Rock Springs Massacre sparked Teow Lim Goh’s look at anti-Chinese violence in the West ...Middle East

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two previous books of poetry, “Islanders” and “Faraway Places.” Her essay collection “Western Journeys” was a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Denver.

SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. How did you become familiar with the Rock Springs Massacre and how did you decide to tell such a complex story, and from so many points of view, through an epic poem rather than a prose narrative?

Teow Lim Goh: My first book “Islanders” is on Chinese exclusion and detention at the Angel Island Immigration Station. I learned about the Rock Springs Massacre when I was researching the long history of Chinese exclusion. Also, the first time I drove through Rock Springs, when I was in my early 20s, before I thought of myself as a writer, I had this strange feeling. And I am not one who sees ghosts and visions. 

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As a writer, I am interested in human stories, especially those of competing interests and intractable conflicts. I knew early on that I wanted to explore the different points of view. The Chinese workers, white workers, and company executives were all making rational choices in the paradigms they inhabited, but it spiraled into one of the worst episodes of anti-Chinese violence in the American West.

I actually tried to write a historical novel at first, but I quickly learned it was not how my mind works. So I returned to poetry. A few years in, I saw that I was writing in and against the epic tradition. Formally, I blend cinematic passages in blank verse, the English epic meter, with flights of lyric fancy. These formal choices helped me rethink the origin stories of the American West on a deeper, structural level.

SunLit: How does the excerpt fit into the book as a whole?

Teow Lim Goh: The excerpt is from the first section of “Bitter Creek.” In November 1875, the Union Pacific brought in Chinese workers to break a strike. Here I link the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, which was a triumph in American engineering and ingenuity and made the settlement—or conquest—of the West possible, to the racial terror in Rock Springs in 1885.

SunLit: It seems that perhaps we don’t always think of poetry as a form requiring deep research, yet “Bitter Creek” reflects not only thoughtful writing but also extensive reporting. How did you familiarize yourself with the history before you sat down to write? 

Teow Lim Goh: I write to figure out what I know—and perhaps more importantly, what I don’t know. Much of the writing and research went hand-in-hand. As I fumbled my way through the early drafts, I was also figuring out the questions I was asking as well as what else I needed to explore.

Early on, I made a couple of trips to Rock Springs to dig into the archives as well as to get a sense of the place. Rock Springs is a remote high desert with arctic winters and harsh summers. It does not have the conventional beauty of, say, Yellowstone. Both the white and Chinese workers would have seen it as an apocalyptic landscape.

I also read general histories of the transcontinental railroad, Asian American history, and the Adams political family, among other things. (Charles Francis Adams Jr., the president of the Union Pacific at the time of the massacre, is a great-grandson of President John Adams.) This helped me understand the larger context of the story I wanted to tell.

SunLit: How did you construct the poetic narrative in terms of point of view, and then determine how the individual pieces best fit together?

“Bitter Creek”

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Teow Lim Goh: Early on, I saw that if I wanted to bring together multiple points of view, poetic styles, and character arcs, I had to arrange the poems chronologically. Otherwise, it would be confusing for the reader (and this writer) to follow. This structure became a scaffolding with which I could organize the poems.

The individual pieces grew out of this structure. Some poems I knew I had to write, such as the long pieces on the 1875 strike and the Rock Springs Massacre itself. The idea of following a Chinese miner through the intermittent letters he writes to his wife back home came to me early.  

Others came over time, glimmers of imagination as I sifted through the materials: a pregnant wife thinks of the worst when her husband is home late from work, a Union Pacific manager breaks an ornament as he sets up a Christmas tree. I don’t plot or outline—I discover what the story needs as I go along.

SunLit: As you compiled the separate pieces of the larger work, did you encounter any surprises in terms of what you imagined the story arc would be and what ultimately emerged as the finished work?

Teow Lim Goh: The Union Pacific archives are held in the Nebraska State Historical Society, and they were happy to send me a lot of the materials, including telegrams between the Union Pacific executives and the Wyoming Territory officials, and the Board of Directors Annual Reports. 

With this information, I pieced together the financial story of the Union Pacific. I have a background in accounting and finance, so yes, I reviewed the annual reports that show the company hemorrhaging red ink. I didn’t include it in the book, but I also built an amortization schedule of the loan the Union Pacific took from the U.S. Treasury to finance the construction of the transcontinental and then refused to repay. 

