Julia Flynn Siler

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“Auntie” Tye and one degree of separation….

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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 herself to me. We chatted briefly and she handed me a sealed envelope with my name inked onto it in careful handwritten script.

Tye Leung Schulze, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

I waited until the next morning to open the envelope and read what was inside. There were three pages of a typed, single-spaced story about Mrs. Lim’s own history with Cameron House, the setting of my book, as well as a handwritten note with her address and telephone number, inviting me to contact her about seeing some family photographs.

I read about her father’s first wife, Rose (Fung Ho) Lee Young, and Rose’s sister, Tye Leung Schulze, whose extraordinary story I tell in the book. A short-statured woman whose nickname was “Tiny,” Tye Leung Schulze was a pioneering staffer at the Angel Island immigration station and the first Chinese American woman to cast a vote in a U.S. presidential election.

Tye Leung Schulze was one of the sixty or so girls and women who fled from the Presbyterian Mission Home on the morning of April 18, 1906, to safety after the earthquake and subsequent firestorms that destroyed Chinatown and much of San Francisco.

Mrs. Lim’s family believes that Rose also “must have been one of Miss Cameron’s girls….but we were never able to find any records of her having been there.” In 1906, Rose was not yet married to Mrs. Lim’s father (Mrs. Lim’s own mother, a “picture bride” married her father in 1930, after Rose’s death two years earlier. In turn, after Rose’s death, Tye and her sister Alice took May Lynne’s mother under their wings and called her “Little Sister” in Chinese. Alice and Tye, in turn, became May Lynne’s informal “aunties.”)

Rose, Tye, and Alice (photo courtesy of May Lynne Lim)

The remembrance that Mrs. Lim shared was especially moving in its detail of all the ways she and her husband remained connected with Cameron House for many years afterwards, first through the youth programs and later as an alumnae.

Mrs. Lim’s late husband Roger also grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and participated in Cameron House’s youth programs. May Lynne and Roger were married at the Chinese Presbyterian Church sixty-three years ago, in 1956 – a time in which the namesake of the home, Donaldina (Dolly) Cameron, was still alive.

By the mid-1950s, Miss Cameron’s successor, Lorna Logan, lived upstairs at 920 Sacramento Street, while Dolly and her longtime aide and friend, Tien Fuh Wu, had moved in their retirement from the home to Palo Alto. When Dolly died in 1968, the city of Palo Alto named a small park in her honor. Both Cameron and Wu were pioneers in the fight against what we now call human trafficking.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lim told me that her family now numbers around 200 people. Each year, more than a hundred relatives  gather for her family’s annual Chinese New Year’s celebration!

The typed remembrance and hand-written note that Mrs. Lim gave me.

Five Generations at Cameron House

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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. They brought her instead to the Presbyterian Mission Home on 920 Sacramento Street, which was established in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1874 as a refuge for vulnerable women.

The Rev. Harry Chuck at Cameron House, photo by author.

Because many of the home’s residents were former prostitutes, Harry’s mother, who was born in 1900, rarely spoke of her own mother’s time there. In fact, Harry only learned about it by accident, when Mae Wong, a staffer, said to him “You are the grandson of Jern Ho,” a name given to his grandmother at the home which roughly translates to “one who has been transformed.”

When Harry mentioned that encounter to his mother, she asked how he’d heard that name. “I later learned that women who lived at the home carried the stigma of prostitution,” Harry told me one morning, as we sat together recently in 920 Sacramento Street’s sunny, wood-paneled parlor. “My mother managed to keep that secret” until that moment.

His own mother, Edna Evelyn Chan, was born in 1900. Six years later, she was among the sixty girls and women who were part of the group that safely fled San Francisco after an earthquake struck in the early morning of April 18, 1906. Firestorms soon swept through the city and firefighters used dynamite to try to battle the flames. The twelve-square-block neighborhood of Chinatown was almost entirely destroyed and its residents left homeless.

