This week we watched a video from Newsy about the Chinese people who came to California as the Gold Rush started in the mid-19th century and helped build North America’s first transcontinental railroad. The Chinese nickname for San Francisco, Jiu Jin Shan (“Old Gold Mountain”), remains today. The issues raised by the video—immigration, pay equality, labor conditions, and whose stories get told—were alive in the 1800s and continue to figure prominently in our national conversations in 2021. Most students said they knew what it felt like to be excluded, and many expressed outrage when we compared the historical erasure of Chinese contributions to the railroad to a hypothetical Harvey Milk yearbook that only shared photos of one of the two third grade classrooms.
In the kitchen, we made lo mein, a dish that celebrates one of the great culinary inventions of all time, noodles! The third grade chefs minced the aromatics garlic and ginger and chopped an abundance of vegetables that all got thrown into a traditional Chinese high-heat cooking vessel known as a wok. Once the vegetables were cooked through, we added cooked noodles and a simple sauce of soy sauce, sesame oil, and ground white pepper. There were chopsticks available for anyone who wanted to practice. We were too deep in conversation to remember to snap any photos, but I can attest to the fact that there were many creative ways of using the chopsticks to transfer the food from plate to mouth.
