Among the people who arrived in San Francisco in the late 1800s were Asian girls and women trafficked for the purpose of prostitution. Sometimes called “daughters of joy,” they were the victims of kidnapping, abuse, and a form of slave trade practiced openly on the waterfront well into the 20th century.

SO: Before we start today’s episode, we wanted to touch base. AM: We started this podcast to study histories and perspectives we don't hear about as much, especially from immigrants and people of color who came to San Francisco by way of the Pacific Ocean. SO: And we hoped by giving these perspectives more time in the light, we’d not only spark curiosity and discussion, but normalize questioning the stories we’ve always heard, which is, of course, uncomfortable. AM: And important for growing. SO: Definitely. AM: We want to treat these stories with the care and attention they deserve, but we know we won’t always get it right, or complete. SO: Oooh, that hurts this know-it-all to admit. AM: [Laughs] I think you mean “thorough and conscientious researcher”...and it’s going to be okay. SO: Thanks. AM: You’re welcome. SO: In treating these stories and perspectives with care, we hope we create a space where the discomfort is a little easier to cope with because it’s shared. AM: That being said, we do not want to trigger trauma responses, especially without warning. SO: And while we welcome listeners of all ages, some topics--like the ones we discuss in today’s episode--may not be appropriate for younger audiences. AM: Briefly, this episode focuses on the history of human trafficking and sexual enslavement in San Francisco. SO: Our transcript can be found on the Better Lives, Bitter Lies page on the San Francisco Maritime website. If you’d like to read it before making your decision on whether to listen and who to listen with, please feel free to do so now! AM: And now, let’s get into the episode. [Audio break] SO: Hey, Anne! AM: Hi, Sabrina! What have we got going on today? SO: Well, I was just listening to this audiobook. Want to listen with me? AM: Absolutely, I do. SO: Okay, here goes. [00:01] "A ghost story first led me to the edge of Chinatown. One crisp morning, I dodged the crowds in Union Square and walked past a pair of stone lions up a hill. I had an address--920 Sacramento Street--and a description. I was looking for a five-story structure built with misshapen red bricks--some salvaged from the earthquake and firestorms that razed much of the city in 1906. “Passing a church and a YMCA, I came to an old building with metal grates on its lower windows. Above the main entryway, I peered up at the century-old raised lettering that read, OCCIDENTAL BOARD PRESBYTERIAN MISSION HOUSE. “On a Plexiglas sign mounted onto the bricks at eye level, I read CAMERON HOUSE EST. 1874.” AM: That’s the opening of The White Devil’s Daughters ! The book by Julia Flynn Siler! SO: Yeah! It’s the book you told me about months ago, which, well, it’s a long story, but it really led us to working together on this podcast! AM: That’s true! The White Devil’s Daughters was a name given to the Chinese women and girls who were sheltered at the Presbyterian Mission House. We’ll certainly talk more about why the white women running the Mission Home were known as white devils. But, referring to the women and children living in the home reminds me of another moniker--the Daughters of Joy. SO: Which was a term sometimes used to refer to prostitutes who worked the waterfront, particularly an area which became known as the Barbary Coast. AM: Hey, we have a marker for that in our park! SO: Yep! We have a display in the Visitor Center too! [AM: Huh!] Now, when you recommended this book, I was intrigued because it reminded me of this old saying that a sailor has a woman in every port. [AM: Hmm] And then it got me thinking: who was that woman -- or, more precisely, who were those women? Was every single woman really waiting for a man on shore? AM: Oooh, good questions. Well, that saying could have referred to women who were treated as wives or partners by the sailors. I imagine it was quite difficult to determine the marital status of a seafarer. And you know how women were limited to stale imagery that was rarely of their own creation -- in our first episode, you said that whole part about how a writer personified the Golden Gate as a bridge. I mean, bride. SO: The Golden Gate Bride? AM: [chuckles] Okay… back to the book. SO: Okay. The book provides a doorway, if you will, to the histories we’ll be talking about today. But short of just reading the back-cover blurb, I don’t know how my introducing it can do it justice. AM: Then it’s a good thing we interviewed the author herself, Julia Flynn Siler. Julia is a New York Times best-selling author and a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek . She was also born in the Bay Area and is based here. Let’s hear what she had to say: Julia Flynn Siler: The White Devil's Daughters