19 May 2025 Celebrating AAPI Month with Teow Lim Goh’s Western Journeys

During Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’d like to highlight Teow Lim Goh, author of Western Journeys, a collection of essays that chart her journeys immigrating from Singapore and spending the last fifteen years living in and exploring the American West which was published by the University of Utah Press. Her new poetry book Bitter Creek was recently released by Torrey House Press. Enjoy a brief interview with Goh as she reflects on her culture, AAPI Month, and the current political landscape.

Western Journeys delves deeply into your experiences as a Chinese immigrant in the American West. Can you share how these personal experiences have shaped your writing and perspective?

I became a writer when I came out West. I was a math major in college. I had flunked both English literature and history in secondary school in Singapore. Becoming a writer, much less one who sifts through the fragments of history, was not on my radar.

But the scale of the western landscape astonished me. And I turned to writing to understand this landscape and my place in it. At first, I was merely making observations, trying to find the precise language to describe what I saw. Looking back, I was raised in an environment where truth was what I was told it should be, rather than what I could see and experience for myself. In observing and describing nature, I was teaching myself to trust my instincts and perceptions.

These observations were simply details. I was not yet making meaning and metaphor. My breakthrough came when I visited the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese immigrants were detained under the Chinese Exclusion Act, and where some of them wrote poems on the walls. I was also navigating the H1-B visa process, which, at that time, was a lottery. It took me years to figure out what I wanted to say, but now I see that my voice grew out of this collision of landscape, history, and personal experience.

Click on the book cover to learn more.

Your writing often highlights the stories of Chinese immigrants in the American West. Can you describe the importance of recording these stories, especially in the context of Asian American Heritage Month?

I find these stories fascinating, full of the dramas of the human heart. The lives of the Chinese workers who came to the American West are very much hero’s journeys. They left home for an unfamiliar world, endured the pain of separation from their families, the weight of familial expectations, and the racism that fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act and the violence against them. The few women who did come were often sold into prostitution. Most of them longed to go home—back to China, back to their families, or, if they could not, for a place for themselves in this country. All this makes for great literature.

These are also stories that, as a culture, we have deemed unimportant, that we have willfully forgotten. A large part of it is that the realities of these Chinese immigrants, who provided the hard physical labor for the settlement—or conquest—of the West, contradict our cherished myths of the frontier. As I write in Western Journeys, the Chinese “were the antithesis of the cowboy, stereotyped as meek and subservient, unable to reinvent themselves, a visible representation of the underbelly of industrial capitalism that the nation would rather not acknowledge.” It is easier to ignore facts than to grapple with uncomfortable truths.

In documenting these stories, I am honoring my forebears and writing them into the historical record. I think of them as ancestors in the sense of cultural rather than personal lineage. And this work of honoring includes contending with difficult truths about their lives, especially the ways trauma impacts their decisions, relationships, and personalities, instead of portraying them as saints.

I am also writing a counternarrative to the (white) myths of the American West. The stories I write are based on meticulous research, and where there are gaps in the record, speculation rooted in the available facts and evidence. I question my own assumptions and biases and consider how we construct truth. I say this because the myths of the West are alluring and powerful. Donald Trump invoked Manifest Destiny when he talked about his plans to annex Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. We laugh, but he knows what he is saying. He knows the emotions it evokes in his supporters.

Can you describe how your creative process differs when writing poetry versus personal narrative? How do you balance personal reflection with historical research in your essays?

I often approach the same subject in both genres. I usually explore the dimensions of the story in essays. Especially when I’m dealing with fragmented and incomplete archival records, I also document the gaps and contradictions. And I ask myself why I am drawn to the story. This, I have come to see, serves two purposes. The first is that I often find personal reasons for my interests. For me, personal reflection arises from the historical research. The second is that when I have a handle on my motives for writing the story, I can also confront my own emotional responses and the biases they engender.

I turn to poetry when I want to delve into the emotional textures of these stories. History, after all, is the accumulation of individual lives, driven by the subterranean impulses of the spirit—or, as Muriel Rukeyser writes, “the place where things are shared and we recognize the secrets.” Poetry, with its attention to the rhythms of language, enables me to enact the stutters and silences of speech—what we tell ourselves, and perhaps more importantly, the limits of our emotional equipment, what we cannot or choose not to see.

Your new book of poetry, Bitter Creek, also touches on themes of immigration and identity. How do you see the themes in Western Journeys connecting or contrasting with those in Bitter Creek?

All four of my books—including Islanders, on the women detained at Angel Island, and Faraway Places, a chapbook of imagistic and elliptical poems—grew out of these journeys into landscape, history, and identity. I think of them as the first stage of my writing life—my new projects take a different direction.

Bitter Creek is an epic poem on the massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885. It is the least personal of my books. I call it an epic as I incorporate, interrogate, and remake the epic tradition, from the hero’s journey to the form and meter. More than that, I continue the line of questioning at the heart of Western Journeys, that of how we invent our origin stories.

The Rock Springs Massacre arose from a profound conflict in origin stories. The first Chinese to come to the U.S. worked in the mines and railroads of the West. They were seen as unwilling and unable to assimilate, the monstrous Other. I draw a direct link from the completion of the transcontinental railroad, that triumph of American ingenuity that made it possible for white settlers to come out West and reinvent themselves, to the horrors in Rock Springs sixteen years later.

I touch on all this in Western Journeys, but in poetry I can also enact these social and political questions in language that channels the marrow of lived experience.

As a writer who explores the complexities of identity and belonging, what advice would you give to other writers who are trying to navigate and articulate their own cultural experiences, especially in today’s political climate?

We are in a political moment in which some lives—and the stories they engender—are deemed more worthy and important, and others are expendable. These beliefs are not new, but now it is overt and brazen, and the highest authorities in the land act on them with impunity.

Telling our stories is an act of reclamation—of ourselves and our communities—from the violence of unjust power. On an individual level, we nurture our voices, our inner compasses, our authentic selves. When we know who we are and what we believe, we can step into our power. On a political level, this is resistance, a refusal to abide by a system that regards us as lesser and our stories as insignificant.   

But it is easy to say that our stories are important. When I was a beginning writer, my biggest struggle was giving myself the permission to give voice to my experiences, to express what I could clearly see that went against the grain of my upbringing. It helps to have a supportive community that models and mirrors this permission, but ultimately, you must cultivate it for yourself.

You can find out more about Goh and her book Western Journeys in her interview with Janalyn Guo on our Youtube channel.

Da Quanisha Parks who currently works for the University of Utah Press as a graduate research assistant for marketing while earning an MS in Environmental Humanities.