A new choral work seeks to bring to life the history of the forced expulsion of a few hundred Chinese immigrants from a coastal Northern California town in 1885.
The Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir will present the world premiere of Eric Tuan’s Echoes of Eureka on April 12 at First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley as part of the ensemble’s annual Making History Concert. Tuan, a composer and Bay Area native who grew up singing in PEBCC, is in his sixth season as the group’s artistic director.
The seven-movement work, which is billed by the choir as an opera but won’t include costumes or a set in this performance, tells the true story of 18-year-old “Charley” Wei Lum, who was one of about 300 Chinese residents chased out of Eureka by a violent mob and forced onto steamships headed to San Francisco’s Chinatown.
“Unfortunately, the piece has gotten more and more relevant over the course of the two years that I’ve been writing it,” Tuan said. “The xenophobia and the fear of immigration that are expressed [by its characters] are very eerily similar [to current politics].”
During the composing process, Tuan pored over census records, newspaper clippings, old advertisements, archival photographs, and other historical documents, as well as consulted with historians Jean Pfaelzer and Alex Service and the community group Humboldt Asians & Pacific Islanders in Solidarity, which currently runs the Eureka Chinatown Project.
He also visited Eureka and took a walking tour of the city’s erased Chinatown. For the libretto, he collaborated with author Emily Jiang, who wrote the fifth movement’s text, along with local poet Daryl Ngee Chinn, whose poem “The Water Book of Questions” is prominently featured in the fourth movement. The whole project was partially funded by a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Eureka expulsion was triggered when a stray bullet fatally struck a white councilman on Feb. 6, 1885. Two Chinese men, said to be in a dispute with each other, were blamed for the shoot-out. That night, an angry crowd marched through downtown Eureka, demanding Chinatown be burned and calling for every Chinese resident to be rounded up and killed. To avoid mass bloodshed, city leaders ordered the Chinese residents to leave Eureka or be hanged, giving them a deadline of 3 p.m. the next day to board one of two ships and never return.
But long before the councilman’s accidental death, anti-Chinese sentiment in the city had been brewing. Chinese people were convenient scapegoats amid a national economic downturn, as Tuan explained, and were often blamed for taking away jobs (by working for lower wages) and also for bringing in crime, gangs, and disease. By this time, the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had already taken effect.
Neighboring cities, including Tacoma, Washington, soon followed Eureka’s lead in driving out their Chinese residents.
Lum’s story of barely escaping a lynching thanks to the help of a sympathetic clergyman was documented in the journal of the Rev. Charles Huntington, who had converted the young man to Christianity.
Tuan, who first learned of the incident while reading Pfaelzer’s book Driven Out, said he hoped setting the story to music would bring “forgotten history to life.” Social justice has been a running theme in his recent compositions, which include a choral work based on his grandmother’s tales of surviving the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and another choral piece that highlights the experiences of refugees.
Echoes of Eureka also highlights a lesser-known piece of history: the displaced Chinese residents’ efforts to fight back by filing a group lawsuit, Wing Hing v. the City of Eureka (1886), in which they argued that they should be paid reparations because the city failed to protect them from race riots. These efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, but the case still holds a place in U.S. history as one of the first lawsuits for reparations.
After premiering the piece in Berkeley, PEBCC plans to head to Humboldt County next month for three more performances — including one on May 3 at the Eureka Chinatown Street Festival, where the student musicians will sing at the very spot where the purging took place over 140 years ago. And later in 2025, the choir intends to take the work abroad, with performances lined up in Finland and Estonia.
