Book Review: Bitter Creek

Bitter Creek: An Epic Poem by Teow Lim Goh

Torrey House Press | $18.95 | Publishing date May 6, 2025

5 stars

This slim volume packs in history, violence, and grief in the form of an epic poem on the history of the railroad, coal mining, and Chinese workers in Wyoming. Particularly, Teow Lim Goh focuses on the decade of tension leading up to the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885. 

The Union Pacific Coal Mines faced strikes from their workers who were angry about poor working conditions, low pay, and the scams that were company stores. In response to the strikes, Union Pacific brought in Chinese workers, and tensions built, fomenting already existing anti-Chinese sentiments. Horrific violence followed. 

In the poems, Goh uses articles, letters, and historic accounts of the time, mixing historical figures with fictive characters to capture the experience of the workers, Chinese and not, along with their wives and the other people who lived in the towns. 

Bitter Creek is an epic poem that shows how workers of all races were trapped in the need to make money to support their families, how those who run the businesses rarely consider or care for those who earn money for them, and how racism created the false narrative that the Chinese, and not the men who ran the companies, were to blame for worker conditions. The fear of the other, the scarcity mindset, led to an awful massacre of Chinese people - a history that was long buried. 

There are different point of view characters, sometimes American workers, sometimes their wives, sometimes a Chinese worker, and sometimes “China Mary” a prostitute in the mining town.

In one poem, Mary remembers:

Their bodies are still buried in the rubble too dangerous to reach. Their spirits still roam this desert, lost, unable to go home

This quote captures, perhaps, the mood of the entire book: a history buried, dangerous, those dead unable to rest until their stories are told, until accountability is taken.