Bitter Creek: A Chinese Epic of the American West
When we think of epic poetry, the Iliad and the Odyssey immediately come to mind. For many of us in the English-speaking world, these two ancient Greek poems that tell the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath are so embedded in our culture that their characters, symbols, and metaphors have become part of our lexicon. Think of Achilles heels and Trojan horses. Think of the concepts of the virile hero and the rightful home that Odysseus and Ithaca represent. If we remain in the ancient world, the epic also calls up Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and the Aeneid. In more modern times, we have Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. What these canonical works of Western epic have in common is that they tell stories of heroic deeds of ancient gods and god-like men.
As such, as a culture we tend to think of epic as grand and lengthy narratives of heroic quests that surpass our mortal worlds, or, to quote Penelope in the Odyssey, “enchantments of mortals, deeds of men and gods, those things that singers memorialize.” In recent decades, however, studies have shown that many cultures outside of the Western tradition have their own epic tales, from the Mayan Popol Vuh to the Persian Shahnameh, from the Indian Ramayana to the Kenyan Tambuka. They bear resemblances to but also depart from the Western tradition, suggesting that the epic arose not so much from influence but from a shared human impulse. Scholars such as John Miles Foley and Frederick Turner propose that the epic ultimately tells the origin story of a people or culture.
A decade ago, I had the idea to write about the massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming. On September 2, 1885, a dispute between two white and two Chinese miners in the Union Pacific coal mines escalated into a fight in which one of the Chinese men was stabbed in the skull. The white miners then walked off the job, went home for their guns and knives, and marched into Chinatown, ordering the Chinese to leave and shooting at them as they tried to flee. At the end of the day, the mob set fire to Chinatown, burning to death many of the Chinese who were hiding in their cellars. At least 28 Chinese men were murdered that day. Many more fled into the hills with little more than the clothes on their backs.
As a poet, my tendency has been to write from moments of emotional intensity. I am partial to the persona poem that delves into the subterranean emotions driving the forces of history. In addition, there are no known letters, journals, or similar records of the everyday lives of the Chinese who worked in the railroads and mines of the Old West. In this context, the persona poem becomes a vehicle for me to imagine their lived experience, center their perspectives, and honor their agency and humanity. I draw on facts and research to construct the shapes of their lives, but the incidental details and their inner worlds are often fleshed out from my imagination. This psychologizing, coupled with the lyric-narrative free verse form, is a decidedly modern impulse—one that has served me well until I tried to write this story.
The Rock Springs Massacre was part of a wave of anti-Chinese violence in the Old West in the years before and after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was also the culmination of a decade of labor struggles in the Union Pacific coal mines: in 1875, the Union Pacific brought Chinese workers from California to Wyoming to break a strike. The Union Pacific, in turn, was on the brink of bankruptcy, brought on by corruption, mismanagement, and bad luck. The first time I tried to write this story, I created a lyric series of moments from not only the lives of the Chinese miners, but also the white miners, their families, the Union Pacific officials, and even robber barons such as Jay Gould and Leland Stanford. I wanted to explore how each of these characters acted in accordance with their beliefs, interests, and circumstances, how their competing worldviews added up to one of the worst racial riots in American history.
This polyvocal and fragmented approach gave me great latitude to balance social forces with individual psychology and explore the extremes of human experience. It also enabled me to contend with the humanity of the perpetrators, the white miners striving for better lives, the railroad managers who needed to save their own skins for the sake of their families. In doing so, I could ask how ordinary people turn into monsters, a question central to many struggles for justice past and present. But the modern lyric poem tends to be founded on sound and image. It can be privy to our deepest selves, but I also wanted to tell a story of actions and consequences. I needed a narrative strategy to tie these lyric fragments into a coherent story and convey the sweep of this history.
I tend to write from intuition rather than design. I put this project aside for a few years, telling myself that I did not quite have the literary or life experiences that I needed to write the book. Along the way, I was drawn to the epic tradition and saw that I could use it as a scaffolding—in terms of both genre and narrative structure—for this work. The roots of the Rock Springs Massacre can be traced to the construction of the transcontinental railroad, which in turn was a product of Manifest Destiny and the frontier ethos. The first Chinese to come to the US in large numbers worked on the Central Pacific, blasting rock and laying track through the hard granite of the Sierra. This earned them the enmity of the whites, setting the nation on the path to Chinese exclusion. I saw that in writing this book, I had to critique the dominant myths of the American West and that I was also writing an origin story for the Chinese in America.
