Against a vast wash of sagebrush and volcanic rock in Utah’s West Desert, Chris Merritt, an archaeologist with the State Historic Preservation Office, took me on a tour of the old Transcontinental Railroad’s route through Promontory Summit, from Corinne to Umbria Junction. The line was replaced during World War II by the Lucin Cutoff, which now runs straight through the Great Salt Lake, shearing off some of the original line’s distance and allowing its iron tracks to be recycled for war munitions. That change turned all of the Promontory Summit settlements into ghost towns.
I was visiting those sites throughout 2018 and 2019 as research for a poem commissioned by The Spike 150 committee to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Transcontinental’s completion in 1869. At the time, I was Utah’s poet laureate — the first person of Asian descent to hold the role. I wanted to write a poem based on the letters and diaries of the Central Pacific Railroad’s Chinese workers, which, I thought, were surely somewhere in the company’s archive. But the CPR’s records — absorbed long ago into the Union Pacific’s, after the CPR’s purchase — had no such materials. To date, not a single written document by a Chinese Transcontinental worker has been found. Absent any record, then, I turned to the landscape.
And the landscape offered much. As we walked the ghost town of Terrace, the era’s rigid racial segregation was still apparent: All the Chinese artifacts, the buried remnants of its Chinatown, were found near the town’s dump. Merritt pointed out fragments of broken opium pipes and dishes ground down in the sand. I dug up buttons and bits of glass. Some rice bowl shards were decorated with the Four Seasons or Bamboo patterns popular on Chinese dishware in the late 19th century.
Absent any record, I turned to the landscape. And the landscape offered much.
Merritt said you might find similar bowls in any of the Western ghost towns where Chinese miners and railroad workers lived. It suggests the paucity of material choice for them, yes, but also the close ties they developed with the same trading partners — likely other Chinese migrants eager to make money in the U.S. by supplying plum wine, rice, soy sauce and dishes to the Chinese workers that white merchants wouldn’t sell to.
As I thumbed a rice bowl shard, a phrase returned to me, one common to Chinese and Chinese Americans households: Chi ku — “to eat bitterness” — a stark reminder that we all must suffer life’s injuries without complaint. It was my mother’s master philosophy for succeeding in America: Keep your head down and chin up, blind to setbacks and deaf to racist remarks. During the first months of a teaching job where an older colleague told me, in a hissed hallway conversation, that I was just another in a long string of “diversity hires,” I considered bringing a complaint to the department chair. But my mother batted it down. “You’ll never get promoted,” she warned. “Just work hard and ignore him.”
Eating bitterness is a concept familiar to many immigrant families. The philosophy itself is not that original. What is unique is its subtle glorification of pain, the use of the verb “to eat” rather than “to endure.” To eat is to feed, to sustain: It is to grow the soul itself. Suffering represents, in this sense, a kind of power — one that nourishes what it threatens to destroy.
But these rice bowl shards also reminded me how much these Chinese workers desired to preserve their culture, to stay Chinese. It’s a myth of American exceptionalism that the Chinese Transcontinental workers wanted to become American themselves. Most ate bitterness for money, not citizenship. Like the Chinese workers, the merchants who supplied them probably had little interest in staying in the U.S. Instead, they saw themselves as “sojourners” — travelers eager to milk America for money, just as America was eager to milk a war-torn, famine-stricken southern China for cheap labor.
We know this from more archaeological evidence. Many 19th century Chinese graves across the West are empty, part of an elaborate death ritual. Chinese men in the U.S. paid a huiguan, a district association, to bury their bodies and then have a bone collector exhume them months later, scraping away the flesh and breaking the bones to fit into earthen jars or metal boxes. These were shipped to the Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong, which distributed the remains to the workers’ families. The Shasta Courier in 1897 cited the boxes as evidence of Chinese workers’ unsanitary, disease-spreading habits.
Not every body that arrived in Hong Kong, however, was collected. The hospital still hosts many unclaimed boxes from the last two centuries — stacks of men left to languish at the border of home.
