been neglected, even suppressed for so long is telling.
Why now? Because of the pandemic-related anti-Asian violence?
HH: The work started long before Covid. Ironically, right as we released our first podcast episode, in March 2021, the anti-Asian violence erupted in the Atlanta murders of six Asian women.
“I was especially captivated by Yo Hing…He was such a vagabond, such a rascal — so unequivocally bad-ass!”
Micah Huang
Micah, why were you drawn to this story?
Micah Huang: My father experienced terrible racist violence in his New Jersey hometown while he was growing up in the 1960s. His parents arrived from China and Hong Kong after the war and gained residency through educational institutions. For work reasons, they did not end up in a Chinese enclave. As a result, my father endured extreme persecution including violence, cross-burnings and stigmatization reminiscent of Black Americans’ struggles under Jim Crow.
My mother is non-Chinese, and I also grew up in areas where Chinese or Asians were stigmatized and persecuted. My experiences were not nearly as bad as my father’s experiences. But a constant threat of violence, combined with an imperative for self-defense, were common to us both. All of these experiences made the characters and situations in Blood on Gold Mountain feel relatable to us.
Why a drama about the massacre?
MH: For me, it was the characters who really caught my interest. I started sifting through the primary (mostly old newspaper clippings) and secondary sources (special mention for “The Chinatown War,” a 2012 book written by Scott Zesch). I was blown away by the drama of the story. The characters had so much character!
I was especially captivated by Yo Hing, who left a very substantial paper trail behind him, in English as well as Cantonese or Sze Yup. He was such a vagabond, such a rascal… so unequivocally bad-ass! As a Chinese-American male, I suffer from a chronic sense that people think of me and others like me as weak, small, unintimidating, unsexy and easy to persecute. Yo Hing was none of those things. He swaggered around L.A., causing a ruckus, getting into trouble and talking his way out of it — a real life Chinese cowboy! I found him and the others like him irresistible, like a ready-made cast for a spaghetti (or should I say, Chow Fun) western. Sam Yuen, the laconic gunslinger, and the young lovers, Yut Ho and Lee Yong all sprang off the pages in different ways, though none of them were as well-documented as Yo Hing.
I loved the idea of a Chinese Western (Jackie Chan’s Shanghai Noon was one of my favorite movies growing up) and wanted to try my hand at it.
How did you view your main character, Yut Ho, the woman caught between the two gangs?
MH: I wanted to portray aspects of southern Chinese culture that gave the lie to demeaning western stereotypes; for instance, that Asian women were universally oppressed and submissive. I wanted to highlight our humanity by showing the good as well as the bad.
This was especially true in my choice to follow Yut Ho as the principal character. East Asian and Chinese women are singularly wronged in mass media; demeaned in a way that bears little resemblance to reality, but exoticized to such an extent that it is difficult for anyone in the community to speak out about it.
Stories of evil Asian men as cruel, effeminate women haters are all America have wanted to hear from East Asian women, and writers such as Karoline Kan, Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston were happy to oblige. I wanted to present a strong, independent Chinese-American woman who did not need to gain her social status by degrading Asian men, or by submitting her mind, culture and body to the dominion of “American” men.
I based a lot of Yut Ho’s personality, including her responses to crisis situations, and her sense of humor, on my grandmother and aunt (Gu Ma and Nai Nai,) and then threw her into the historical situation and let her respond to events in her own way.
Your story telling isn’t overtly judgmental. Why?
MH: I tried to keep moralism and editorializing out of the text. One of the benefits of a “historical fiction” framing is that it allows us to “show, not tell,” thereby liberating us from the fevered environment of competing moral pronouncements that dominates the “real world” of social media.
For me, there is no final judgement to be made about the 1871 massacre. Racism, prejudice and violence are facts of life, which are intrinsic to the competitive, dangerous environment in which these people lived.
Nowadays on the internet, there is a push to try and “cancel” racism, as if simply pointing it out and saying it’s bad makes any difference. However, as often as not, the same people who denounce racism in one context may actively perpetuate it in another, different context. Many Asian and Chinese Americans were reminded of this during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a vast swath of the American population turned against us, regardless of their feelings on Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, or any number of fashionable social issues. Because of this “woke hypocrisy” phenomenon, I tried very hard to avoid leaning on moral pronouncements or angry judgments, preferring to present the story, and let the audience come to their own conclusions.
The Blood on Gold Mountain podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. Or click on the button below:
