Reading Sue Fawn Chung’s Chinese in the Woods: Logging and Lumbering in the American West, I was reminded for the first time in decades of my family road trip from San Francisco to Eureka, California. In Eureka, an old logging town, I recall eating too much at the Samoa Cookhouse with its long tables and family-style meals. (In fact, I did not remember the exact name, but a quick Google search found it.) However, I cannot imagine (and do not remember) any representations of Chinese workers on the walls in this now tourist-focused cookhouse.

In her new book, Chung reinserts Chinese workers into this western landscape, and she makes a case for the importance of the nineteenth-century lumber industry, which can be overshadowed by railroads and mining. Chung argues that Chinese workers participated in every aspect of the timber industry. She also argues that compared to Chinese workers in...

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