san francisco Archives - Julia Flynn Siler

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 now filmmaker, was a youth director and then Executive Director of Cameron House. He mentioned to his son Josh, who also worked at Cameron House over the years, that he was thinking about getting rid of some film reels that had been sitting in his garage for decades. Josh asked if he could see them first.

The more than 20,000 feet of film, shot on a 16 mm Cameron, were his father’s footage of the Asian American movement of the mid-1960s. Harry Chuck lived through that period of intense social change as a young minister and activist in Chinatown. He captured on film the San Francisco State College Strike, the desegregation of public schools, and the successful organizing efforts of the Chinatown Coalition for Better Housing.

I found the Chinatown Rising both fascinating and inspiring, especially the final scenes in which Harry Chuck convinced San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to approve plans for much-needed housing in Chinatown by showing them the footage he took of the appalling conditions in Chinatown’s SRO housing at the time. Here’s the trailer and I urge you to go see this film, which will be shown at the San Francisco Public Library soon.

https://vimeo.com/331118828

Donaldina Cameron (1869-1968) captured the nation’s imagination at the turn of the 20^th century. She was an early anti-human trafficking pioneer who ran a “safe house” for vulnerable girls and young women on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. A tall, auburn-haired woman with a Scottish lilt, she who fascinated headline writers and the public alike.

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

But Cameron wasn’t the founder of the Presbyterian Mission House in Chinatown, nor did she run it single-handedly. The home opened in 1874, more than two decades before Cameron first arrived as a sewing teacher in 1895. Throughout its sixty-year history, all of the home’s superintendents, including Cameron, relied on Chinese translators and volunteers to help the home run smoothly.

The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown tells the story of the many people involved with the home – white and Asian, women and men. I was fascinated by how this extraordinary and often cash-strapped band of activists managed to disrupt the lucrative business of human trafficking between China and America for more than half a century.

To investigate the history of the home and its people, I traveled from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2014, and then again in 2015, to Philadelphia to spend several days working in the archives of the Presbyterian Historical Society. My goal was to uncover the stories of the many people who founded, supported, and worked in the mission home starting from the early 1870s to the mid-1930s, as well as the inspiring stories of some of the thousands of residents who passed through its doors to find their freedom there.

Margaret Culbertson, the superintendent of the home from 1877 to 1897, is a largely overlooked hero of the story. She came to life with the help of the materials I found about her in Presbyterian Historical Society’s archives. I learned, for instance, from her biographical file in the PHS that Culbertson nearly seven hundred girls had found refuge at the home during her tenure as its superintendent. She also hired and mentored Cameron, who first arrived at the home in 1895 as a sewing teacher.

Margaret Culbertson was the superintendent of the home for two decades before Cameron. Photo courtesy of Cameron House.

Culbertson and Cameron faced down many threats: sticks of dynamite placed at the home, legal assaults from brothel operators and traffickers and even outbreaks of the Bubonic Plague in the first decade of the 20^th century. Those stories made it into the newspapers. But more interesting were the quiet, yet inspiring stories I found in the records at the Presbyterian Historical Society involving the home’s Chinese aides and residents.

Perhaps the most moving involved Cameron’s longtime colleague Tien Fuh Wu, who had been sold by her father into servitude as a child to pay his gambling debts. Wu arrived at the home about 15 months before Cameron, in 1894, gained an education at the elite Stevens School in Philadelphia with the help of a sponsor, and then onto a Bible College in Toronto, before returning to work at the home in San Francisco in 1911 as an interpreter and on “rescue missions.”

Cameron and Wu worked side by side for more than 25 years, until Cameron’s retirement. The letters and employment files contained by the PHS archives helped reveal the nature of their long working relationship and friendship, which extended into both women’s retirements. Cameron lived in a tidy home in Palo Alto, California and she arranged for Wu to retire into a cottage next door.

After five years of researching the history of the home, with many visits to archives at Berkeley, Stanford, and elsewhere, I remain fascinated by how Cameron and Wu, both immigrants from distant continents, leaped barriers of race, class and culture to unite in a shared mission: to offer refuge for vulnerable women. In a folder at the PHS, I found this touching letter written by Cameron, written in 1941 describing the woman she called “Blessed Tien”: “…no daughter could be more faithful and devoted, she is a great solace to my heart…”

I am deeply grateful to the PHS’s staff for their assistance over the many years it took me to research and write this book. And I urge other researchers to begin exploring its deep and bountiful holdings.

Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist. Her latest book is The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She will be speaking at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia on Thursday, July 25^th, at noon. For more information, please visit www.juliaflynnsiler.com