Blood on Gold Mountain

Iron Horse Road: a Tale from Gold Mountain recounts one of the great untold epics of American history: The story of the Chinese laborers–neither truly enslaved nor truly free–who built the most rugged stretches of the Transcontinental Railroad. More than 150 years ago, these Gold Mountain Men tunneled through mountains, dangled over cliffs, and dragged entire trains over alpine summits where other...

Act One of the play Jianchi/Perseverance is based on the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 in San Francisco Chinatown, which led to suspicion and demonization of Chinese who were identified with the “China plague,” a term used to describe the bubonic plague. The history of Chinese in San Francisco is a fraught affair. Drawn at first by mid-nineteenth century stories of riches to be found in “Gold...

By some lights, this episode is what Blood on Gold Mountain is all about. The Massacre. This episode has been very difficult in every way. How do you make something good or beautiful out of a mass murder? How do you take the experience of being a perpetual foreigner, persecuted and exploited, mocked and belittled, and turn it into something redemptive? This episode has taught me the answer: You do...

In this episode, we are introduced to Christianity through the eyes of Yut-Ho’s Gwailo marriage to Lee Yong in a Christian church. Can you imagine being married in the holy place of a foreign religion without having any context for the iconography all around you? Understandably, Yut Ho is horrified by the sight of Jesus nailed to the cross, “his head hanging down in an attitude of infinite pain an...

If there’s one person who could be said to truly be at the center of the 1871 LA Chinatown drama, it might be Yo Hing. While Yut Ho’s love intrigue was nominally the reason for the conflagration of Chinatown’s ongoing gang conflict, it would never have happened if it hadn’t aligned with Yo Hing’s plans. Yo Hing represents a side of Chinese America that both Western nativists and Chinese assimilati...

Sam Yuen Sam Yuen is one of the larger-than-life characters that drive the historical narrative of the LA Chinatown massacre. Historical sources paint a picture of a laconic, stoic-minded business leader whose traditional methods and lack of adaptability made him and his company vulnerable to disruption. Sam Yuen was the leader of a conservative faction who thought that the Chinese community shoul...

No one knows just how the historical Yut Ho and Lee Yong met. Perhaps, as in our story, it was in the course of their daily routines. Yut Ho would almost certainly have lived a secluded life with her new husband. In Chinese immigrant society, most women worked alongside their menfolk. As a wealthy married woman Yut Ho had the uncommon luxury of staying home, but in practice, that luxury probably f...

Life in California’s early Chinese communities was challenging and dangerous, particularly for women. Discriminatory laws made it harder for women to emigrate, leading to a severe gender imbalance in California’s Chinatowns. Eve of Exclusion Initially, the gender gap was a result of American employers’ perception that men were a more desirable form of cheap labor. However, the exclusion of women q...

This episode addresses one of the most important and neglected aspects of early Chinese immigrants’ experience in California. Relations between Chinese immigrants and their Anglo counterparts were not always hostile. Despite the fact that there were few women in California when Chinese men started arriving, sometimes relationships would form. The only references to such relationships that we have...

In some ways, one might think of this episode as containing our version of a land acknowledgment. Immigrants are always trying to listen to natives and learn from them, and I thought Yut Ho and Ah Choy deserved a chance to do so. Indian Camp is a fictional waypost in the foothills of the coastal range near Big Sur. The Elder who dwells there is called only by his title, Haya, which is a transliter...

This episode introduces some key players in the story of the Chinatown Massacre, and gives some background about the social and political conditions for Chinese Immigrants in Wild-West California. Yut Ho and Ah Choy are based on historical figures. For more information about them, a great resource to check out is “The Chinatown War,” by Scott Zesch , who has collected and attempted to decode a num...

Los Angeles, 1871, was the murder capital of the Wild West, and nowhere was wilder or more dangerous than Chinatown.  Blood on Gold Mountain is an original storytelling podcast, which follows the journey of Yut-Ho, a young woman who arrives in LA as a refugee, only to become embroiled in a love intrigue, a gang war, and one of the deadliest race riots in American history.  Set in a vivid...