In fact, I already had many elements of an epic in place in that draft. The hero, so to speak, is a Chinese miner who longs to reunite with his wife and children after two decades abroad. He comes to America after his father passes away and is constantly worried about money. I tell his story through his letters to his wife, which creates a deliberate slant of intimacy and withholding. Unlike the god-like hero of the epic tradition, I made him a fallible man: as race relations in Rock Springs come to a boil in 1884 and 1885, he keeps telling his wife that he would go home once he has made enough money. At the same time, he is resigned to his fate, indulging in opium and prostitutes instead. His quest is to return home, but I’m not giving away too much by saying he does not make it: he loses everything but his life in the massacre and must start all over again.
Most epics employ the same meter throughout the work: dactylic hexameter in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Old English alliterative meter in Beowulf, terza rima in the Divine Comedy. They are also often narrated in the omniscient third person, conveying actions, setting, and dialogue, the parts of the story that is exteriorized. They give little insight into what the characters are thinking and feeling, portraying instead what is plainly visible, the twitch that evokes fear or the flying arrows of rage. I saw that I could use this epic narrative structure to depict episodes in which people came together to clash or celebrate, such as the joining of the rails at Promontory Point, the Denver Chinatown riot, and the Rock Springs Massacre itself. I think of these passages as narrative connective tissues, transmuting the facts into cinematic scenes and conveying this history in a journalistic style. But I could not sustain it for a book-length work. I still wanted to delve into the lyric self.
I developed a strategy that blends elements of the ancient epic traditions with modern lyric practices, framing the lyric moments of emotional intensity with narrative, epic-style passages. The narrative pieces are told in the omniscient third person, while the lyric poems are in the first, second, or close third person. The only characters I follow throughout the book are the Chinese miner and a Chinese prostitute loosely based on a real-life woman who lived in Evanston; the white miners and railroad officers appear in flashes. As a whole, the narrative is not linear, jumping between characters, forms, and styles. I arrange the poems chronologically, stamping each poem with a date and place. I organize these poems into sections that are akin to the “books” in traditional epic verse, each with its own internal arc, and bookend them with prologue and epilogue poems.
At one point in the writing of Bitter Creek, I thought of its structure as a kind of orchestration, a multiplicity of voices, forms, and styles coming together to give voice to something larger than each of them could do on their own. I saw the narrative passages, which I wrote mostly in blank verse, as the bass line, while the intimate first-person voice of the Chinese prostitute was the soprano solo. Like I have said, I tend to work from intuition rather than design, and when I completed the manuscript, I saw that I also had plenty of sonnets, mostly unrhymed and not always in an accentual-syllabic meter, as well as couplets. These forms are not tied to any one character, group, or subject matter, but rather used across the work as my instincts called for them.
Early on, I made the decision to draw on the English prosodic tradition. The central reason is practical: English is the only language in which I have fluency. It is the language that shapes my dreams and thoughts. In addition, Chinese poetry does not have a strong epic tradition or epic meter to speak of. The classic novels that could be considered Chinese epics, such as Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, were written in prose. And I would argue that a five-beat line is the closest English approximation to the five-character line in classical Chinese lyric poetry. Each character corresponds to a syllable. Unlike in many Western languages, there are almost no non-lexical words in Chinese, which means that each syllable has the gravity and import of a stressed syllable in English. As such, I felt that in using iambic pentameter as the metrical base of this work, I was also giving a nod to the Chinese poetic line.
The opening poem is a sonnet in the voice of the Chinese miner, who is then a laborer on the Central Pacific:
Chinese Camp
December 1866
Donner Pass, California
Winter has fallen on us again.
I crawl into my shed in the snow
and curl under my blankets in pain.
All day I shovel as the winds blow.
At night I pray the drifts will not crack
and collapse, carrying me as they mow
down the mountain and breaking my back.
I left a wife and two boys to come
to America, where I lay track,
blast rock, and I try not to succumb
to the ghosts that visit me at night.