IF WE CAN IMAGINE how the Chinese felt about America from their death rituals, we might also intuit something about their lives from what they ate. Layers of trash and coprolites from sites like Terrace can be read as an archive. Besides plum wine and opium, the Chinese appeared to stick to grains and vegetables familiar from home. But there are some interesting discrepancies: The trash is littered with bones from subsistence meat like jackrabbit and with pine nuts.
Pine nuts are used in southern Chinese dishes and are also a staple of the Paiutes, one of the Great Basin’s Indigenous nations. The seedpods are shiny and tough: You have to split them with your teeth to reach the nut — sweet and oily, not bitter like its Asian cousin. You have to pick and pick to keep yourself fed; it is a subsistence diet, and the railroad workers wouldn’t have had the time. Did they trade with traveling Paiutes or buy from Cantonese merchants? Without written records, it’s hard to say whether the nuts suggest cross-cultural exchange or insularity. Likely the latter: Contemporary reports suggest the Chinese were as afraid of Indigenous people as white railroaders were. Like their Anglo counterparts, they were prejudiced against anyone they saw as “other.”
In 1852, Norman Asing, a Chinese restaurant owner in San Francisco, wrote to California Gov. John Bigler after the state enacted policies to prevent Chinese from entering. Asing chides that immigration “transferred (your nation) … from childhood to manhood and made you great and respectable throughout the nations of the earth.” And he reminds Bigler that he, too, is the descendant of immigrants, since he would surely “not boast of being a descendant of the red man.” Asing brags that the Chinese “exercised most of the arts and virtues of civilized life; that we are possessed of a language and a literature, and that men skilled in science and the arts are numerous among us.” Their cultural achievements, he argues, make it impossible to compare the Chinese to Black people. “We are not,” he declares, “the degraded race you would make us.”
Not much is known about Asing, but his letter shows how profoundly the Chinese understood that their identity was triangulated against Black and white, and that their own bid to be treated as equals relied on presenting themselves as ethnically and racially superior. This is the dark underbelly of eating bitterness: the suggestion that anyone who presents himself as a model sufferer becomes, too, a model citizen. If the promised power of chi ku is success, then eating bitterness demands that you live at the margin of politics and power to achieve it. You become, at best, a shadow of the powerful, replicating their arbitrary hierarchies and rules. It is subsistence nourishment, just as railroading is subsistence labor. Pain is the final result of both.
AFTER OUR VISIT TO TERRACE, Merritt drove me to see a famous 10-mile section of track that was laid down in a single day, mostly by Chinese workers — the longest section completed in the shortest amount of time— and I both marveled and winced at the achievement. For an instant, on that shelterless plain, buffeted by an endless wind, I understood what it meant to say that every foot of the Transcontinental’s trestle and inch of grade was built by humans.
Suffering is the definition of such work, and it’s even more bitterly astonishing to know the Chinese weren’t even the CPR’s first choice to do it. Charles Crocker, one of the railroad’s partners, urged his co-owners to hire young men from Guangzhou because they would be cheaper than whites. Most Americans at the time viewed the Chinese either as direct competitors, or as “less” than men. Chinese men wore robes that resembled women’s dresses, their black hair tied in long braids called queues. Because many — especially after the Gold Rush petered out — worked as domestics, washers in laundries or cooks in restaurants, they garnered the stereotype of being like women: weak, homebound, small.
Asing brags that the Chinese “exercised most of the arts and virtues of civilized life; that we are possessed of a language and a literature, and that men skilled in science and the arts are numerous among us.”
The 1875 Page Act effectively banned immigration by Chinese women by assuming they were all coming to work in prostitution, but it also implicitly aimed to prevent Chinese men from marrying and raising Chinese families on American shores. The men had to live in close-quartered, segregated “bachelor societies,” further convincing their Anglo detractors that they were sexually perverse — effete homosexuals or opium-addicted rapists. CPR co-owner Leland Stanford didn’t think Chinese men were fit for the dangerous work of railroading. But they were seemingly less volatile than white workers as they didn’t drink, weren’t known to frequent the prostitutes that trailed the railroad, and kept to themselves. Only the Mormons, hired by the Union Pacific, were as hard-working and dependable. Most importantly, Chinese workers were cheap. The CPR only paid them about $26 a month for 12-hour workdays, and they had to buy their own supplies and food. The Irish, by contrast, were paid $35 and had their expenses covered.
