Julia Flynn Siler

Join Mailing List

Arctic Adventures

by Leave a Comment

Last fall, I took part in an unusual residency program in the Arctic Circle. I spent two and a half weeks aboard Antigua, a three-masted sailing ship with 29 artists and writers on an expedition to explore the Svalbard archipelago. It was quite a trip.

Julia in Svalbard as part of The Arctic Circle residency in the fall of 2022.

I wrote a story about my experience for the current issue of The Journal of Alta California. We hiked on frozen tundra, encountered a polar bear, hunkered down during a howling wind storm, and gazed in awe at the spectral beauty of aurora borealis. My shipmates were artists and writers  who’d come from Hong Kong, Berlin, Toronto, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere for an off-the-grid wilderness experience.

Two of the gorgeous photos in the story were taken by the expedition leader Sarah Gerats, a photographer herself when she is not leading groups around the Arctic. The stunning photo of the polar bear we saw was taken by my shipmate Frankie Carino, an L.A.-based photographer. And the startling archival photo of explorer Louise Arner Boyd and the dead polar bear comes from the Marin History Museum.

Several friends have asked if I’m really planning to go back to the Arctic soon (perhaps alarmed by my description of Covid’s arrival on the ship). The answer? I hope so, if I can land a berth on an expedition in the summer of 2024 or 2025. I’ve written to two captains of Arctic boats and have heard back from one of them. I’ve also begun exploring the possibility of joining a commercial expeditions. Wish me luck!

Remembering a Hawaiian Queen

by Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago, I was asked by a producer at Wondery if I’d be interested in being interviewed for the podcast American History Tellers about Hawaii’s last queen. I hesitated at first because my book on Hawaii had been published more than a decade ago. Agreeing to the interview would mean that I’d have to give myself a crash refresher course on my own book.

Since I’d never fully listened to the audio version of Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, I dove into it to prepare for the interview. Produced by Brilliance Audio and narrated beautifully by Joyce Bean, who mastered the Hawaiian names and words, I felt as if I was reading someone else’s book. It was  a joy to have a voice actor read it to me.

Working with the producers Lushik Lotus Lee and Polly Stryker from Wondery was a pleasure. We ended up doing two takes of the interview, in large part because I wasn’t as relaxed as I might have been during the first one. When Polly made the trek to my house to re-tape it a second time, the interview flowed more smoothly. Not to mention that Polly brought me a gift of homemade marmalade as a gift!

A few days later, Polly shared with me an article she’d found from Hawai’i Magazine titled “5 Beautiful Versions of ‘Aloha Oe,’ Queen Lili’uokalani’s Most Famous Song.” To my surprise, the magazine had found versions of Aloha Oe covered by Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwoole, Tia Carrere, slack key master George Kahumoku Jr, and Amy Hanaiali’I – but also a haunting version by Johnny Cash.

American History Teller’s host, Lindsay Graham, asked me at the end of our interview what I thought Queen Lili’uokalani’s most powerful legacy might be. She sat on the throne for a brief period – from 1891 to 1893. Yet the more than one hundred songs she composed are still performed today. To many people, she is remembered as much as a composer as a queen.

History Written by the Victors….

by Leave a Comment

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.

Leland, Jr. and Jane Lathrop Stanford, courtesy of Stanford Special Collections

 

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 was successfully covered up.

 

The key figure involved in that cover-up was the university’s first president, David Starr Jordan. He was the victor in shaping how history judged Jane’s contribution as a leading educational philanthropist over the next hundred years or so.

 

At a moment in time when many institutions are examining their histories, will Jane  finally get her due? Aside from the lingering question of whodunit, will we finally discover more about how one of America’s most powerful women came to such a tragic end.

I wrote about the still-unsolved mystery of Jane Stanford’s death for the summer issue of Alta Journal and discussed the story today in an Alta Live online event. Join us for an unsettling conversation.

 

The Safe Place That Became Unsafe

by 2 Comments

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 files with the home’s retired executive director, she suddenly turned to me and asked, do you know about Dick Wichman?

