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.

"Wing Tek Lum'sThe Oldtimers is an origin story about arrival, displacement, and finally a sense of belonging during a time of exclusion. The words here are not about laws and documents but about heartfelt family stories sourced from the basic elements of earth, air, fire, and water of the islands." — Shawn Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees

"This impressive collection lets us see through the eyes of those who went overseas and those loved ones they left behind in China and makes us feel their sadness, loneliness, terror, and frustration as if it were our own. Wing Tek's precise, insightful poems transform the shacks, fields, and streets of Hawaiʻi into a grand stage for the moving drama of Chinese America itself." — Laurence Yep, author of Dragonwings

"What is astonishing about The Oldtimers is how, by recreating the daily lives and desires of the denizens of old Chinese Honolulu, Wing Tek Lum does something that few poets do: he tells stories. Continuing his poetics of archival resurrection, this book expresses a generous curiosity about his dramatis personae: the domestic servant, the plantation worker, and the prisoner; the street peddler, the cook, and the sex-worker; the bandits and the bachelors as well as the many victims of anti-Chinese violence. What results is a series of vivid dramatic monologues with the richness, intimacy, and humanity of a social novel." — Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia

"Full of wisdom and insights earned from a life of paying attention, these wonderful poems draw on memory and proceed by an earnest storytelling in an unassuming and understated tone in order to restore an individual voice to its rightful context of culture and, beyond that, cosmic inheritance." — Li-Young Lee, author of The Invention of the Darling and co-translator of Dao De Jing