The Celestials’ Last Game
I’ve been following Ben Railton on social media for a long time now, first on the site formerly known as Twitter (back in the good old days) and now on Bluesky, where he is @americanstudier.bluesky.social Among other things, he curates a fabulous list, #SundayScholar, of people to follow and stuff to read. I always find someone new to follow, and I am always chuffed when I make the list.
Railton responded to my request for stuff about Asian-American history with a recommendation of his podcast, The Celestial’s Last Game. I am so glad he did.
Obviously this is not a picture of the Celestials. Such a picture exists. But I did not want to go through the permissions process with the archive that owns it. Permissions are often painful, always slow, and sometimes expensive. Not worth the effort for a blog post. Luckily, you can see it on the podcast website.
The Celestial’s Last Game is the kind of historical project I enjoy the most: it takes a small, relatively unknown, event and uses it to illuminate a larger picture.* The podcast tells the story of a semi-professional baseball team called the Celestials made up of Chinese students in America and the last game they played before they went back to China. The sub-title sums it up: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America.
The podcast is structured like a baseball game. There are nine episodes, labelled as innings, followed by what Railton dubs a “post game press conference.” Each inning is broken into smaller units that could be considered times at bat.
The story of the Celestials carries the action. A group of Chinese students who had studied at New England prep schools and colleges, including some who had been star athletes at Yale, formed a baseball team. They made a name for themselves on the New England semi-pro leagues. But rising anti-Chinese sentiment drove them back to China. In California, waiting to depart, a local Oakland team challenged them to a final game. I’m not going to tell you how it ends; you’ll have to listen to the podcast.
Railton uses the story to talk about the broader experience of Chinese immigrants in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, racism in other American immigrant groups, and the rise of baseball as an American cultural marker. It is a fascinating blend, even for someone like me who is not much of a sports fan.
I strongly recommend it. You can find it here: https://americanstudier.podbean.com/
*To quote the brilliant Chuck Wendig, “The small story always matters more than the big story…We think we care about the Empire versus the Rebel Alliance, we think we care about Spider-Man versus the Vulture, we think we care about Buffy versus the Vampires. But we don’t. Not really. Not deeply. What we care about is the small story embedded in there, the small story that’s the beating heart of a larger one.” (Damn Fine Story, p. 79) It is as true for non-fiction as it is for fiction. Maybe even more true. It’s the reason Big Fat History Books are sometimes so hard to read, unless the author successfully links together a series of small stories that make you care about the protagonists and consequently about the big picture. If you don’t manage that you have what one of my professors described as “just one damn thing after another.” But I digress.