I didn’t. So, in a somber tone, she told me the chilling story of a sexual predator who, for decades later in the 20th century, abused boys in the very same place where my story was set –the safe house in San Francisco’s Chinatown that my characters had established in the 1870s to protect girls and women.

I felt shock – and soon realized I was facing a challenge. How should I handle the monster in the basement – which was, literally, where the abuse took place? To include him in a book about heroic women could overshadow their story.

The home’s retired director, a woman named Doreen Der-McLeod, gave me fair warning. Before I ventured too far down the path of telling the stories of the brave women who’d fought human trafficking and slavery at the turn of the 20th century, she wanted to make sure that I understood the full horror of what occurred decades after the women had left the home.

I’d planned to begin my book in 1874, when a group of churchwomen founded a safe house for vulnerable women. Thousands of mostly Chinese girls and women took shelter there over seven decades, including several who went on to live remarkable lives. The home’s long-serving director was Donaldina Cameron, and the home was eventually renamed Cameron House in her honor. The book would end with her retirement in the late 1930s.

The person recruited to Cameron House after the women’s’ project had ended was  the Rev. F.S. “Dick” Wichman. He became the institution’s first male director, and he created a thriving program for Chinatown’s youth. But he also turned what had been a sanctuary for girls and women into a profoundly unsafe place for boys and young men. As the home’s director from 1947-1977, Wichman was a pedophile who preyed on vulnerable boys. (Both Cameron House and the Presbyterian Church have publicly acknowledged and apologized for his abuse.)

F.S. Wichman (left) and Donaldina Cameron (right), photo courtesy of Cameron House

By one count, there are 40 known victims of Wichman – all of whom he raped or molested when they were boys, and all Chinese. Some estimate the actual number may be in the hundreds. His predations defiled the dreams of Cameron and many others who devoted their lives to fighting sexual exploitation.

In researching and writing The White Devil’s Daughters, I decided to end my story before the period of Wichman’s abuse – ignoring what would happen in the future. I dealt with Wichman in a single paragraph in the acknowledgments. I didn’t want his story to undermine the accomplishments of the women I was writing about.

But it became impossible for me to continue to ignore Wichman’s decades of abuse after The White Devil’s Daughters was published. His story continued to hang over Cameron House like a dark cloud. As the Rev. Gregory L. Chan later described Cameron House, where he’d served as the board chairman and interim executive director, “the place felt like the Bates Motel in Psycho. We had not cleaned up the shrouded energy…”

In the summer of 2019, Cameron House, along with the Chinese Historical Society of America, hosted a large event to discuss The White Devil’s Daughters. Hundreds of people attended, many of whom had long ties to Cameron House and to Wichman.

During this event, and in private conversations afterwards, Wichman’s name arose – again and again. It became clear to me that there remained a crucial, second story to be told about his era at Cameron House. Yet I was reluctant to tackle it. I knew the reporting would force me to dive into the dynamics of clergy sexual abuse – an area that frightened and disturbed me.

It was a Facebook post about a film in the summer of 2020 that finally tipped the scale. A short documentary had been released about Cameron House’s long effort to acknowledge Wichman’s abuse and embark on a long journey of healing. More than a hundred people commented on it in a heartfelt outpouring of solidarity. Elaine Chan-Scherer, a former Cameron House staffer, who played a crucial role in bringing the abuse to light as a whistleblower, tagged me in her post. Because of the release of the film, I realized this was the moment to write about Wichman, who died in 2007. This was the right moment because the community’s healing process was nearly complete.

Wichman’s three decades at Cameron House were antithetical to the spirit that had guided the project of providing a safe place for vulnerable girls and women. It felt right to follow up my book with a detailed investigation of his time at Cameron House.

As a result, my expose, titled “The Safe Place That Became Unsafe,” about Wichman’s era of abuse and the community’s efforts to heal from it, was published in the Winter, 2021 issue of The Journal of Alta California. That gave me the chance to tell the story of the monster in the basement. While there are probably even more stories to be told about the home, they don’t all need to be told in one telling.

***

This essay was adapted for one first published in The Biographer’s Craft, with thanks to its editor Michael Burgan.

Remembering Judy Yung

by 2 Comments

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.

