Daily Press

Review: A powerful look at 'The Chinatown War'

The Chinatown War
Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871

Scott Zesch
Oxford University Press: 272 pp., $29.95











Rumors about Chinese gunmen killing white men spread quickly through the town. As the sun went down, hundreds of white men armed with guns gathered on Calle de los Negros in the heart of the Chinese settlement, a now-nonexistent street near the southeastern corner of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument. According to one estimate, the mob swelled to 500 men, about one out of every 10 in the town's population.

In an eerie precursor to the role of police during the Los Angeles riots 121 years later, a small number of law enforcement officers in 1871 tried to break up the shooting among the Chinese and then tried to protect the Chinese against the rampaging mob. But, Zesch shows, the "thin blue line" was insufficient to maintain order against the mob, in 1871 as in 1992.

A horrific sequence of atrocities ensued, uncomfortable to read even 140 years later and impossible to summarize here. Eighteen people were killed that night, some shot, some lynched, all of them Chinese.

Near the end of his powerful account of a largely forgotten incident in our city's history, Zesch asks whether the right lessons have been learned. He argues that the 1871 massacre may have marked the end of mob justice in Los Angeles. But Zesch attributes this milestone primarily to improved law enforcement, not to the better angels of our nature taming our impulse to scapegoat, pander and pick up a gun.

Woo, dean of the College of Environmental Design at Cal Poly Pomona, was the first (and only) Chinese American elected to the Los Angeles City Council.

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