One of L.A.’s deadliest days: Lisa See revisits the Chinese massacre of 1871 in new novel

By Emily St. Martin

In Huntington Library archives, novelist Lisa See excavates fragile court records to reimagine the 1871 Chinese Massacre at the heart of her new L.A.-set novel.
Drawing on generations of Chinatown family lore and silences, See turns China City’s vanished streets and her ancestors’ immigrant gambles into a historical fiction layered with stories of survival and belonging.
As Los Angeles plans a long-overdue memorial to the massacre amid renewed anti-Asian violence, See presses the city to confront its brutal past and remarkably diverse historic core.
Inside an unassuming room of the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles author Lisa See unfolded a stack of court records. At first glance, they looked like a centuries-old love letter. The paper had yellowed from age and the cursive was so ornate the words were hard to make out. “This is the case of the Wing Chung store,” See said. “This is where a lot of the violence happened.”

The store was run by Sam Yuen, head of one of Los Angeles’ tongs, which were secret societies made up of men from China who often dabbled in illicit activities.

The Chinese Massacre of 1871 started in the doorway. Sam Yuen’s lawsuit against the mayor wasn’t the only record that told the story of what became known as the “Night of Horrors.” While researching her latest novel, “Daughters of the Sun and Moon,” See pored over documents to uncover the cultural mood of the city leading up to the night when a mob of roughly 500 white and Latino Angelenos attacked the city’s Chinese residents and its aftermath. She discovered detailed cases of sex trafficking, kidnapping, torture, robberies, gunfights, lynchings and more. The City of Angels — or Lo Sang — was the deadliest city in not only the Wild West, but the country. Even now, the Chinese Massacre is considered the largest mass lynching in the state’s history.

“The official death count would be 18, although that didn’t include the tong assassin killed while eating a bowl of noodles, Butterfly — the woman who was entrusted to a man named Curly Crenshaw to be taken to the safety of the jail but was never seen again — or others who crawled away to die or whose deaths were hidden from the authorities,” See wrote in the novel (using Butterfly’s fictional name although the event was entirely nonfiction).

This isn’t See’s first time digging through archives to interrogate the truth of the place where her great-grandparents Fong See and Letticie Pruett settled in 1897. More than 30 years ago, her first book, “On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family,” debuted with a splash and became a national bestseller. Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times.