Historian Judy Yung, photo by Laura Morton, courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle

Along with fellow San Franciscans Him Mark Lai and the Philip P. Choy, Judy Yung made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the Asian American experience. Her focus was on  women, a group that had been largely been overlooked by scholars. Judy died on December 14 at her home after a fall, at the age of 74.

 

Born in 1946 and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Yung worked as a librarian in the public library’s Chinatown branch before getting her PhD. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley. She went on to become a beloved professor at U.C. Santa. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Sam Whiting wrote a touching tribute to her life.

 

Yung’s Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco, and Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco, were an enormous help to me in writing The White Devil’s Daughters. One of the women she profiled was Tye Leung Schulze, among the first Chinese American woman to exercise the right to vote.

 

Judy and I were in touch during the five years I spent researching and writing The White Devil’s Daughters, and one of my last email exchanges with her was while I was doing my photo research. She shared some suggestions on how to track down descendants of some of the women who passed through the mission home now known as Cameron House.

 

She also provided me with one of my favorite photos in the book – a 1912 photo of Tye Leung Schulze behind the wheel of an enormous Studebaker-Flanders. Judy revealed that Tye, a short-statured woman whose nickname was Tiny, never actually learned to drive. I am deeply grateful to her and send my heartfelt condolences to her sister, Susan Lee, and her family.

Honoring Hawaii’s Queen

by Leave a Comment

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 erected in the 1980s.

If anything, this regal public monument become even more beloved over time. To understand why, watch this PBS American Masters short documentary on the Queen that’s just been released. It’s a wonderful and very moving.

Queen Lili’uokalani ruled the independent Kingdom of Hawaii for two years in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1893, a group of local businessmen, aided by U.S. Marines, overthrew her. A few years later, the U.S. annexed Hawaii as a territory.

I wrote about the Queen and her overthrow in Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. I visited the statue many times during my research trips to Honolulu. I was also the historian interviewed for the recent PBS American Masters documentary.

The last time I visited the statue of Queen Lili’uokalani was at opening day of Hawaii’s legislative session in January of 2020. People had draped multiple strands of delicate pink flower lei around the statue’s neck to honor her memory.

Facing the Capitol with her right hand outstretched, the statue seems to say “I surrendered my authority to the United States to avoid bloodshed, but I am with you,” as Richard Rodrigues, community relations specialist in the Hawaii governor’s office, suggests.

In her left hand, the Queen’s statue holds three documents — Hawaii’s Constitution; the Kumulipo, Hawaii’s creation story; and ‘Aloha Oe,’ the most famous of the more than 150 songs and chants that she composed.

It is as if the artist meant the statue to remind today’s legislators that “As you shape Hawaii’s future, remember its history, values and traditions,” Rodrigues adds. The Queen is a powerful and inspiring reminder of the struggles that have shaped our nation. You can watch the PBS documentary here.

Who Should California Honor?

by Leave a Comment

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?

Mariposa Villaluna at Coit Tower after a crew from the city dismantled a statue of Christopher Columbus during the night. Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

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 with monuments memorializing the heroic women who’ve helped shape our state? The current protests have given us an opportunity for a deep cultural reckoning about how we want to see ourselves as people. The monuments that any society erects reflect its values. So let’s use this opportunity to address an unjust imbalance. Let’s honor more women, especially women of color.

There are shamefully few statues or monuments honoring California women so far, perhaps because out state’s statue-erectors have historically focused on early conquerors and explorers.

How many of the state’s monuments are dedicated to men versus women? In a list of California’s public statues on Wikipedia, only four out of forty-one are women — or about 10%. Out of the state’s current population of 39 million, just over 50% identify as females.

In San Francisco, widely considered to be one of the most progressive cities in the nation, out of 87 public statues, just two represent real women. The city passed a law about three years ago aimed at increasing the percentage of women honored in this way, but, perhaps predictably, nothing much changed.

A much-anticipated competition to honor the writer Maya Angelou with a piece of public art stalled with a disagreement at City Hall over which representation to pick. One of the competing artists, Lava Thomas, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “Artists deserve better, women deserve better, and Black women deserve better.”

