Lisa See’s new novel revisits the Chinese massacre of 1871

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 Chun 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.

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.

In her 2009 historical novel “Shanghai Girls,” See brought L.A.’s Chinatown of yore to life again, following sisters Pearl and May, who leave their lives as models in pre-World War II Shanghai when their gambling father sells them into arranged marriages. The two move to China City, a one-square-block attraction built from Hollywood film sets and surrounded by a miniature Great Wall.

A decade after it was opened, most of China City was lost in a fire, but one major building remained. It was there that See grew up, exploring the nooks and crannies of her grandparents’ antique shop, F. Suie One Co.

“That’s where I spent so much time, in this last remaining piece of China City,” she said. “I wanted to write about it before the last brick disappeared, before it was erased off the map of memory.”

See said she felt that same impulse with “Daughters of the Sun and Moon.” She wants people to know about the history. “Not a lot of people do,” she said, adding that that’s changing with a memorial in the works.

In the fall of 2021, when COVID-19 infection rates were still alarmingly high and pandemic-fueled xenophobia led to a spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans, officials in L.A. were tasked with erecting a proper memorial of the city’s darker history. It had been 150 years since the massacre, and the 1871 Steering Committee, a team of civic and cultural leaders coordinating with the city’s Civic Memory Working Group, impaneled by former Mayor Eric Garcetti, was taking a closer look at L.A.’s monuments, and where they were lacking.

See was asked to join forces and help the city explore its broader history. Most of the group’s meetings were held at the Pico House, L.A.’s first three-story luxury hotel, built in 1870. The view from the window flooded See with memories from her childhood.

Author Lisa See.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

“My grandmother would take me for a walk, and we’d stop into the butcher and the international grocery,” See said. “Sometimes we would walk through Olvera Street into the plaza, and she would point out where my great-grandparents had settled in 1897. Right on that corner, where there’s a gazebo now, it was just a grassy knoll back then.

See’s grandmother would tell her stories of the family’s store, her grandfather’s restaurant and how they’d lived in the basement when See’s dad was a teenager. “What my grandmother never mentioned was that it was just a literal stone’s throw from where the massacre had begun,” she said. “Did she not tell me because she didn’t know? Did she not tell me because it was dark? Did she not tell me because it was still kind of shameful? But one thing I know is that my great-great-grandparents came here to Los Angeles in part because of what had happened.”

In “Daughters of the Sun and Moon,” Dove, Petal and Moon arrive in “the dirty, dusty, violent streets of Los Angeles.” Dove is the bound-foot daughter of an imperial scholar who came to the city to become one of the locked-away wives of a decades-older merchant. Petal, nicknamed “Worthless Girl” by her family, is the daughter of peasants who is sold into sex slavery by her parents. And Moon is the wife of a respected local doctor of traditional Chinese medicine.

Resident of Los Angeles Chinatown, from the Lisa See Collection at the Huntington Library.

(The Lisa See Collection, The Huntington Library)

“Los Angeles was just a little pueblo of five thousand inhabitants,” Moon writes in the book, recalling the early days of the city, before the Night of Horrors. “We Chinese made up a tiny part of the population—only 179 souls, 34 of us women, and 1 child. I was the twenty-second Chinese woman to arrive, and I remember clearly counting each new woman as she appeared.”

Despite their dramatically different standing in Chinatown’s social strata, the women form an unlikely bond. By narrating the lives of a sex worker, a merchant’s young bride and the wife of a doctor — all based on real historical figures — See said she can explore the varying realities of early Chinese immigrant women.

“My great-grandfather’s fourth wife was 16 when he brought her here, and she was never let out. She was not allowed out on the street, but when it was a funeral, or a wedding, or one-month birthday, my mom used to say these women would all get together, and she used to describe it as birds twittering together, because they actually had this opportunity to be with each other, but on really very rare occasions.”

See’s great-grandfather lived to 100 years old, but when he died, his much-younger wife finally had the freedom to go out. According to See, she became a big gambler and loved trips to Las Vegas.

And while the women of Chinatown’s faraway past may have daydreamed and even plotted their escapes, See keeps going back.

“I do feel a connection to that place — where my family came, why they felt it was safe for them, and how against all odds you plant roots,” See said.

“Here we are four generations later, and yet … the history of that area, right in the historic core, is so layered. You have the Indigenous peoples, you have people from Spain, people from Mexico, the oldest Croatian church in the state is right near there, and Little Tokyo not far. We just don’t appreciate the diversity of what’s in this square mile.”

See said she expects the Chinese Massacre memorial will be unveiled ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. “It’s going to be pretty spectacular,” she said, between sips of green tea as families and friends strolled the Huntington’s Chinese Garden behind her. “Very moving.”