is about a very small group of women who in the 1870s saw a great social injustice taking place. And that was the forced prostitution of Asian girls and women. This was a time of enormous prejudice against Asians in California and this small group, mostly women, really rejected that and acted against the tide of anti-Asian sentiment and decided to try to do something to help the women who had been trafficked. And so they set up a safe house on the edge of Chinatown. And I quickly realized that I could tell the history of the city through this one institution, through this one building and the people who worked there and passed through its doors all those decades, which covered everything from the Sandlot Riots against the Chinese in the 1870s through the earthquake and firestorms that destroyed Chinatown in 1906 through the great flu pandemic of 1918 to 1919, um, into the roaring twenties and then into the Great Depression of the 1930s. And I was looking for an inspiring story, as well. I was looking for a story about people changing their lives and finding freedom. [audio break] SO: That was a lot to unpack. AM: So let’s start unpacking. SO: I guess we’ll begin, as noted, in the 1870s. Or thereabouts. AM: How about a little bit before then? To recap: In our second episode, we talked about why the Chinese began to come to San Francisco -- first, for Gold Mountain from 1849 through the 1850s, then, for various other jobs that helped develop California and the West, like the Transcontinental Railroad. SO: We talked about settlers--as well as sojourners--who stayed a while before returning to China. Most of the time, both the sojourners and settlers were men. This was partly due to social conventions -- men were the ones who sought work, wherever that might be. The point of sojourning was to support families back home. If they had families -- wives and children – to begin with. AM: And speaking of social convention, we have and we’ll likely continue to use binary gender language when discussing historical gender roles. This is due to the gender-binary nature of the census records and society in the United States at the time. We understand that many of the people identified as male or female in the census records may not identify as such today. SO: Non-binary identities are unique and valid then and through today, even if the historical record doesn't reflect their presence. AM: Absolutely. Back to it? SO: Back to it. So, our last episode went into some of the effects of such long-distance and, often, long-term separations of Gold Mountain men from their wives. In this episode, we will be looking at another effect. AM: Both sojourners and settlers contributed to the growing population of San Francisco. According to one collection of census records, between 1860 and 1870, the population of Chinese living here went from 3,130 to 11,728. [SO: Mmm] The numbers you have over there are just as interesting. SO: Mmhmm. According to the book Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco, in 1850, there were 12 men to every woman in the state. But, among the Chinese, the ratio was 39 to 1. Another set of statistics says that, in 1850, only 7 of the 4,025 recorded Chinese residents of San Francisco were women. AM: Oh, wow. But over the next few decades, the numbers would balance out, right? SO: Yeah, and by 1900, the ratio among the Chinese population in San Francisco had decreased as well, but it was still 12 men to every 1 woman. AM: Where were the women? Which is never a bad question to start research with. SO: Oh, I agree. [AM chuckles] But in this scenario, the answer is they were mostly back in China. Because, again, traditionally, the woman’s role was to stay in the domestic sphere. But staying back was also cheaper. Given the journey and the destination, it was also thought safer. AM: And so, early Chinese communities became mostly male quote-unquote bachelor societies. This was true not only in San Francisco, but up and down the West Coast. Now these bachelor societies made two things possible. First was a mobile workforce that could go wherever labor was needed [SO: MH] -- railroads, farms, canneries, you name it. Second was a demand for women -- whether for companionship, love, or sex. And, well, that gave rise to a different kind of workforce. SO: Which, in turn, can explain this other interesting statistic: according to the 1870 census, 1,565 Chinese prostitutes worked in San Francisco. They constituted 61 percent of the entire Chinese female population. AM: Wow. Well, we’re certainly going to go more into the hows and whys behind this. But before that, let’s talk again about--drumroll please--[SO chuckles] laws. Specifically, the laws which were passed in response to that bachelor society and, ironically, maintained it. [audio break] SO: Beyond transactional experiences at brothels and the like, men in these bachelor societies also looked outside of their own ethnic communities