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Scott Zesch, the author of the China Town War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871, relies on the records of ancestors of those connected to the massacre and court records to explain the history of the See-Yup dispute that led to the massacre of 1871. Only small number of letters and diaries still exist. They are mostly vanished over time. The author argues that it is a major problem with the research on the subject. And even the sources that still exist might be difficult to find and identify because they probably were written in Chinese. In order to explain the Asian- Anglo situation in Los Angeles, Zesch turns to examples of other cities, such as San Francisco, that had a large Asian population. This book primarily relies on two sources “Los Angeles area court record at the Huntington Library and California newspapers of that time” (p.225). Most of the narratives, comes from the court cases after the massacre. The documents, which were likely to have been translated accounts, could be inaccurate, and self-serving. People frequently relocated and it was very difficult to track them. English transcriptions of names from Chinese could also be changed based on a person transcribing the name that only added to the difficulties of findings.
Zesch’ intent is not to create a perfectly accurate history of the event, but to make readers “” less ignorant” in the words of Him Mark Lai” (p.226). The Author is filling in what life was like using information he finds about Chinese life in San Francisco. Due to the limited resources, this book reads very much like a fascinating historical novel. The author is a historian because of his use of the official and unofficial documents to connect events that took place, but he is also a historiographer because he relies so heavily on the research of Him Mark Lai whom he calls “unofficial dean of Chinese American studies” (p.225).
To give the readers a true sense of life in Los Angeles at that time, the author uses photography, pictures of advertisement, pictures of art, and posts from 1870. What including pictures do – it adds the reality to a historical novel. Picture of a notice of the rewards that sparked massacre is just an amazing evidence, and photograph of massacred bodies of victims also included in the book that create a tone for the massacre of 1871. Fascinating information found among the photograph is about Los Angeles Justice of the Peace, William H. Gray, who the local Chinese thought treated them fairly, and hid some of the potential victims in his caller (between pages 154-155).
The China Town War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871, has a great deal of similarity to Ari Kerman’s book, the Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, in collecting historical materials and comparable sources. Both authors have done an incredible work of portraying each event. In Robert Huitrado’s commentary on the Misplaced Massacre, Robert states that the author, Ari Kerman, “focuses on one event and thoroughly investigates it from multiple angles,” that is well expressed about Kerman book and it is precisely how Scott Zesch delivers the history of the event to his readers.