A short tribute on a historian of race and migration in the American West — and on a gravedigger’s logbook in Nevada City, where every burial has a name except the Chinese ones, written down only as “John Chinaman” or “Mary Chinaman.”
Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University, a historian of migration, race, and the American West. Her book The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018) argued that anti-Chinese violence and the federal exclusion regime of the 1880s were bound together, that expulsion and law fed one another, and that the process produced a category the United States has never lost: the "alien."
Her more recent John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law (Belknap Press of Harvard, 2025) traces the thousands of state and local laws that governed Chinese life in the American West across some seventy years, and the individual lives caught inside them. The Dan David Prize honored Lew-Williams for rigorous and imaginative scholarship that uncovers the stories of racial exclusion and oppression against Asian Americans, and the lived experiences of Chinese migrants.
Lew-Williams's subject is a paradox at the heart of the archive: the same laws and ledgers that ruled Chinese lives in the American West are often the only record those lives left, and they recorded almost nothing, a fee, a category, “John Chinaman” or “Mary Chinaman.” The individual was governed in exhaustive detail and remembered as a type.
The film's task was to hold both truths at once: the vast machinery of exclusion, the streets and towns and paperwork, and the single human being inside it whom the record declined to name. We built the film around the documents themselves, the ledger, the photograph, the town, and let the film do what the archive would not: return attention to the person behind the category, and make the erasure itself visible.
He dutifully recorded the name of each person he buried, and the date.
Page after page, the names of white Americans, fully written out.
The first California census counted 2,581 Chinese residents in San Francisco, and listed two dozen by name. The rest were simply anonymous, dangerous “Chinamen”.
In the years that followed, California enacted hundreds of discriminatory laws to control its Chinese residents.
Chinese people lived full and complicated lives in the American West. Often the only remaining evidence of their experiences comes from people who did not acknowledge their humanity.
The film ends on a woman under a red tree, with the town and the water behind her — the last image, after the ledger, the census and the laws.
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.