Locke’s first reunion this past fall, not surprisingly, was a reunion like no other. More than 200 men, women, and children from age 8 to 98 sat around plastic tables set up in the middle of Main Street on a warm autumn afternoon, listening to Cantonese opera singers and traditional Chinese music. On one side of the street was the Dai Loy Museum, the town’s former principal gambling hall preserved "as is," with poker chips still scattered on the tables as if the raids ordered in 1951 by California Attorney General Pat Brown had taken place that morning. On the other side loomed the sagging façade of the Star Theater, where the Peking Opera once played. There were the descendants of grocer George Marr, whose oldest son, Dustin, still runs Locke’s Yuen Chong Market. There were also the Toms, the Chins, the Lais, the Owyangs, the Chans, Chus, Chuns, Kans, Lees, Lows, Jongs, Chees, and Kings—with four generations of families waiting to be served grilled steaks and chicken from the infamous Delta restaurant known as Al the Wop’s in this year 4702 of the Chinese lunar calendar.

Their little town had been in the news recently, after the Sacramento County Housing and Redevelopment Agency bought the land beneath Locke and transferred ownership to its residents for the first time in history. (California’s 1913 Alien Land Act forbade anyone not eligible for citizenship—i.e., Chinese people—from owning property.) While private ownership has revived interest in restoring the town and commemorating its Chinese history, the town’s current residents—only a fraction of whom are Chinese—are struggling with exactly how to do that.

It’s an issue of vital importance to the legacy of this unique place. Virtually the entire story of Chinese immigration in California can be told through the lives of people who moved through the two blocks of this tiny wooden town. The story begins with completion of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad in 1869. Landowners then hired Chinese laborers to build the levees that helped convert the Sacramento River delta into some of the richest farmland in the world. By 1880 a majority of farmers and farm laborers in California’s Central Valley were Chinese, part of a larger network of Chinese towns and settlements spread across the west.

But in 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the first U.S. immigration law ever to exclude a specific nationality—and then began a chapter of American history as shameful and ignored as any—the "Driving Out." Vigilantes torched Chinese homes and businesses throughout the west. Newspapers of the day across California—in Sacramento, Chico, Calistoga, Truckee, Modesto, and dozens of other locales—reported violent mob actions against Chinese people, who had no legal redress.

The Sacramento delta was one of the few places where the Chinese escaped violence. Here among the tule marshes and 700 miles of crisscrossing waterways, Chinese workers carved out a niche, hiring themselves for as little as 90 cents a day working the fields they’d formed from the swamps. By 1910 nearly 90 percent of the world’s asparagus was being shipped from the delta, then known as the "Asparagus Capital of the World."

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