“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 More

Five 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 More

The Cameron Family’s Gift to the Bancroft Library

One morning, in June of 2016, an e-mail popped into my inbox from the grandniece of Donaldina Cameron, one of the main characters in The White Devil’s Daughters, my nonfiction account of the women who fought slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I’d already been researching and writing my book for more than three years by…

Read More