Lava Thomas envisioned this modern design for a Maya Angelou sculpture, but a supervisor wants a traditional approach. Photo by Lava Thomas.

Yes, they do.

At the same time, the few statues of women that do exist are often chosen, not to honor the contribution that those women made as individuals, but because of their physical beauty or their relationships with powerful men.

One of those monuments is a 26-foot-high sculpture of Marilyn Monroe, capturing the moment from the Billy Wilder film, “The Seven Year Itch,” when a blast of air from a subway grate lifts her dress.

Titled Forever Marilyn and created by the artist Seward Johnson, is now in negotiations to be on permanent display in Palm Springs, provoking some discussion of objectification of the actress whose life ended in tragedy.

Likewise, the figure atop a pedestal in San Francisco’s Union Square was meant to represent Nike, the Goddess of Victory, but was modeled on a young Alma de Bretteville, considered a great beauty in her day. Not long after, she became the mistress and eventual wife of the wealthy sugar king Adolph Spreckels.

Photograph courtesy of Russel Ray

Instead of sexy movie stars and the paramours of wealthy men, perhaps we should start honoring California women who directed films, worked for social justice, and led a civil rights movement.

I can suggest a few possibilities. Bridget “Biddy” Mason, an African American woman born into slavery, she bought her freedom, became a successful investor, and helped found Los Angeles’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Or Julia Morgan, the first woman to become a licensed architect in the state who helped erect some of California’s greatest architectural treasures.

Perhaps we should consider Tien Fuh Wu, a child servant at a brothel who’d been sold by her father, she eventually became a pioneering social worker in San Francisco who worked tirelessly for decades to help vulnerable girls and women in Chinatown.

We might even consider a living woman — Dolores Huerta – the 90-year-old civil rights worker and activist who, helped found the organization that would become the United Farmworkers and organize the Delano grape strike in 1965.

Tye Leung Schulze, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

For more inspiring choices, you may want to join an online event June 30th co-hosted by the California Historical Society, Cal Humanities, and KQED, for a viewing and discussion of three short documentaries on women who changed California’s history.

One of the women I wrote about in The White Devil’s Daughters, Tye Leung Schulze, is the subject of one of the documentaries. She was an early advocate for trafficked women. I’m interviewed in the documentary about her life, as is  her grandson, Ted Schulze.

The other two women highlighted in the documentary shorts are Lois Weber, the first woman to direct a feature-length film, and Charlotta Spears Bass, a newspaper editor, Civil Rights crusader, and the first African American woman to be nominated for Vice President.

It’s about time we start looking for other heroes to look up to. And they shouldn’t all be  men. As Huerta might say, Si, se puede!

 

Unladylike2020

by Leave a Comment

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.

Tye Leung Schulze, artwork by Amelie Chabannes

 

Part of PBS’s American Masters series honoring the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, just aired a film about Tye Leung Schulze.  She was the first Chinese American woman to work for the U.S. Federal Government and an advocate for trafficked women. You can watch the film here.

 

UnladyLike2020 is led by the prize-winning filmmaker Charlotte Mangin.  Charlotte interviewed me for the film, along with Tye’s grandson, Ted Schulze, and Judge Toko Serita, a New York State Acting Supreme Court Justice who presides over the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court. It’s a moving film about a woman who worked for social justice

 

I got to know Tye because she was one of the thousands of girls and young women who took refuge at the Presbyterian Mission Home in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the 20th century.  Tye is one of the young women I write about in my latest book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown..

 

The youngest daughter of impoverished Chinese immigrants, Tye fled to the home to escape an arranged marriage at twelve. There, she gained an education and became an invaluable aide to the home’s longtime superintendent, Donaldina (Dolly) Cameron, who affectionately called her “Tiny” because of her short stature (Tye  was just 4’4″ tall.)

 

Dolly was so impressed with Tye’s gift for languages and her good judgment that she recommended her for a job in 1910 at the newly opened Angel Island Immigration Station, a detention center in the middle of the San Francisco Bay designed to control the flow of Asian immigrants into the U.S.