Some days I have to make myself numb
and blunt my vision of greater heights.
And I have lost the spirit to fight.
This poem began as an experiment in writing terza rima in syllabics. But I liked what I wrote and saw it was the beginning I needed for the book. In writing terza rima, I was invoking Dante’s epic descent into the underworld; here is it both the literal underground of tunnels and mines as well as the hell of an exploitative system. Donner Pass, the location of the Summit Tunnel, is named for the snowbound wagon party that reportedly cannibalized their dead in the winter of 1846-1847. And in restraining the Chinese miner’s voice into the interlocking rhymes of a decidedly non-Chinese form, I highlight the foreignness of his experience: he turns to a form alien to his culture in order to speak of it. I compress these epic ideas into a lyric form—fourteen lines of terza rima make a sonnet—and thus signal my intention to blend the genres.
In the middle of the book, especially in the poems on the labor struggles on the Union Pacific system in 1884 and 1885, the blank verse and sonnets of the early sections disintegrate into couplets. I did not realize that I was doing this until an early reader pointed it out, but once I saw it, I began to think about its formal and cultural implications. Here is one of the poems, situated right after the union leader in Denver tells Colorado coal miners that on the first day he looks out of the window and sees snow on the mountains, he will order the strike:
Winter Storm
October 1884
Louisville, Colorado
Winds slam down from the mountains so hard
that even the birds struggle to fly.
The sky is still clear, the air warm at dawn.
Autumn leaves, dried up and ready to drop,
whip into a steady rumble on the trees.
He grips his lunch pail and shields his face
as he walks right into a squall.
At the bathhouse, he shivers as he changes
into a light shirt and his boots.
Ten hours later, as he leaves the mine,
dark clouds begin to gather on the plains.
In the dusk light, he sees the peaks
blue in the distance are streaked with snow.
At this point in the story, the social fabric is on the verge of breaking down and the couplets enact a similar effect in the movement of the verse. And there is a significant tradition of parallel couplets in Chinese lyric poetry. My couplets are by no means a strict interpretation of the Chinese forms, but in using this form to portray the plight of the white miners, I am also suggesting that the lives of the white and Chinese miners were more intertwined than they would have liked to acknowledge. Deep in the coal mines of the lonesome West, their fates were inextricable from each other.
The dominant story of the American West is that Anglo-European pioneers and settlers tamed the wild and uninhabited continent one 160-acre homestead at a time. Their ingenuity and industry are celebrated as uniquely American virtues, touted in movies, books, and political speeches. In many ways, this conquest of the West is an epic narrative, a foundational story used to justify the power and dominance of the United States, with the charismatic cowboy as its epic hero. But this story elides and often misrepresents the realities on the ground. The indigenous people are rendered invisible or recast as the invaders. The Hispanics in the borderlands are stereotyped as peasants or bandits, thought of as Mexican rather than American. The Chinese who built the railroads are all but forgotten. And the West was won with the might of railroad corporations, banks, and politicians.
In Bitter Creek, I reframe the origin story of the American West to center the Chinese workers and honor their struggles and achievements. It is tempting to situate these Chinese workers as pioneers who provided the heroic physical labor that made the West possible, an origin story to bolster Asian-Americans’ justified demands for recognition and equality, but this argument echoes the rhetoric of settler colonialism and suggests it is only in proximity to empire that we can gain acceptance. And such acquiescence does not insure safety, for racial violence is rooted in a primal fear of the other that can be deftly stoked into rage during times of terrifying change and uncertainty. Rather, at the heart of the Rock Springs Massacre is a profound conflict in origin stories, propagating a nightmare from which there could be no return.
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Excerpted from Bitter Creek. Used with permission of the publisher, Torrey House Press. Copyright © 2025 by Teow Lim Goh.
“Chinese Camp” first appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal. “Winter Storm” first appeared in Quarterly West.
Adapted from a talk delivered at the John R. Milton Writers Conference in September 2021.
Teow Lim Goh is the author of three poetry collections, Islanders (2016), Faraway Places (2021), and Bitter Creek (2025). Her essay collection Western Journeys (2022) was a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, High Country News, and The New Yorker.