Asian Americans
The Safe Place That Became Unsafe
Early on in the research for The White Devil’s Daughters, I learned about a horrific aftermath to the story I was writing. My focus was on a group of women residents and staffers of a historic safe house who fought sex slavery at the turn of the 20th century. One day, while sifting through case…
Read MoreRemembering Judy Yung
Judy Yung’s death this month marks the passing of a gifted and generous scholar. Her groundbreaking work in the history of Asian American women paved the way for a new generation of thinkers and writers. Along with fellow San Franciscans Him Mark Lai and the Philip P. Choy, Judy Yung made an enormous contribution to…
Read MoreTalking with Min Jin Lee
Over this past week, I’ve been immersed in Pachinko. To be specific, I had the fortunate assignment to read Min Jin Lee’s masterful novel Pachinko, which is a family saga about the world of Koreans living in Japan. I’ve always loved the sprawling social novels of the 19th century – Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and…
Read MoreUnladylike2020
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. …
Read MoreTwo Historic “Safe Houses”
Cameron 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…
Read More“Auntie” Tye and one degree of separation….
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…
Read MoreFive Generations at Cameron House
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 MoreFrom Cameron House to Civil Rights Work
Donaldina 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…
Read MoreChinatown Rising
This summer, I saw the new film “Chinatown Rising” in San Francisco. It’s a new documentary directed by Harry Chuck and Josh Chuck, a father and son team. Both of them have been deeply involved with Cameron House, whose early history I explore in my latest book. The Rev. Harry Chuck, a social activist and…
Read MoreSeeking Refuge on the “Castle” Grounds
I’ve walked or biked past our local “castle” hundreds of times: Its Romanesque Revival campus perched on a hillside above my home town has a magical quality to it, particularly at dusk. In the days when our boys were reading J.K. Rowling’s books, it seemed as if Harry Potter might swoop through it spires any…
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