L.A.s deadliest day: Lisa See revisits the Chinese massacre of 1871 in new novel

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Inside an unassuming room of the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles author Lisa See unfolded a stack of court records.At first glance, they looked like a centuries-old love letter.

The paper had yellowed from age and the cursive was so ornate the words were hard to make out.“This is the case of the Wing Chun store,” See said.

“This is where a lot of the violence happened.” The store was run by Sam Yuen, head of one of Los Angeles’ tongs, which were secret societies made up of men from China who often dabbled in illicit activities.The Chinese Massacre of 1871 started in the doorway.

Sam Yuen’s lawsuit against the mayor wasn’t the only record that told the story of what became known as the “Night of Horrors.” While researching her latest novel, “Daughters of the Sun and Moon,” See pored over documents to uncover the cultural mood of the city leading up to the night when a mob of roughly 500 white and Latino Angelenos attacked the city’s Chinese residents and its aftermath.She discovered detailed cases of sex trafficking, kidnapping, torture, robberies, gunfights, lynchings and more.

The City of Angels — or Lo Sang — was the deadliest city in not only the Wild West, but the country.Even now, the Chinese Massacre is considered the largest mass lynching in the state’s history.

On the Shelf Daughters of the Sun and MoonBy Lisa See Scribner: 384 pages, $32If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.“The official death count would be 18, although that didn’t include the tong assassin killed while eating a bowl of noodles, Butterfly — the woman who was entrusted to a man named Curly Crenshaw to be taken to the safety of the jail but was never seen again — or others who crawled away to die or whose deaths were hidden from the authorities,” See wrote in the novel...