Tag: Transcontinental Railroad

Television4 Comments

Hell on Wheels: Chinamen, The Final Frontier

Ren Hsieh

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched through Episode 6 this season, there are some character revelations and minor plot twists revealed, but ostensibly nothing that would alter anyone’s viewing of the show.

AMC’s Hell on Wheels entered its fifth and final season this summer with seven episodes scheduled to finish in 2015 and seven more in 2016 to close it out. The show follows a former Confederate solider, Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), as he reconciles his dark past while becoming a key player in the race to build the Transcontinental Railroad.

Admittedly, I have never been a regular viewer of the show. I only tuned in for this season after hearing that Hell would finally include Chinese railroad workers as part of its story; and not without some healthy skepticism. Chinese workers have been mostly glossed over in mainstream media depictions of the western frontier and they got the same treatment through Hell‘s first four seasons. While the show’s creators Joe and Tony Gayton gave practical reasons as to why this happened, the chances of whether the Chinese would ever be included on the show seemed less promising with each passing season.

Season Five, however, has been worth the wait.

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Conventions, Television12 Comments

Is AMC Finally Embracing Diversity This Fall?

Keith Chow

It’s hard to believe it’s already been a week since Comic-Con started, but here we are in that post-Con daze, and I’m still recovering. While I might need some more time before getting back into regularly scheduled posting, I didn’t want to leave before I comment on a couple of the trailers that came out of SDCC. No, not this one or that one. Instead, I want to focus on the early looks that came out of the AMC presentations and how the network is kicking off the post-Don Draper era by seemingly embracing diversity in the casts of its newest shows.

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Art, Comics2 Comments

Building America by Ming Doyle

Keith Chow

Last September, I mentioned how I was honored to coordinate and edit a digital comic in conjunction with the Smithsonian‘s touring “I Want the Wide American Earth” Asian American history exhibit.

(And once again, many thanks to Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis and Konrad Ng for allowing me to be part of such an honor).

This morning, in a ceremony at the U.S. Department of Labor, Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez officially inducted thousands of 19th century Chinese railroad workers into the Labor Hall of Honor. I wanted to share Ming Doyle‘s contribution to the Smithsonian project. Titled “Building America,” Ming‘s piece depicts the Asian Americans who risked their lives to connect the Transcontinental Railroad between 1865 and 1869.

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