Ye Chun’s Straw Dogs of the Universe is a devastating novel that lays bare the hollow promise of the California dream for Chinese immigrants of the 19th century. Told with an unflinching attention to detail, Ye’s narrative captures the brutal racism and violence inflicted upon these newcomers both in the crowded alleys of San Francisco and amid the vast beauty of the Sierra Nevada. Yet Ye’s characters never surrender their aspirations for a better life.
The novel opens in 1876 with 10-year-old Sixiang being sold for some food and six silver coins to a woman who will take her from a small, impoverished village in China to San Francisco. But Sixiang’s mother entrusts her daughter with the coins—enabling her to cling to the belief that “her mother had not sold her”—and a photo of her father, who left for California’s goldfields before she was born. Sixiang, the name given to her by her father in one of his first letters from overseas, means “remember home.” His letters and money have stopped arriving, so Sixiang is sent off on a mission to find him and bring him home.
While Ye relies on Sixiang’s search for her father as the central plot, she weaves in various subplots. We learn that Sixiang’s father, Guifeng, has fallen in with Daoshi, who may or may not be a Daoist priest, and together they find low-paying employment on the transcontinental railroad. Through them, we witness the incredibly dangerous work performed by Chinese laborers. There are the white matrons of the Mission Home in San Francisco—Miss Moore and Miss Webb—who rescue Sixiang from indentured servitude as a housemaid and, after some heavy-handed training and religious instruction, dispatch her as a servant to the Turner family in Grass Valley. There she is called Cindy and subjected to other forms of humiliating assimilation. Still another storyline: After calamity strikes while blasting a tunnel, Guifeng leaves the railroad and takes up with a woman from back home, Feiyan. Together they attempt to carve out a piece of the California dream.
Reading Ye’s novel may bring to mind C Pam Zhang’s novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which tells of Chinese immigrants toiling in California’s goldfields, and Julia Flynn Siler’s The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a nonfiction account of efforts to defeat human trafficking of the kind faced by Sixiang and other girls. While those excellent and much-lauded books hold out hope that in California resilience can lead to redemption, Straw Dogs of the Universe yields no such promise for immigrants to the Golden State. Even after the last page, you may find yourself wondering whether Ye’s characters will ever discover home.
EXCERPT
He was looking at her when she lifted her head from the rose bushes. “Don’t let them turn you into a monkey,” he said across the fence, a dozen feet away from her, hand clutching his clippers. He looked almost angry, as if he was personally insulted by her, as if she, whom he neither knew nor had exchanged a word with, was bringing shame upon him.
“What?” she said, but she knew exactly what he was saying. He was looking at her curled hair as he said it. His eyes ran down her tight dress as well, which, she became aware again, was constricting her breath. Back home in the market by her village, she’d seen a monkey dressed in baby clothes made to perform funny tricks for the audience. When the monkey did well, its owner would grant it a bite of banana or a pat on the head. Sixiang couldn’t believe a young man not much older than she was had just said such an ugly thing to her. “What about you?” Sixiang said. “A Chinaman without a queue.”
Alta Journal caught up with Ye to discuss Straw Dogs of the Universe two weeks before its publication. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Your characters are so sharply drawn; how did you create them? How much research did you do?
I had known early on that a male character would be a railroad worker, as my paternal great-great-grandfather had come here to build the transcontinental railroad, and I wanted to learn more about his experience. I’d also known that a female character would be a sex worker, as the few Chinese women who ended up in California during the time were often forced into the profession. When I started writing, the little girl, Sixiang, emerged—possibly because my daughter was 10 at the time, and I was both scared and compelled to imagine what it would be like for a 10-year-old to be away from her family and alone in a hostile world. The narrative thread of a daughter looking for her father emerged after that. Then, as I was writing about the father’s railroad days, Daoshi, a spiritual leader of the community, came into being.
Who is your favorite character? Why?
I feel most connected to Daoshi because he is closest to my age and asks questions I sometimes ask. While I was working on the novel, I was also thinking about the Daoist idea of neutrality and the concept of wuwei—how they are relevant in my own life. I wrote my inquiries into the novel through the Daoshi character, who was born to a family of Daoist priests and sort of renounces the family profession when he leaves for Gold Mountain to be a prospector. But as he later works on the railroad, he finds himself ruminating on how to live according to Dao. In the face of many deaths, he performs funeral rituals for the community and becomes a real Daoshi.
Your novel moves section by section, forward and backward through time and place. How did you arrive at the structure?
