Assignment 10 [Canadian Railroad] <33

I found lots of information, and i decided to do my assignment number 10 on a Chinese boy living in the U.S.A. grieving over the loss of his father who helped work on the Canadian Railroad. This video shows what it was like, this site is a really great place to get a good, detailed, definition of what happened.This site has a brief description of a Chinese workers life.

Dear Diary, Sept 8, 1897

My Mother used to tell me stories, about how her mother was one of the first Asians to move to the United states. In the United States, she owned a restaurant, called "The Chef's Delight", I had never seen it, nor tasted the food, but I've heard it was the best. About a year after success with the restaurant, it was taken away. In 1880, my father and I had moved to the States, to work on the Canadian Railroad. I was about 12 years old. I didn't understand anything that was happening, all I knew was that my father worked on the Canadian Railroad. Whenever I asked him why we didn't just move back to China, he would never answer me, and I knew not to ask it again, so for the next couple of years, i got used to life working on the Canadian Railroad in British Columbia.

As i got older, I began to understand that everyday when my father and I went to work, we were risking our lives, but we didn't have a choice, because the Americans thought that we were trying to steal their jobs, and they didn't like us. I also realized that Andrew Onderdonk, the contractor who was hired to build the Canadian Railroad from Port Moody through Fraser Canyon didn't want to give us jobs, but British Columbia had a labour shortage. We were given the most dangerous tasks, we were the ones who were risking our lives, just for the low-payment we got. It wasn't just us, it was all of the Chinese workers who were there, 9 out of 10 of those workers were Chinese, and the white men who did work there, didn't get jobs which were as dangerous as ours, and a Chinese man's salary's was half of the white man's salary. I couldn't even see my father for most of the time, because he was always doing a more dangerous job than I was, and I was with most of the boys my age. Each month, the cost of food was 15 to 18 dollars, and we only earned 35 dollars a month each, sometimes less, and we were the ones who even slept there overnight, and the only thing to keep us warm was a fire. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was to make sure there wouldn't be too much hard labour.

It's 1897, and my father died in the year 1884, he was blowing up a mountain, and he couldn't get away from the explosion fast enough, I remember how hard it was for me to see his body on the ground, and to realize that my father was actually gone, he's not here anymore, I'm just glad to know that this railroad is finally done, and people don't have to go through what i did.

- Lee Fang