Addressing issues of ethnic makeup in The Stand

So I am working on my newest larp project, The Stand, and I am actually making a lot of progress. Trying to ride this wave of creativity while I can as far as I can. The Stand is a western, a cowboy game set very far north in California in the year 1848. One thing that came up for me recently in the writing process for this game is whether I have a realistic ethnic makeup among the characters in the cast. The group that it occurs to me that I am missing from my PC list is Chinese-American.

I'm kind of troubled by this. The immigrant Chinese made a huge contribution to early Californian history, and it's especially problematic to me because the non-white presence in the typical settings for cowboy stories is all too often ignored. Hell, at the time of my game, California had only just been annexed by the United States from Mexico. There were more than just white settlers out in cowboy land. And The Stand does have characters who are not only white but also Latino and American Indian, other peoples who did live in this part of northern Califonria in 1848.

But though I am interested in having that part of the history represented, I'm having a hard time finding a place for a Chinese presence. And I really hate forced political correctness. The ethnic characters I have already in the game I included because their inclusion felt natural to me. It makes sense to have, in a mid-nineteenth-century northern California frontier town, mostly white people with a smattering of those of Mexican or Native American extraction as well. I also have one black person because it makes a certain plotline possible. I'm just not really coming up with anything for this theoretical Chinese character to do. And I'm having a hard time envisioning any of the character I currently have as being Chinese instead.

And my game takes place right before the San Francisco gold rush. The railroad is still just an idea in the heads of some forward-thinking American businessmen and politicians. That means two big economic oppoturnities, gold mining and track laying, that drew the Chinese in large numbers to Califnoria have not really come into existence yet, especially not as far to the north of the territory as my setting is. It isn't really all unikely that at this time and place, there just wouldn't happen to be any Chinese immigrants.

So I am making the conscience decision now to not include a Chinese-American character in The Stand. I can't seem to find a place for one, I can't currently come up with a plotline for one, and I believe to say that there could reasonably not have been any present is not historically unjustifiable. I will not include a character that is not playable and well-rounded just for the sake of being politically correct. At the same time, I record this decision-making process here because I regret that I can't do something to portray a part of history that is so frequently omitted from storytelling. I do not do this out of ignorance, or of a desire to whitewash, but because I will not present compromised gameplay and story elements just to be racially diverse.