History
Singing with the Choir
Workmen were pulling up the tattered carpets of our college chapel at Oxford, which meant that our choir was temporarily homeless for our weekly rehearsal. After casting around for alternative spaces, our music director came up with a solution: we crossed Holywell Street and entered the grounds of nearby New College, making our way to…
Read MoreIntrepid Women at the Pitt-Rivers Museum
On the eve of International Women’s Day, a standing-room only crowd of a hundred or so people squeezed into an upper gallery of Oxford University’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, a place known to generations of British school children as where they saw shrunken heads. The tsantsa, or shrunken heads, were removed from their display cases in 2020…
Read MoreWalking the Bells
My first Saturday in Oxford, I walk down the Banbury Road towards St. Giles Church. My small roller bag click clacks over the broken sidewalk. Bells peal in a melodic succession:123456…654321. At first, the ringing seems to be coming from a dated glass and concrete building – a structure, I learned, that some locals consider…
Read MoreHistory Written by the Victors….
For an example of history being written by the victors, consider the case of Jane Lathrop Stanford, the victim of one of California’s most puzzling unsolved murder mysteries. As co-founder and primary benefactor of Stanford University, Jane died of strychnine poisoning in 1905 in Waikiki. For nearly a century, the fact of her murder…
Read MoreThe 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 MoreHonoring Hawaii’s Queen
At a time when statues are toppling across the nation, one work of public art stands tall. It is the eight-foot-tall bronze of Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani, who faces the state Capitol in Honolulu. This beautifully rendered artwork, by the American realist sculptor Marianna Pineda, is even more powerful today than it was when it was…
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 More“Are you wearing a mask…?”
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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