for relationships. AM: The bigotry and racism with which these relationships were treated by society led to the passing of anti-miscegenation laws, or laws which banned the intermarriage or intermingling of races. SO: Beginning in 1850, California prohibited marriages between whites and Blacks. By 1869, there were laws in five Western states that banned marriage between whites and Chinese, “Asiatic” or “Mongolian” people. The terms varied per law. It seems the term “Mongolian” was widely considered synonymous with “Chinese,” though a similar term was also used as a catch-all for anyone who essentially wasn’t white or Black. AM: The first law banning marriages between Chinese people and white people was passed in Nevada in 1861. But it was only in 1880 -- two years before the Chinese Exclusion Act – that California anti-miscegenation laws expanded to forbid marriage licenses between whites and people defined as, quote-unquote, Mongolian. SO: Now, in the book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, author Peggy Pascoe points out that popular images and rhetoric sexualized Chinese men as a threat to white womanhood. Black men were painted as, quote, direct sexual dangers in American popular media; Chinese men were linked to, quote, fraudulent marriages, rampant prostitution, and commercial vice, unquote. Either way, interracial relationships were portrayed as inseparable from illicit sex and/or vice. AM: That’s awful. And portraying Chinese men in this way also played into the depiction of Chinese women as prostitutes. SO: Which gives me a headache and brings us to the Page Act of 1875. AM: The Page Act explicitly forbade the, quote, importation into the United States of women for the purpose of prostitution, end quote. It also said that port officials would determine whether the “immigration of any subject of China, Japan, or any Oriental country… is free and voluntary.” If it was determined that the immigrant, quote, has entered into a contract or agreement for a term of service within the United States for lewd and immoral purposes, end-quote, they would not be allowed in. There would also be fines and imprisonment for people knowingly and willfully behind such contracts and importation. SO: And such was the climate around the law, that, according to the book Unbound Feet: quote, immigration officials apparently operated on the premise that every Chinese woman was seeking admission on false pretenses and that each was a potential prostitute until proven otherwise. AM: Wow, those are some assumptions. Let’s not forget that prostitution was only made a criminal act in California in 1872. SO: That’s true. And it’s certainly worth noting that the Page Act didn’t name any particular ethnicity or race in its exclusion, but it was used almost exclusively to prohibit immigration of Asian women. It was seldom enforced with white female immigrants who may have also been coming for, quote-unquote, lewd and immoral purposes. AM: And it paints a picture that all these Chinese women who were, quote-unquote, potential prostitutes coming to America under false pretenses were doing so of their own volition, which we know isn’t the case. But we’ll talk more about that in a minute. You look like you’re dying to tell me something... SO: Yes. Can I please tell you now about the first-known Chinese woman to immigrate to California? AM: Is this one of your research rabbit holes? SO: ...yes. AM: Just call me Alice. SO: See my Cheshire grin? AM: I do! [SO and AM chuckle] SO: So, her name was Maria Seise. She wasn’t a prostitute, and, as far as I’ve read, she’s an example of the few nineteenth-century women who did come here of their own volition. And--get this--she predates the Gold Mountain men. In fact, she beat all of the 49ers to San Francisco. AM: Whoa! When did she arrive? SO: 1848! And she’s also said to be the first-ever Chinese woman in San Francisco. AM: And why did she come here? SO: For work. She came over with her employers -- Maria was one of three Chinese servants in Charles Gillespie’s household. Charles was a trader and, perhaps not incidentally, the first American to reside in Hong Kong after China ceded Hong Kong to Great Britain -- AM: -- because of the Treaty of Nanjing that ended the Opium War! SO: Mmhmm. AM: Wow, this rabbit hole has twists! But let’s get back to Maria Seise! SO: Happily. So, we don’t know her birth name, but Maria was from Canton. At a young age, she ran away to avoid being sold by her parents -- which, as we’ll learn, was a fairly common practice among poor families. She went to Macau, a region in China controlled by Portugal, and adopted Portuguese customs and the Catholic faith. Then, she married a Portuguese sailor, who left for sea and never returned. AM: Ooh, Maria was a woman waiting at port? SO: Maybe? But not for long. To support herself, Maria Seise sought work as a domestic helper. In 1837, she even traveled with an American employer to Hawaii. Eventually, she