The Chinese protested this injustice during an 1867 strike. They had struggled that summer to complete the hardest work on the western half of the line, working from dawn till dusk, blasting through the Sierras. The Chinese demanded 10-hour workdays and a pay increase to $35 a month. “The truth is, they are getting smart,” wrote E. B. Crocker, Charles’s brother and CPR’s legal counsel. The real truth was that they weren’t smart enough: The Chinese never allied with the Irish or Black railroaders because of the groups’ mutual prejudice and racism. When Charles Crocker cut off food for the Chinese, it broke the strike.
It’s uncanny how often food and its metaphors for power and violence intertwine in the story of the Chinese in America. Hunger starts a strike, starvation stops it. Famine sends men fleeing from Hong Kong; American mines and railroads devour their labor. Hunger is the thread that binds us. After the Transcontinental was completed, some Chinese workers stayed in Salt Lake, growing gardens and selling produce to the Mormons, who regarded the gardeners with suspicion even as they became dependent on their business. In 1893, a white 17-year-old crushed a Chinese vegetable peddler’s head with a stone, killing him. In 1900, another vegetable seller named Tom Loung was shot and robbed.
When Merritt and I walked along the track to the sign commemorating that famous 10-mile section, I felt both pride and dismay at the Chinese workers’ achievement. It was undeniably astonishing to see their legacy physically carved into the landscape. But later, listening to the staticky voice of the president shouting about Chinese viruses, Wuhan and travel bans over my car radio, I thought about that section of track. What was the purpose, I wondered as I drove home, of working so hard for people who refused to work hard for us? What was the purpose of pain, if the only people who remembered it continued to suffer?
IF FOOD AND PAIN are the entwining metaphor for Chinese American resilience, how to interpret the fact that so much of Chinese political resistance has revolved around food production and restaurants? Asing was a restaurateur. So was Wong Kim Ark, born in 1873 in San Francisco, who worked as a cook in a Chinese restaurant before suing the U.S. for the right to re-enter as a citizen after visiting China — the case that established what, until the last election, we understood as the principle of birthright citizenship.
Or perhaps it makes sense that Chinese agitators sprang from the restaurant industry, since restaurants, like laundromats (in which my grandfather worked), are common in Chinese American families. The tongs, the backbone of Cantonese labor culture in America, supplied them with workers. Tongs are benevolent societies that help young men find work, with membership based on the man’s home district, family name or dialect. In late 19th and early 20th century America, almost all male Chinese migrants joined tongs for physical protection, from the police as well as from white mobs. But as the tongs gained power, some turned to organized crime.
Because of the Page Act, tongs understood that women had become a commodity that, like opium, could be sold throughout the West. An exceptionally attractive woman bought for a few hundred dollars in Canton could bring as much as $3,000 in San Francisco. The tongs trafficked Chinese girls who thought they were coming to the States to marry eligible men. Many believed they’d entered an indentured servant system that required them to serve as prostitutes for a period of time. Women couldn’t read, so they signed contracts they didn’t understand. Girls who didn’t end up in fancier parlor houses were locked into barred, street-facing cells called “cribs.” Just 25 cents could purchase a girl for a few minutes; prostitutes were pushed to service as many men as they could in an hour.
Who eats bitterness, and who forces others to? Who does not eat bitterness at all? The more I try to understand the cultural resonances of chi ku, the more history itself complicates the boundaries of suffering and success. The novelist Tom Lin, whose The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu recasts the classic Western with a Chinese outlaw protagonist, has argued that pain was itself the subject of the Western and that suffering is glorified because it was required to settle the land. That’s why the West’s fictionalized landscapes are depicted as bleak, he says, its violence random and relentless. For Lin, “eating bitterness” is the subject of the genre itself. Why not see these novels, then, as part of a Chinese American literary tradition, just as I might argue that the Transcontinental was Chinese infrastructure, and the Chinese the people that finally colonized the West?
