The Traitor
This is an excellent but quite upsetting book about an actual event that took place in 1885 in Wyoming, the massacre of a bunch of Chinese immigrants by white men.
The fiction part concerns two boys, Michael Purdy and Joseph Young. Joseph is of oriental ancestry, but was born in the US. Michael is white, but his mother and father never married, technically making him a bastard, and as such he's considered an outcast by the rest of the townspeople. Joseph is hated by most of the whites because he is Chinese, and therein lies the basis of the entire story, the incredible hatred for the Chinese that the whites had at the time.
The Chinese were involved in working on mines (in this area; in other places they were working on the railroads), and they became targets of hatred with many of the themes being used that we hear today against other immigrants, that they are “stealing our jobs” being the main attack used. In this case, though, the attacks go far beyond the verbal, all the way to murder.
Michael and Joseph end up becoming friends, and how that happens is well written. Also well written is the lives of those around Michael and Joseph, where the characters become quite real and the events draw the reader in.
Below are some newspaper articles about the actual event. The first one is from the Yates Country Chronicle (NY), Sept. 9, 1885. The next one is from The Morning Review, (Ill). October 7, 1885, and the last one is from The Athens Messenger of March 11, 1886, all three articles showing that the events depicted in this story really happened.
It's a story of racial hatred, something which the US has always seemed to have a great deal of. The anti-Oriental feelings led to various laws limiting and stopping immigration. Persons of Japanese ancestry, even those born in the US, and that were living on the West Coast were rounded up in World War II and put into internment camps, with no charges and no trials being used. For a long time in relatively recent times that hatred was directed against persons of Hispanic origin, although now persons of Middle Eastern/Arab origin have become the targets of racial hatred.
Books like this one are very important for young readers, because if we can get young people to realize the viciousness and uselessness of racial hatred then, perhaps, they will grow up into adults that lack those types of feelings. This is definitely a good book, although some of the massacre scenes might be a little graphic for some readers.
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