{"id":356090,"date":"2026-06-11T10:49:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T10:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/356090\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T10:49:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T10:49:13","slug":"lisa-sees-new-novel-revisits-the-chinese-massacre-of-1871","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/356090\/","title":{"rendered":"Lisa See\u2019s new novel revisits the Chinese massacre of 1871"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Inside an unassuming room of the Huntington Library<\/a>, 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. \u201cThis is the case of the Wing Chun store,\u201d See said. \u201cThis is where a lot of the violence happened.\u201d <\/p>\n

The store was run by Sam Yuen, head of one of Los Angeles\u2019 tongs, which were secret societies made up of men from China who often dabbled in illicit activities. <\/p>\n

The Chinese Massacre of 1871<\/a> started in the doorway. Sam Yuen\u2019s lawsuit against the mayor wasn\u2019t the only record that told the story of what became known as the \u201cNight of Horrors.\u201d While researching her latest novel, \u201cDaughters of the Sun and Moon,\u201d<\/a> 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\u2019s Chinese residents and its aftermath. She discovered detailed cases of sex trafficking, kidnapping, torture, robberies, gunfights, lynchings and more. The City of Angels \u2014 or Lo Sang \u2014 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\u2019s history. <\/p>\n

On the Shelf <\/p>\n

Daughters of the Sun and Moon<\/p>\n

By Lisa See
Scribner: 384 pages, $32<\/p>\n

If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org<\/a>, whose fees support independent bookstores.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe official death count would be 18, although that didn\u2019t include the tong assassin killed while eating a bowl of noodles, Butterfly \u2014 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 \u2014 or others who crawled away to die or whose deaths were hidden from the authorities,\u201d See wrote in the novel. <\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t See\u2019s 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, \u201cOn Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family,<\/a>\u201d debuted with a splash and became a national bestseller. <\/p>\n

In her 2009 historical novel \u201cShanghai Girls<\/a>,\u201d See brought L.A.\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\""Daughters <\/p>\n

\u201cDaughters of the Sun and Moon\u201d by Lisa See<\/p>\n

(Scribner)<\/p>\n

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\u2019 antique shop, F. Suie One Co<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where I spent so much time, in this last remaining piece of China City,\u201d she said. \u201cI wanted to write about it before the last brick disappeared, before it was erased off the map of memory.\u201d <\/p>\n

See said she felt that same impulse with \u201cDaughters of the Sun and Moon.\u201d She wants people to know about the history. \u201cNot a lot of people do,\u201d she said, adding that that\u2019s changing with a memorial in the works. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s Civic Memory Working Group<\/a>, impaneled by former Mayor Eric Garcetti, was taking a closer look at L.A.\u2019s monuments, and where they were lacking. <\/p>\n

See was asked to join forces and help the city explore its broader history. Most of the group\u2019s meetings were held at the Pico House, L.A.\u2019s first three-story luxury hotel, built in 1870. The view from the window flooded See with memories from her childhood. <\/p>\n

\"Author <\/p>\n

Author Lisa See.<\/p>\n

(Ariana Drehsler \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandmother would take me for a walk, and we\u2019d stop into the butcher and the international grocery,\u201d See said. \u201cSometimes 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\u2019s a gazebo now, it was just a grassy knoll back then.<\/p>\n

See\u2019s grandmother would tell her stories of the family\u2019s store, her grandfather\u2019s restaurant and how they\u2019d lived in the basement when See\u2019s dad was a teenager. \u201cWhat my grandmother never mentioned was that it was just a literal stone\u2019s throw from where the massacre had begun,\u201d she said. \u201cDid she not tell me because she didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cDaughters of the Sun and Moon,\u201d Dove, Petal and Moon arrive in \u201cthe dirty, dusty, violent streets of Los Angeles.\u201d 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 \u201cWorthless Girl\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

\"Resident <\/p>\n

Resident of Los Angeles Chinatown, from the Lisa See Collection at the Huntington Library.<\/p>\n

(The Lisa See Collection, The Huntington Library)<\/p>\n

\u201cLos Angeles was just a little pueblo of five thousand inhabitants,\u201d Moon writes in the book, recalling the early days of the city, before the Night of Horrors. \u201cWe Chinese made up a tiny part of the population\u2014only 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

Despite their dramatically different standing in Chinatown\u2019s social strata, the women form an unlikely bond. By narrating the lives of a sex worker, a merchant\u2019s young bride and the wife of a doctor \u2014 all based on real historical figures \u2014 See said she can explore the varying realities of early Chinese immigrant women. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy great-grandfather\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

See\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

And while the women of Chinatown\u2019s faraway past may have daydreamed and even plotted their escapes, See keeps going back. <\/p>\n

\u201cI do feel a connection to that place \u2014 where my family came, why they felt it was safe for them, and how against all odds you plant roots,\u201d See said. <\/p>\n

\u201cHere 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\u2019t appreciate the diversity of what\u2019s in this square mile.\u201d<\/p>\n

See said she expects the Chinese Massacre memorial will be unveiled ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be pretty spectacular,\u201d she said, between sips of green tea as families and friends strolled the Huntington\u2019s Chinese Garden behind her. \u201cVery moving.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Inside an unassuming room of the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles author Lisa See unfolded a stack of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3573,13005,145095,145094,1409,9342,418,2303,48,52,51,1637,49005,47,50,49,63,11482,1869,592,1557],"class_list":["post-356090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-china","tag-chinatown","tag-chinese-massacre","tag-chinese-american-family","tag-city","tag-daughter","tag-history","tag-l-a","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-life","tag-lisa-see","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-moon","tag-night","tag-people","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}