The regulation of power and race in America has long been achieved through violence or its threat. It’s a story as old as the Western itself, and with the same sad message behind it: Groups that might see each other as allies vilify each other as enemies, jealously guarding an ever-shrinking territory bordered on one hand by racist laws and on the other by growing class divisions between generations of immigrants. That’s what happened to my family, at least. I am not the same kind of Chinese American that my mother and my grandmother were, nor are we like my grandfather, who was born and raised in Guangzhou. Even as I am distinctly a result of them all, I am, I recognize, no longer Chinese at all.
Still, I am evidently what my grandparents wanted, because my mother and uncles speak no Chinese, and so their children speak no Chinese. We left our Chinese enclaves and were encouraged to toughen up when bullied. Today, we eat sticky rice with roast beef at birthday parties; our Christmas tables groan with platters of ham and Peking duck and Santa-shaped sugar cookies. We eat Dungeness crab smothered in five-spice gravy. We intermarry and force our white spouses to eat steamed egg custards laced with stinky black beans. We buy but no longer make dong tay. We eat the culture that’s been constructed for us, losing more and more of our heritage in order to become what our parents hungered for us to be: citizens with passports and memories unshaped by grief.
PERHAPS THE INEVITABLE RESULT of chi ku is debilitating rage. If we cannot let ourselves protest what constrains us, we turn to the vocabulary of cruelty. We lash out at those we do have power over, and our anger becomes the bitterness they swallow in turn. My mother had a contentious relationship with her mother, my Po Po, who treated my mother with the imperiousness of any Chinese matriarch overseeing her daughter’s training. It was something my mother, an ambitious woman who wanted to become a doctor, couldn’t stand. While my mother went to college (to become a teacher) and also graduate school, she was raised with the belief that she should be a servant in her own house, caring for her brothers and father, putting aside her ambitions at times to be an obedient and docile helpmeet.
Perhaps the inevitable result of chi ku is debilitating rage.
But outside the house, my mother encountered an America convulsed by feminism. Her intelligence and drive opened up a world of travel and work possibilities unavailable to women like my Po Po. The cognitive dissonance of living between worlds, caught between my grandmother’s desires and her own, was, I believe, deeply painful to my mother. Struggling to attain her own ingrained sense of Chineseness while also pleasing herself, and struggling, too, to act like the perfectly competent housewife at home, sent my mother into near-frenzied rages. At times of stress, she alternated between screaming tantrums and ice-cold silence — fits of rage my father and I could neither anticipate nor interpret. Even as a child, I sensed this anger had little to do with me and more to do with something my mother privately endured. In public, she appeared perfect: polished and intelligent, affable and hard-working. Only at home could she let herself express the rage that was denied her.
I remember once being in a grocery store with my mother when I was a child, watching the checkout cashier speak to her in pidgin. My mother, a woman who was not only fluent in English, but who had been born in this country, who had a Ph.D., was being talked to like an illiterate child. She smiled tightly at the cashier, picked up our sack of groceries, and walked me to the car. She said nothing all the way home, but later — while I was practicing piano — she kicked in a small glass panel of our kitchen door.
Perhaps rage is an attempt to reclaim power, a rejection finally of chi ku’s “feminine” endurance of pain in favor of the assumed masculine ability to inflict it.
OF COURSE, this history is itself rapidly changing. When the New York Times assigned me to write about Bing Kong Tong, a Transcontinental holdover in Salt Lake City, Willy Chun, its 92-year-old leader, told me that tongs like his were dying out. Bing Kong Tong was no longer linked to organized crime; it’s a social club that helps with scholarships and offers prayers for the dead Transcontinental workers. At the tong’s meeting hall on State Street, Willy pulled out a battered briefcase to show me the documents the tong had collected for the past century. The papers were a messy stack, photos and enrollments and charter documents tossed together. The tong’s remaining members, restaurant cooks and construction workers, sat in a corner, smoking and playing mah jong on the new mechanized table Willy had bought them. They looked embarrassed when I approached, because they didn’t speak much English, and I can’t speak Cantonese.
