The Oldtimers

In his third collection of poetry, acclaimed writer Wing Tek Lum examines Honolulu's Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century through historically grounded verse. The Oldtimers gives voice to a generation of Chinese bachelors who journeyed across the Pacific for work. As field laborers, cooks, merchants, laundrymen, and more, they helped shape Hawaiʻi's future, though their stories remained largely unrecorded. Far from home, they endured isolation, racial exclusion, and hardship, even as plague and fire swept through the narrow lanes of Chinatown.

Lum's work does not attempt to recreate history, but to interpret its silences through the lens of poetic imagination.

Drawing from archival research, family histories, and an empathetic eye, Lum crafts a poetic record steeped in historical texture and emotional truth. The voices that emerge are candid, conflicted, and human. Each poem a snapshot of a community grappling with disconnection, cultural displacement, and the unrelenting pull of home. What results is a compelling literary chorus of resilience and longing, rendered with clarity and care.

Themes of labor, legacy, cultural memory, and historical erasure anchor the collection. But Lum also captures the small, fleeting moments that reveal deep humanity like banter between friends or a bowl of noodles shared in silence. This is not nostalgia, but restoration.

For readers of Maxine Hong Kingston, Cathy Song, or Garrett Hongo, The Oldtimers offers a moving meditation on how poetry can breathe life into figures and stories too often left in the margins.

Wing Tek Lum is a Honolulu businessman and poet. Bamboo Ridge Press has published two earlier collections of his poetry: Expounding the Doubtful Points (1987) and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2012). With Makoto Ōoka, Joseph Stanton, and Jean Yamasaki Toyama, he participated in a collaborative work of linked verse, which was published as What the Kite Thinks by Summer Session, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 1994.