came to work for the Gillespies in Hong Kong. It’s said she was actually more of a companion to Sarah, Charles’s wife, and enjoyed her fullest confidence. Later, in San Francisco, they were even confirmed in the Episcopalian faith together. Church records say Maria, quote, knelt at Sarah’s side to receive the rite at the same time. AM: So, you could say Maria Seise was self-supporting and well-traveled [SO: Mmhmm] which is not something you could have generally said then about women of any race or social class. In that sense, she already sounds extraordinary. And that’s before she “became” the first Chinese woman in California! SO: I’ll say! Oh, and by the way, just to connect one more detail in Maria’s story to previous episodes -- soon after the Gillespie household arrived in San Francisco, the male Chinese servants left their jobs for the gold fields. AM: Okay, that last part does not surprise me. Pretty much all male laborers were heading for the gold fields. SO: That’s true. But, yeah, as you were saying, Maria Seise was certainly surprising then. [AM: Mhm] And her story is surprising now. Or maybe not. Or shouldn’t be. AM: What do you mean? SO: Sometimes, I don’t know if learning something new about the past is surprising just because it’s hard to remember that there can be exceptions to the rule. Maria certainly seems to have been one. Who knows how many more exceptions to the rule there were? AM: Hey, we’ll never find them if we don’t look, right? Maybe we should also ask why those rules were there in the first place? [SO: Mhm] And exceptions are a great lens to use in reconsidering the effectiveness or necessity of any rule! The stories of the White Devil’s Daughters prove that. [audio break] AM: So we’ve talked a little about prostitution and the Chinese women who were suspected of immigrating for, quote-unquote, lewd and immoral purposes, but I think we need to clarify a few things. SO: First, this episode is not a discussion of the morality of prostitution. We are neither condemning nor condoning sex work that is done with the consent of all involved parties. AM: Prostitution is largely illegal in the United States today as a result of state and some federal laws. SO: At the same time, there are places within the US, as well as countries around the world, where prostitution is a legal occupation. If you’re interested in learning more, start researching and find people with whom you can discuss it! AM: Yes! What this episode does focus on is trafficking and enslavement, both of which are unambiguously wrong. The mostly women and children we’re talking about were--more often than not--forced into sex work or prohibited from leaving it. SO: Let’s let Julia Flynn Siler tell us more. JFS: In the 19th century, there were a series of laws passed to restrict Chinese and Asian women from coming to the United States. And so increasingly, to meet the demand for women, Asian girls and women were smuggled into the country and they were often smuggled by very sophisticated human trafficking rings operating both between China and the western United States. I would say that both white men and Chinese men frequented the brothels in Chinatown. Both groups were involved in the trafficking of Asian women. These criminal tongs or criminal, uh, gang members had very sophisticated ways of luring the girls and young women to the United States with promises of good jobs or with promises of marriage or the ability to help their families back in China. China during the 19th century was undergoing, uh, extreme civil strife and poverty. And many, many young girls felt it was their obligations to their families to take these opportunities. But when they got to the United States, they quickly realized that they had been tricked and that they were headed for forced prostitution. “Daughters of joy” were a description of prostitutes. And it was a somewhat ironic name for a life for many girls and young women that was extremely brutal and often very short. Perhaps they were daughters of joy for the men who were purchasing them. But certainly not in their own lives. They would arrive at the Embarcadero, for example, in San Francisco, the port area, um, often groups of 200, 300 young women and girls at a time. They'd be rounded up, put onto wagons, and carried directly up to the brothels in Chinatown and into the area adjacent to Chinatown in San Francisco, known as the Barbary Coast. There, they might work in what was known as a crib. And the crib was an extremely small area often divided from others by sheets. The girls would end up prostituting themselves to 10, 14, 16 men a night. And this could go on for years until they succumb to disease, or abuse, or other kind of calamities that overcame them. SO: Life for so many of these so-called daughters of joy was brutal, disheartening and far, far too short. But they weren’t completely alone. They weren’t without their allies when fighting for a freedom which