Father Junipero Serra. Christopher Columbus. Sir Francis Drake. Even Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem. What do most of the statues being toppled across California have in common? They’re figures from history who supported white supremacy. And they’re all men. So here’s a timely proposal. Why don’t we replace them…
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As a high school freshman many years ago, I took a course titled “The Bible as Literature.” It wasn’t exactly in the spirit of that freewheeling era. At a time when many of us were listening to the Grateful Dead and wearing our Birkenstock sandals with rainbow socks, we were also studying the Book of…
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Women’s lives have long been overlooked by historians, especially the lives of women of color. But a new PBS project, UnladyLike2020, is producing 26 documentary shorts of unsung women heroes of American history. Part of PBS’s American Masters series honoring the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, just aired a film about Tye Leung Schulze. …
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Donaldina Cameron and Tien Fuh Wu, two of the women whose life stories I weave together in The White Devil’s Daughters, lived through the terrible flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide. Just as today’s Covid-19 pandemic has taken its steepest toll to date at nursing homes and other…
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Each year, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) presents its Golden Poppy Book Awards “to recognize the most distinguished books written by writers and artists who make Northern California their home.” I learned yesterday that The White Devil’s Daughters, my history of a pioneering group of women in Chinatown that fought human trafficking at…
Read MoreMarch is Women’s History Month and I had planned to participate by telling the story of a group of pioneering women who fought human trafficking…but, alas, our panel at the U.N. Women’s Conference in New York was just cancelled due to concerns over the coronavirus. As part of a delegation of women to the United…
Read MoreCameron House, at 920 Sacramento Street in San Francisco, is famous as the place where thousands of vulnerable girls and women found their freedom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It opened its doors in 1874 and is the setting for my book, The White Devil’s Daughters. But it was not the first…
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One of the unexpected pleasures of my book tour has been meeting readers whose own life stories overlap with the characters I write about in The White Devil’s Daughters. After a recent talk I gave at the San Francisco Theological Seminary , a retired Chinese American woman named May Lynne Lim came up to introduce…
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The Rev. Harry Chuck can trace his family’s history at 920 Sacramento Street back to the late 19th century. That’s when his grandmother was sold into slavery by her impoverished family in China. Her owners sent her to San Francisco but she was intercepted by immigration officials before she reached one of Chinatown’s many brothels.…
Read MoreDonaldina Cameron’s work inspired many people. One of the most memorable is Marion Kwan, a civil rights activist who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s. Born and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Marion calls herself a “Cameron House kid.” When Marion’s mother immigrated from China in 1940, she was detained…
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