Numbers tell stories. It came as somewhat of a surprise, but once I saw it, it made sense that I had to include the loans and ledgers in the larger narrative arc.

The other surprise is that I wanted to create the character of a Chinese woman to refract another angle of the story. Based on historical research, I knew she would most likely be a sex worker. I started making a backstory for her, and along the way, I found there was a real-life woman in Evanston, a hundred miles west of Rock Springs, who had a similar biography.

SunLit: What’s the most important thing you’d like readers to take from this book?

Teow Lim Goh: The ways we dehumanize people we see as the Other are often so embedded in the culture that they seem to be natural and inevitable. And this dehumanization often stems from fear.

In one of the poems, I portray a young white girl playing in the yard when a group of Chinese workers walk by, and a parent admonishes her to go inside, saying, “You don’t know what men like that will do to girls like you.” I was that girl, in Singapore in the 1990s, and the monsters at the gate were South Asian migrant workers who provided the labor for a construction boom.

The violence of the Rock Springs Massacre—as well as many of today’s headlines—is rooted in seemingly small moments like this. We internalize these fears. Our bodies react to the perceived threats, with rage, with defensiveness. All of us do it to different degrees and pass it on to our children. I would like readers to grapple with this dynamic and put in the hard and uncomfortable work of rewiring it. 

SunLit: How does your writing and revising process for your poetry work differ from how you’d approach a prose narrative? Or is it essentially the same?

Teow Lim Goh: I tend to write essays when I am trying to figure out the dimensions of the subject, and I turn to poetry when I want to delve into psychological states and consider the silences in our speech. I often approach the same subject in both genres. I have an essay on Rock Springs in my previous book, the essay collection “Western Journeys.”

I begin with taking notes. With essays, it often takes the shape of interesting facts and observations. With poetry, it often begins with a speaker and a situation. When I jot things down, my mind starts to ruminate on them, and over time, I make notes of the fleeting insights that appear to me as I go about my days. At some point, which could be weeks or months, I take out the notes and begin to shape them into a piece.

SunLit: Tell us about your next project.

Teow Lim Goh: I’m considering the stories of the larger Chinese diaspora, a mix of research from public archives and my family’s oral histories. The Chinese who came to the U.S. to work in the mines and railroads were part of the same global migrations as my ancestors who went to Southeast Asia to open the jungle.

 A few more quick questions

SunLit: Which do you enjoy more as you work on a book – writing or editing?

Teow Lim Goh: I like the open vistas of possibility in early drafts and the sense of satisfaction of bringing a piece to completion. Both also evoke anxiety and dread.

SunLit: What’s the first piece of writing – at any age – that you remember being proud of?

Teow Lim Goh: In graduate school, I took a course in metrical theory. We had to write poems in each of the meters we studied, such as the Old English strong stress meter and iambic pentameter. The professor said, “Look, these are technical exercises. Don’t write about something emotionally difficult, or it might get in the way of practice. Write about something light, like socks.” That summer session, I delivered one poem every day about kittens and later made them into a letterpress chapbook I call “The Kitten Poems.”

Not the first—I had already published my first book to critical acclaim—but “The Kitten Poems” has a special place in my oeuvre.

SunLit: What three writers, from any era, would you invite over for a great discussion about literature and writing? 

Teow Lim Goh: Eduardo Galeano, Sofia Samatar, and Garrett Hongo.

SunLit: Do you have a favorite quote about writing?

Teow Lim Goh: “Break the story.” – Rebecca Solnit

SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your home shelves tell visitors about you?

Teow Lim Goh: I have a wide range of obsessions, but I’m particularly interested in how we eke truth out of silence.

SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? What’s the audio background that helps you write?

Teow Lim Goh: The sounds of cats purring on my desk.

SunLit: What music do you listen to for sheer enjoyment?

Teow Lim Goh: A little bit of everything. Rhiannon Giddens, Patti Smith, Spanish classical guitar, and more.

SunLit: What event, and at what age, convinced you that you wanted to be a writer?

Teow Lim Goh: Going to the Angel Island Immigration Station in my mid-20s, where I saw the poems the Chinese detainees wrote on the walls.

SunLit: Greatest writing fear?

Teow Lim Goh: That I miss something pertinent in my research.

SunLit: Greatest writing satisfaction?

Teow Lim Goh: When I find the precise language to express a mood, experience, or argument that has been on my mind.

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