The Poker Bride paints a grim picture of the US faced by Chinese in the years leading up to the Exclusion Act, but in Corbett's thorough account of that world, he manages to document a humanity that white Americans often were blind to.

"The Chinese in the old days were remarkably resilient, patient and industrious," he writes. "Those are not clichs. The ghosts of the old Chinese - in a very real sense - haunt the American West, even today. We should never forget them."

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