Bitter Creek: An Epic Poem

Bitter Creek is a lyric Chinese epic of the American west reveals devastating realities of the 1885 Rocks Spring Massacre.

In September of 1885, Chinese coal miners were killed in dozens and driven out of the town at gunpoint by the white coal miners with whom they shared the labor. Bitter Creek revisits this dark episode-known today as the Rocks Spring Massacre-revealing the stories beneath this violent, decade-long culmination of labor struggles and racial hostilities in the Union Pacific Coal Mines.

Through the eyes of the struggling railroad workers, their families, and the corporation working them to the bone, Teow Lim Goh creates an ode to buried history that blends epic tradition with modern composition and astonishing empathy to ask the question, "What turns ordinary people into monsters?"