should have always been theirs. AM: Let’s learn a little more about these allies with Julia. As she noted earlier, there was a small group of women who saw this injustice taking place. They decided to help by setting up safehouses -- one of which was the Presbyterian Mission House at 920 Sacramento Street. Here’s Julia again: JFS: They ran this home for almost 70 years. It opened in 1874 and it ran as a safe house until the 1930s. Many of the women who ended up there as residents were either forced into prostitution, or trafficked, or in some other way, were very vulnerable and needed a place to go that was safe. As time passed, the home became kind of an early, um, social services venture. So it was one of the places that new immigrants could go to get help when they first arrived in San Francisco. I write about the women who ran the home as well as the residents of the home and talk about them as pioneers in what we now would call the fight against human trafficking. AM: The first superintendent of the Mission Home was a woman named Margaret Culbertson. She dedicated over twenty years of her life to the fight against human trafficking. In doing so, she became known as a white devil of Chinatown. Brothel keepers and others running slave and trafficking rings told girls that the Mission Home was a horrible place -- that there was, quote, a white devil who drank the blood of captive girls to keep up her energy, end-quote. SO: The woman who became superintendent after Culbertson was also called the white devil of Chinatown. But the girls who lived with her came to call her Lo Mo, or “beloved mother.” Her name was Donaldina Cameron. She was a Scottish American who immigrated to California from New Zealand as a child. The youngest in a large family, Donaldina--or, Dolly, as she was called--lost her mother within a few years of arriving in the United States. At 25 years old, she came to the Mission Home as a sewing teacher. A few years later, she succeeded Culbertson as its superintendent. AM: And today, the Mission Home is named the Cameron House in honor of her work. But there is another amazing woman… SO: Which one? There were so many. AM: There really were! But for Donaldina, I think no one was held in higher regard or trusted more completely than Tien Fuh Wu . Let’s let Julia tell us more about this inspiring woman. JFS: Tien Fuh Wu, she actually arrived at the Mission Home before Donaldina Cameron became the face of the Home for decades. Tien was there even longer than she was. And Tien came from a family in China. And her father had gotten himself into very bad financial trouble through his gambling debts. So he ended up selling her and Tien, as a very young girl, ended up on a steamer from China to San Francisco with false papers. Uh, she passed through immigration as a paper daughter and ended up working at a brothel as a child servant known as a muy tsai, or “little daughter.” She wasn't prostituted at that point. She was too young, but she was a servant. In later years she would describe looking out the windows of the brothel and what it was like to be in Chinatown in that situation. Um, somehow from the brothel, she was sold to someone else, a woman who treated her very badly and burned her, and her condition, her abuse came to the attention of authorities. She was brought in the 1890s in the arms of a policeman to the Presbyterian Mission Home. She really spent much of her childhood in the Mission Home, growing up there and playing with the other girls. And she was an extremely bright young woman. The staffers at the Mission Home were able to find her a sponsor who was willing to pay for her education. Tien Fuh Wu became one of the very few residents of the Home to not only go to an excellent boarding school for high school in Philadelphia, but then she went to a bible college in, um, Canada, and this was also supported by her sponsor. So once she finished college, she wanted to go back to China to try to find her family. And she did go back and she was unable to find them. There was so much civil strife and so much passed during those years that she could not find her beloved mother or grandmother. And so she thought to herself what she should do next. She realized that the Mission Home really had become her family. And so she was offered a job as a staffer at the Home and began a long career working there. She worked very closely with Donaldina Cameron. She and Tien became longtime colleagues and very, very close friends as well. Tien would often do the translations with immigration officials and court officials. She was a very good housekeeper and a pretty tough taskmistress as well. She kept a list of household chores that residents called her Book of Lamentations, [SO & AM laugh] which always made me laugh. Donaldina Cameron intrinsically trusted Tien and, in fact, put her forward to become her successor as superintendent of the home in the 1930s. Tien passed on that opportunity.