I was reading and rereading Toni Morrison while working on the book. Historical fiction was a new genre for me, and when I thought of the genre, I thought of Toni Morrison. When I was reading her book A Mercy, its interwoven narratives felt like a befitting structure for my own novel. Like A Mercy, my novel contains multiple lives that are interlocked and multiple voices wanting to speak out.
What surprised you most when writing this?
Before researching the book, I was surprised by how little I’d known about this history. I had not known about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or the fact that about 90 percent of the Central Pacific Railroad workers were Chinese until I cotaught an interdisciplinary course with a history professor in 2018. During my research, I was surprised by the extent of racism these early Chinese immigrants had to live with. While writing the book, much of it during the pandemic, I was surprised by how history echoed back in the present so literally. For example, back then, the refrain was “Chinese must go”; during the pandemic, it was “Go back to China.”
You write about the Sierra and the California landscape with such authority. Have you spent much time in gold country? In California?
I have not spent a lot of time in California. I’d traveled and visited family there a few times, and then in the summer of 2021, I went there to do field research for my novel. I walked around the San Francisco Chinatown, learning about the alleys and landmarks. I did the same in Truckee, even though its Chinatown had long been gone. I could still smell the air and look at the rail track, the mountains, the Truckee River, trees, and plants. The rail line across the Sierra was rerouted in 1993, and the Summit Tunnel that I wrote about in the novel was no longer in use. Although I couldn’t see it in person, I watched a YouTube video of someone hiking through the entire 1,659-foot tunnel. It’s covered with graffiti and looks haunted even in daytime.
Your characters move through the vast landscape of the American West and are positively heroic, battling violence, racism, and poverty. These challenges are very, very different from those faced by characters in books by the likes of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. How much, if at all, did “the western” influence your approach to creating Straw Dogs of the Universe?
I haven’t read much of “western” fiction but did watch some films and shows of the genre, such as Hell on Wheels and Deadwood. I wasn’t thrilled about their portrayal, or lack of portrayal, of Chinese immigrants. In the final season of Hell on Wheels, about railroad building across the Sierra, the male lead basically takes all the credit for what the Chinese railroad workers achieved. The few Chinese characters serve as either his romance interest, or foil, or hapless victims for him to save. The white savior trope is maintained at the expense of history. In Deadwood, the only Chinese character with a face and voice is someone who feeds dead bodies to his pigs. It seems to me the character is created not only for shock value but to fit the inscrutable-and-deceitful-“oriental” stereotypes.
So I wanted to create a different kind of western narrative, in which Chinese immigrants are front and center, rather than sidekicks seen through a white lens.
Which writers of works set in California do you admire?
Both Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain informed my novel. Among more recent works set in California, I admire Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, and Hua Hsu’s Stay True.
I also wanted to acknowledge the excellent scholarship on California that my book drew upon, especially Gordon H. Chang’s Ghosts of Gold Mountain, Jean Pfaelzer’s Driven Out, Benson Tong’s Unsubmissive Women, Wendy Rouse Jorae’s The Children of Chinatown, Julia Flynn Siler’s The White Devil’s Daughters, and Sue Fawn Chung’s Chinese in the Woods.
During the gold rush (and continuing today), California represented the promise of a new beginning, a place where through hard work, anyone could secure a better life and even make a fortune. This was rarely the case, especially for the Chinese immigrants in your novel. Why is the California dream so persistent?
Not a Californian, I feel somewhat unqualified to comment on the California dream. But from a non-Californian perspective, I suppose its persistence has to do with the allure of myth and our capacity to dream. The early Chinese immigrants called California “Gold Mountain.” Even though few made a fortune, the name lasted for decades. Even today, many Chinese people continue to call San Francisco “Old Gold Mountain.” What often endures is not the harshness of reality but the possibility of transformation. For example, I’d always known that my great-great-grandfather had built the large two-story house my father grew up in with the money he’d made overseas. It was not until I was researching for the book that my father told me he’d come to build the railroad in California, stayed for two decades, unable to start a family (possibly due to the laws banning entry of Chinese women and the anti-miscegenation laws), and returned to China. The focus of the family lore had been on the two-story house built in a hybrid East-meets-West style that sheltered the next three generations, not the hardship, the driving-out, the loneliness.
Thank you.•
Blaise Zerega is Alta Journal's editorial director. His journalism has appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio (deputy editor and part of founding team), WIRED (managing editor), the New Yorker, Forbes, and other publications. Additionally, he was the editor of Red Herring magazine, once the bible of Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, he has helped lead teams small and large to numerous honors, including multiple National Magazine Awards. He attended the United States Military Academy and New York University and received a Michener Fellowship for fiction from the Texas Center for Writers.
