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Scott Zesch’s book tells the largely forgotten history of what occurred in Los Angeles on October 21, 1871 in which eighteen Chinese men were killed by an angry mob comprised of non-Asians. The incident was in retaliation for the shooting of one Robert Thompson by Chinese thugs. Zesch gives a detailed, hour-by-hour breakdown of what occurred that night. Fifteen men were hanged and another three were fatally shot, and mostly all of them were innocent Chinese who were unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Zesch uses the Chinatown Massacre of 1871 as the backdrop for a larger discussion regarding the early history of the Chinese in Southern California. Zesch discusses the first Chinese immigrants to Los Angeles, and how they made their lives and settled into the rough, difficult society of the city. Of certain importance to Zesch’s book is his discussion of the Chinese “tongs” and huiguans, which were groups or organizations of Chinese, some legitimate and legal and some being criminal in nature. Zesch also details the issue of Chinese prostitution and marriage practices, both of which were central to the outbreak of violence.
As beirne points out (in his nicely titled post), Zesch’s book is titled The Chinatown War, because it details a much longer time period than just that fateful night. He breaks his book into two parts, with the first part detailing the establishment of a Chinese population in Los Angeles around 1850 and continues up to the night of the massacre. The second part details the massacre itself and the ramifications that ensued. Zesch argues that the general lawlessness and violence of wild west era Los Angeles that the Chinese moved into shaped and influenced how the Chinese developed and reacted to their new surroundings. Prior to the massacre, in fact, much of the violence presented is between the Chinese themselves. This is not to say that the Chinese were not persecuted and faced racism on a daily basis, they most certainly did. However, the very act that kicked off the events resulting in the massacre was the killing of one Chinese man at the hands of another Chinese man from a rival organization (P. 121).
I found vannoyj’s comments of Zesch’s book quite interesting. As others have noted, Zesch is an independent scholar, and it seems to me that he clearly wrote this book with a general audience in mind. However, I did not find his sentence structure confusing. In fact, I found it quite streamlined and I believe it to be the easiest to read of the books we have covered thus far. However, I found vannoyj’s assessment of Zesch’s discussion of women in his book to ring quite true, for the most part. For the Chinese women in the sex trade in Los Angeles at this time, I think the argument that they are given no voice or agency a compelling one. There are only a few instances where Chinese women are given a voice and a surprising degree of agency. This is mainly realized in Chinese women’s (and Chinese men for that matter) to pursue legal options. This is illustrated in the event in which the widow of one of the men killed in the massacre had the sad distinction of being the first Chinese women to lodge a criminal complaint in Los Angeles in which she accused another Chinese man of inciting a mob resulting in her husband’s death (P. 163).