But she did end up going to live in a little cottage beside Donaldina Cameron's cottage in Palo Alto, and they passed their laterly years together. And Tien was there when Donaldina passed away at the age of 99 in 1968. One of the most touching things that I did as part of my research was to go to Los Angeles and visit a graveyard. And there, sure enough, in the Cameron family plot, was Tien Fuh Wu's marker, very close to Donaldina Cameron's marker. And that, to me, was a, uh, symbol of, of how close they were and how much respect they had for each other. [Audio break] AM: Can I confess something? SO: Um, I mean, you know we’re recording, right? AM: [laughs] Haha, I do. The confession is, I’ve gone down my own rabbit hole. SO: Oh, White Rabbit! It’s so nice to see you! AM: Hehe, I really hope that this isn’t a path to Wonderland, but Julia did encourage me to figure out where the term “yellow journalism” came from. SO: The term for reporting that plays up sensationalism and scandal? AM: Yes! So I originally thought, given the use of “yellow” to propagate negative stereotypes of Asian people, that the term “yellow journalism” originated around this same racist practice. SO: And it doesn’t? AM: You know, I don’t think we can ever be totally sure. But the sources I’ve read trace it back to a publishing fight over a New York World cartoon character known as the Yellow Kid. This cartoon was originally published in 1895. And, as far as I can tell, he was called the Yellow Kid because of the color of his nightshirt, not his skin. SO: But 1895? That would have been during the time of the Chinese exclusion acts. AM: Very true. Societal norms would have absolutely played into this. You know who also played a role? William Randolph Hearst. SO: Oh, another family name from the Gold Rush! Has he been in every episode so far? AM: It’s very possible! He hired the Yellow Kid cartoonist away from Joseph Pulitzer and Pulitzer was, unsurprisingly, displeased. They competed viciously for years to steal each other’s readership, using sensationalistic reporting and flashy headlines over fact-driven scholarship. SO: Right. I remember Hearst was even quoted as saying, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!” Anyway, Julia helped us connect the dots between yellow journalism and the Cameron House. Let’s listen to a bit more of the interview. AM: One of the things I enjoyed most about your work is the comparing and contrasting of Chinese-language newspapers with the English-language newspapers, especially those run by Mr. Hearst. JFS: Yes. Yes. It was so eye-opening to learn more about the Chinese press. To my delight as a storyteller, it turned out that one of the editors of a very important new Chinese-language newspaper in Chinatown was closely associated with the home for many, many years.

His name was Ng Poon Chew. He was a Presbyterian clergyman who realized that he could probably be more effective in advocating for civil rights for the Chinese people in San Francisco as a journalist so he started his newspaper. He ended up marrying a woman who had been a resident at the home, and they had a number of children, and they were big supporters for many, many years of the home and of the fight against sex trafficking.

Ng Poon Chew was an advocate for women's rights. He was an advocate for Chinese civil rights. He paid very close attention to the waves of restrictions and laws that were being passed against the Chinese starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And that was continued in various forms through much of his time when he was an editor. Whereas the Hearst newspapers were, for the most part, anti-Chinese. The term “yellow journalism” certainly applied to the Hearst newspaper chain at that point. It was inflammatory. It was racist. It was very much on the side of seeing the Chinese in San Francisco as a threat. AM: I recall Ng Poon Chew's speech in which he put forth that the most yellow journalism was practiced by white newspapers. [JFS: Mhm] and that was such powerful rhetoric. JFS: It was. And he was so witty. He was known as the Chinese Mark Twain. [SO: Mhm] So I think he used that term when he had a very big speech in New York and it went over very well. SO: So… all that said… can I read from an old newspaper again? AM: Um... SO: What?!? We are talking about old newspapers! I have to read from an old newspaper! AM: Well... SO: What!?!?! AM: You know I’m just teasing you. Please share with me! SO: Are you? AM: I don’t know actually. [laughs] SO: Um, I will read it anyway, because I cannot be stopped. [AM laughs out loud] So, this article is from the San Francisco Call -- one of the papers that William Randolph Hearst would own, but not at the time of this writing in 1897. It reports the death of Margaret Culbertson, the first superintendent of the Presbyterian Mission House. The main title is “She Gave Her Life to God.” Here are a few lines: “Miss Culbertson died a martyr to the cause which had absorbed the labors of her lifetime...Brutality begets brutality, and some of the girls brought into the mission from the dens of Chinatown behave more like wild beasts than human beings...The gentle matron of the Presbyterian Home never knew fear, and