Tye Leung Schulze, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

 

Tye took the job, commuting each day to the island by boat to work as an assistant matron and interpreter. There she met a fellow immigration officer named Charles Frederick Schulze, a white man. They fell in love. Defying both their parents’ wishes and the state of California’s anti-miscegenation laws, they traveled to Washington state to marry.

 

Not long after to returning to work at Angel Island, they both lost their jobs. But Tye soon rose to prominence again. In 1912, one year after California granted women the right to vote, Tye became the first Chinese American woman to vote in a U.S primary election.

 

She left a rich written record of her life, including a first-person oral history that the historian Judy Yung kindly shared with me. I highly recommend Judy’s groundbreaking book, Unbound Feet: A Social History of  Chinese Women in San Francisco. There is also a new box of materials from the Leung-Schulze family at the University of California’s Ethnic Studies Library, which I pored through for clues about Tye’s story.

 

Charlotte and her team at Unladylike2020 are illuminating the remarkable lives of Tye and twenty-five other “hidden figures” from American history. On July 1, the series will release a short documentary about Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani. More on that soon! Here the PBS American Masters site.

 

 

“Are you wearing a mask…?”

by 1 Comment

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.

Staffers at 920 Sacramento Street: Donaldina Cameron center, Tien Fuh Wu standing to her right. Photo courtesy California State Library.

 

Just as today’s Covid-19 pandemic has taken its steepest toll to date at nursing homes and other institutions, so did the so-called “Spanish Flu” sweep through the two homes for vulnerable girls and women that Cameron and Wu ran in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the homes was on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the other was in Oakland.

 

Both homes were crowded, with many girls and young women sharing bathrooms and bedrooms. At 920 Sacramento Street in San Francisco, Cameron reported to her board that the flu had sickened nearly all of the home’s residents and staffers. “Not one death out of almost fifty cases,” praising the tireless nursing and care provided to the sick by her longtime colleague, Tien Fuh Wu, and others.

 

Cameron, who marked her fiftieth birthday during the pandemic, was already overworked and under a great deal of stress when the Spanish Flu hit. The city government of San Francisco had mandated that everyone wear masks. A former teacher at the home was so worried about Cameron’s health that she wrote to her that year, asking, “Are you wearing a mask and taking precautions?”

 

Since Cameron worked closely with city officials and was a well-known public figure in the Bay Area, it is likely she followed the order and wore a mask. Cameron also put herself at risk by traveling during that time, including weekly trips to the home in Oakland, where the flu had also spread among its young residents. About thirty of its fifty girls got sick, but thankfully, no one died.

 

But Cameron and Wu’s wider circle of its supporters did suffer. One of the home’s earliest champions, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, died from the flu in 1919. Sadly, Hearst had not heeded the advice of health officials: she did not wear a mask to protect herself, according to her biographer Alexandra M. Nickliss. She died on April 13, 1919, at her beloved Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, about thirty-five miles southeast of San Francisco.

 

Advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle by the Red Cross: “Wear A Mask and Save Your Life!”

 

Update on My United Nations Trip….

by Leave a Comment

March 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 Nation’s CSW64, the Commission on the Status of Women. I was planning to take part in a panel to discuss the late 19th and early 20th century efforts to combat human trafficking detailed in my book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Against Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, on March 12 in New York City, as part of the parallel NGO CSW Forum.

Our delegation was being organized by the San Francisco Collaborative Against Human Trafficking, a public-private partnership established more than a decade ago by the National Council of Jewish Women and the Jewish Coalition to End Human Trafficking in collaboration with the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, and the San Francisco Mayor’s Office.

Our delegation of 42 women included California Superior Court Judge Susan Breall, Emily Murase, Executive Director of the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women, Alla Whitney-Johnson, founder of Freedom Forward, Nancy Goldberg, a co-founder of the Collaborative, and many more inspiring leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was especially looking forward to the convening day on Sunday, March 8th, which was scheduled to take place at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem. Women from around the world working towards social justice will be gathering to discuss ways to implement the goals of gender equality and women’s empowerment worldwide.

 

UN Women Executive Director speaks at NGO CSW Forum Consultation Day