These men were stuck in historical limbo: neither fully integrated into America nor interested in returning to China. Willy emigrated from Guangzhou, the same place the railroaders were recruited, working as a busboy for another tong member in his restaurant until he was promoted to cook and eventually opened his own café. Ten restaurants later, Willy is a prosperous man, the leader of the tong that once supported him.
Talking to Willy reminded me of a conversation I had with a Chinese American friend while researching the Transcontinental. He was complaining about Andrew J. Russell’s iconic photo, East and West Shaking Hands at the Laying of the Last Rail. It was not the absence of Chinese workers from this photo that enraged him, though, but the fact that today’s Chinese Americans were so outraged by it. He is a wealthy and successful entrepreneur in San Francisco, and to him, the Chinese railroad workers were a source not of pride but embarrassment, the pain their bodies endured merely proof they’d been mindless cogs in the machine of someone else’s industry. “Who cares if the Chinese weren’t photographed?” he said. “Those men invented nothing, they owned nothing. Their labor was for others with more imagination than them.”
His argument echoed Asing’s letter, with its insistence that only those who could claim their cultural superiority over others should be offered the opportunities America promised. I began to see chi ku as a ladder on which we each claw and fight to ascend, rung by rung, all the while demanding those lower down suffer more, suffer harder, suffer in greater silence.
When Willy dies, will he be buried in America or shipped back to Guangzhou? And what about his wife? In the 19th century, only men received elaborate death rituals. Women, children, suicides, even murder victims were buried where they fell. Even in death, some lives matter more than others. It’s a lesson I don’t want to believe, though I have been taught some version of it all my life: I am commendable because I work harder than others, I am smarter about weaponizing my talents, I am uncomplaining and biddable. For all these reasons, and because I can endure the worst insults and accidents, I deserve to be respected.
My father, who is white, admires this philosophy. He says eating bitterness is part of what has made the Chinese, including my mother, successful in America. And it has — just as it has made me successful, too. Throughout my life, I have been promoted, given opportunities and praise, partly based on my persistence and uncomplaining attitude. But while chi ku has benefited me, I wonder what it has cost others like me, what my conditioned acceptance of it has meant to people studying my behavior? What lessons, I wonder, am I demonstrating to my female and Asian students through my reputation for being an unflappable workhorse? In the end, eating bitterness does not only mean we endure hardship without complaint, but that our endurance makes it impossible for others in worse conditions to complain. It limits the vocabulary of care we have for each other, which limits, too, our connection and responsibility. In that, paradoxically, eating bitterness atomizes culture even as it suggests a shared temperament.
Eating bitterness does not only mean we endure hardship without complaint, but that our endurance makes it impossible for others in worse conditions to complain.
The last time I saw Willy, I was invited to eat with him and the senior tong members at a Chinese restaurant. The dinner was meant to celebrate Willy and to thank me and the photographer sent by the Times to document the tong. The food was comforting and familiar: bird’s nest soup, a platter of squid and char siu, shrimp with lobster sauce, boiled chicken and duck, a few vegetable dishes. I scooped rice into my bowl after I finished my soup, piling meat and vegetables on top. The photographer sat back and picked at his food.
“I’m eating with my girlfriend later,” he said. I urged him to eat, whispering it would be rude if he didn’t. “My girlfriend will be angry,” he replied. I shrugged. One of the tong members, Richard, leaned over and grinned. “I don’t think you’ve seen food like this before,” he told the photographer. Then he turned to me. “But you have,” he said. “You know how to eat it.”
I felt a sharp prick of pride. It faded as I looked around the table. Willy looked tired, the senior members contemplative. The restaurant was one of Willy’s. Servers came and went, solicitous, smiling at him. The food, frankly, was not very good. Willy had never been interested in cooking as art, he’d told me, just in making a living. The restaurant, I sensed, wouldn’t last. Even as we ate and ate this feast he offered, ours was the only populated table. The rest of the restaurant, I saw, was empty.
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This article appeared in the September 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Eating bitterness.”