in time was always able to subdue the most ferocious of the kicking, howling slave girls. One day, however, about five years ago, an especially troublesome slave girl was rescued. Miss Culbertson on approaching her received a kick which caused an internal injury from which she never recovered. The cause of her illness was a tender subject...she never liked even her intimate friends to think that one of her girls, who were so devoted to her as a rule, could have been the cause of the intense suffering which she has endured so frequently and so heroically.” [audio break] AM: What were we just saying about sensationalistic reporting? SO: Uh, it makes me wonder how Ng Poon Chew’s newspaper would have written an obituary. AM: Mmm. The Chung Sai Yat Po , the Chinese-Western Daily, had not been founded yet. It ran from 1900 to 1951. But, yeah, just imagine if the city’s first Chinese-language daily newspaper could have existed earlier. SO: Yeah, and not just the city’s! It was the first of its kind to be printed outside of China. But back to that article. AM: It’s really a lens into the time it was written, isn’t it? [SO: Mhm] The language used to describe the girls -- “ferocious”, “howling”, “wild beasts” -- reinforces negative stereotypes about people of another culture and race. In contrast, there’s the emphasis on the nobility and martyrdom of the Christian white woman, who devoted her life to rescuing these girls into better lives. SO: Another piece in the San Francisco Call takes the rhetoric farther. Reiterating that Margaret Culbertson died after getting kicked five years earlier, the writer says: “It is not the individual girl, however, but the system in which she was trained that we should blame for the offense. The memory of it should furnish another keen incentive for efforts to prevent Chinese iniquities from gaining a foothold on these shores. If the Mongols are to permanently remain in the midst of our civilization they must be made to amend their ideas about woman slavery. It is no ordinary philanthropy which can devote itself self-sacrificingly to an inferior race...as Miss Culbertson did.” AM: I am trying to say something else aside from “Wow.” SO: Right? But here’s the thing. Despite what the newspapers suggest, women and girls didn’t always need “rescuing.” According to both Unbound Feet and The White Devil’s Daughters, over the decades, they came to the Mission Home for a variety of reasons. Some prostitutes sought protection as they tried to marry suitors of their choice. Others sought temporary refuge to escape abusive marriages or arranged ones. Still others tried to gain leverage in polygynous marriages where one man has several wives. AM: And they also had various reasons for leaving the Mission Home. [SO: MH] Many moved on to new lives as they married Chinese Christians. And some -- particularly those who were assigned by court order to the home -- chose to go back to China under Christian escort. Some chose to return to their former status. And -- keeping in mind that mission homes started out as institutions for both fighting social problems and finding converts to Christianity – many girls and women did not convert. Nor did they embrace the Victorian ideals of womanhood and Christian home life that they were taught, or even pressured, to adopt. SO: Pressured to adopt? I feel like that leads us into another gray area. Or an entirely separate episode. AM: Why don’t we, for now, stay with a gray area we’ve already discussed in an episode? Because I think it’s time to talk about paper children again. [Audio break/music cue] AM: The term “paper children” refers to the Chinese men and women who assumed false identities to enter the country under exclusionary immigration laws. Last time, we talked about how many possible paper children stories there can be. Today, we’ve already heard one more through Tien Fuh Wu. Come the 1930s, two more paper children came into the limelight, as the fight against human trafficking in Chinatown won a landmark victory. SO: You’re referring to the 1935 trials, right? Those saw three women go up against the persons who enslaved them? AM: Yes. The trials were heavily publicized in the press. SO: And how! -- the newspapers called the story the “Trampled Blossoms” or “Broken Blossoms” trials. The “broken blossoms” meaning the plaintiffs, Jeung Gwai Ying, Wong So, and Quan Gow Sheung. AM: Let’s not even get into what that kind of headline suggests… Jeung Gwai Ying was this trial’s star witness; her escape to the Presbyterian Mission Home in 1933 set in motion the investigations that led them to court. Jeung had sailed to the U.S. from Hong Kong, ostensibly to reunite with her father and sister. But she, in fact, had come with false papers and a ticket provided by Wong See Duck. Wong See Duck was a wealthy merchant in San Francisco who headed a trafficking ring all along the West Coast. Remember, last episode, we talked about the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as a main travel line between California and Asia? SO: Yes. AM: In the 1920s, it became the Dollar Steamship Company. [SO: Right] Mr. and Mrs. Robert Dollar were supporters of the Mission Home. Ironically, like many women who took refuge