As the large group from the Mission Home moved through the city, there was an ever-present fear that traffickers would use the chaos following the disaster to try to snatch back girls and women. “We were instructed not to stop of talk to anyone as the older girls kept us moving,” Harry’s mother told him.

Led by Donaldina Cameron, the group, which included his mother, took shelter in a barn on the grounds of the San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo and then moved, for several months that summer, to a large home in San Rafael. On the steps of that home, which some of the girls called “a fairy palace,” Harry’s mother may have been among the young residents photographed that day.

Earthquake refugees in San Rafael, courtesy of Marin County Free Library

Harry’s family remained connected to the home. He joined the youth program in 1947, graduated from the San Francisco Theological Seminary in 1962, and was assigned to serve as a minister at 920 Sacramento Street, now named Cameron House in honor of Donaldina. He served as its executive director for more than two decades, from 1977 to 2000, and lived in the home for much of that time.

Now, a fourth-generation member of the Chuck family – Josh Chuck – volunteers at Cameron House, and a fifth-generation, Harry’s grandson Tristan, is a volunteer and youth participant in its Friday Night Club. Meanhile, the Rev. Harry remains closely connected to it. He beautifully led a conversation on Saturday, September 21st  at 920 Sacramento Street with Doreen Der-McLeod, also a former executive of Cameron House, Donaldina’s grand-niece Catherine Cameron, and myself. Thank you to all of you who came to that remarkable event.

Panelists at Cameron House discussion of The White Devil’s Daughters on September 21, 2019  (from left to right) Catherine Cameron, grandniece of Donaldina Cameron, Tamiko Wong, executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America, Mike Lee, executive director of Cameron House, Rev. Harry Chuck, community activist and former executive director of Cameron House, and Julia Flynn Siler, author and journalist.

The Cameron Family’s Gift to the Bancroft Library

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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 that time. Ann told me that while cleaning out her brother’s home for a move, she’d discovered a box filled with photos, letters, and other genealogical material about her great aunt Dolly, as Donaldina was known.

Cameron family materials dating to the 1840s Family

In her funny, understated way, Ann wrote “There is lots of genealogy stuff by lots of folks…letters from and to Dolly, a dead pheasant from a special hat…several Bibles…family photo albums from Scotland…Not sure how useful any of this stuff is at this stage by am happy to have you paw through it if you like…”

Did I ever! I called her within minutes of getting her note and arranged to come the next day to her home to look through the box. I was excited by the prospect: I’d already scoured the Bancroft Library’s massive collections for material on Cameron, as well as Cameron House in Chinatown’s private files, and Stanford University’s special collections.

Finding primary material like this is every researcher’s dream.  Dolly Cameron has had three biographies written about her already and this newly discovered cache offered the prospect of finding out something new about her. I rushed over to meet Ann at her home and she kindly insisted I take a box of materials home with me. Some of it dated to the 1840s.

Ann had loaned me this treasure trove of new material for my book. Two years later, after finishing the final edits of the manuscript, I reached out to her and her sister Catherine, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I asked whether they might consider donating the material to the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley, the preeminent repository of materials relating to the American West.

To my delight, the Cameron sisters decided to gift the box of family materials to this great library and Theresa Ann Salazar, the curator of the Bancroft’s Western Americana collection, was happy to accept it as a natural addition to the library’s Presbyterian Church in Chinatown collection.

So, in early December, I hopped in my car, drove over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to Berkeley, and handed off a crate of photographs, correspondence, family Bibles, and other materials. It was an early holiday gift from the Cameron family to the many authors, historians, and students who regularly use the Bancroft Library.

Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author. Her new book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Against Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf in May of 2019. For more information, please visit www.juliaflynnsiler.com

 

Author Julia Flynn Siler delivering materials to the Bancroft

Acquisitions Assistant Rachel Lee accepting the Cameron family’s materials at the Bancroft Library