there, Jeung Gwai Ying was smuggled into the U.S. on one of the company’s ships. She was a passenger on the S.S. President Cleveland -- previously named Golden State . SO: Jeung Gwai Ying arrived in Seattle in July 1933. There, she passed interrogation and met up with her supposed family, who, in fact, were part of the ring. They brought her to Wong See Duck in Oakland; she came to live in his household in San Francisco while he looked for a buyer for her. AM: This is how Jeung Gwai Ying described her story to officials: A lady. . . came to see my mother. She told my mother that she wanted me to come to the United States to work, and that if I would like to become a prostitute I could be wealthy within a year or so. . .There was no work in China, so I thought I would take a chance and come to get a position here. They told me that I didn’t have to become a prostitute if I didn’t want to, that I could get a job. My mother didn’t want me to come, but our family is very poor. SO: But she wasn’t able to seek another job once she reached San Francisco. Wong See Duck threatened to hurt and kill her if she refused to prostitute herself. Owned by two women who made sure she looked appealing to men in America, she commanded $25 a night -- $21 of which went to her owners. The average garment-maker in Chinatown then earned $30 a month. AM: This is what Jeung said of what happened next: I told one of my customers that I couldn’t stand that kind of life, and he told me there was a Home I could go to where they could not reach me. I waited my chance, and when I was sent out to have my hair done at 4:30 pm at a place about two houses from my apartment—I had been told that I was to be sent to the country at 5 o’clock. . .I went to the beauty parlor and told the girl to curl the ends of my hair only; then I left the beauty parlor and asked a child on the street where the Mission was. I was taken to a Mission on Washington Street and from there I was brought to Miss Cameron’s Home. SO: Donaldina Cameron and the Mission Home helped her report her story to the legal and immigration authorities; Jeung Gwai Ying did not speak any English, so Tien Fuh Wu translated for her during the months of investigation. Finally, a breakthrough came when an official, searching through hundreds of immigration photographs, spotted a photo of a man named Leong Chong Po. Jeung Gwai Ying identified him as the man who trafficked her, and Donaldina and Tien recognized him as a rumored member of criminal tongs. This man, of course, was Wong See Duck. AM: Wong See Duck himself was a paper son. He arrived in San Francisco aboard the SS Asia in 1908, and was interrogated at the Pacific Mail detention shed near Pier 40. There, he passed himself off as Leong Chong Po, or Leong Foo, whose father owned Yee Chong & Company in Chinatown. Later, it was this merchant status that enabled Wong See Duck to travel back and forth between China, and build his criminal network. SO: It took a great effort for Jeung Gwai Ying to testify against him -- considering that she had just given birth. AM: She was actually pregnant when she escaped to the Mission House. [SO: Mhm] And her baby boy was cared for by the Mission House throughout the trial. SO: Unfortunately, she didn’t do that well on the stand, and the trial ended with a hung jury. What she did do was identify another enslaved woman who she had met at Wong See Duck’s apartment, whose story was similar to hers. This woman, Wong So, became the star witness at a second “Broken Blossoms” trial. There, the jury unanimously found Wong See Duck, his wife, and two other female traffickers guilty. They were all jailed and deported. As was Wong So, because she still had come with false papers. Gwai Ying and the third plaintiff had infants, so they were allowed to remain in the US. AM: Wong See Duck, his wife, the other female traffickers, and Wong So were deported and went back to China on the SS President Lincoln and the SS President Coolidge . Again, both also ocean liners for what was originally the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. [outro music] SO: Do you feel like everything can just all connect together like a glorious network of rabbit holes? AM: [chuckles] I do! It’s like what Julia Flynn Siler said, at the very beginning-- depending on how and where you stop to look at things, any boat, any building, can quite possibly tell a hidden history of the city. I still can’t believe how much history was contained within the walls of 920 Sacramento Street. SO: I know. And we really only got a brief glimpse into all that The White Devil’s Daughters addresses. AM: That’s true. We didn’t even get to how they handled the bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco ... SO: The what?! AM: I think we have our next episode. [outro music ends] SO: Our last two episodes have featured a few stories about passengers and vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the Dollar Steamship Company, and American President Lines. For more resources on these shipping companies, visit the Maritime Research Center page on our park’s website.

Episode music: “Leadin” and “Vengeful” by Blue Dot Sessions. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC.