 The question that I'm asked the most is how did you find the story? So that's what I'm going to talk about tonight is how I found the story of the Chinese Yankee. And it's a long story. It starts 30 years ago. So you're going to have to cast your mind back to the days before the Internet, before there were personal computers. And in those days, in order to do my research, whenever I was invited anywhere to give a talk, I would always stop at the local archives and ask what they had in the way of material about Chinese in the 19th century. And so I was in an archive in Hartford, Connecticut, when this clipping fell onto my lap. And of course my eye was caught by the handsome face, the traditional cue, and the impeccable western suit. But what really astounded me were the few lines of text that said the man Joseph Pierce had fought for the Union in the U.S. Civil War. When I got back to San Francisco where I live, I asked the late Chinese American historian, Mark Lai, whether he knew of any Chinese Civil War combatants. And those of you who knew him will appreciate that, of course, he did. And it wasn't Joseph Pierce, it was Hung Ngoc Wu. And he actually gave me an article that had been published in the 1920s about Hung Ngoc Wu who had served in the Pennsylvania 90-day emergency militia. Not long after I read that article, I came across the book, the two about the co-joined twins Chang and Ng. They were brought to this country and toured the U.S. on exhibit. But then they retired to Mount Erie, North Carolina, where they married and became gentlemen farmers. Not surprisingly, during the war they sided with the Confederacy and each of their eldest sons fought in the Confederate cavalry. Then I met Marion Lim and she was a small girl when this photograph was taken. And I had used this book, this photograph in my book, Chinese American Portraits. And over tea, she said, you know, my dad used to tell us that he fought in the Civil War. And she said, of course, none of us believed him because he was always telling stories. But then he showed us his scars and he had gunshot scars at the center and right of his forehead, his right cheek, the back of his head, his right leg, his back was scarred by shell. And his first and second fingernails were injured by percussion caps. So that was pretty conclusive that he had actually fought in the war. As excited as I was by these chance discoveries of Chinese Civil War combatants, I had no intention of ever writing about them. Why? Well, I'd first come to know about the U.S. Civil War through Little Women, which was published just three years after the Civil War. But when I read it, I was a seven-year-old girl in Hong Kong and it was the early 1950s. And there were thousands of refugees which were pouring in all the time from China's Civil War. And this wasn't long after World War II and the people in Hong Kong had survived a brutal occupation by the Japanese. And so I grew up listening to those stories. And then in school we started reading about the World War I and we read the poets, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon. And all of that, woven with my overactive imagination, used to wake me up night after night, screaming from nightmares about the war. The first night I ever spent in America, these nightmares just disappeared. But to write about something is to return to it. And the last thing I wanted to was to return to those nightmares. So I was determined I was not going to write about the Civil War. But I was still going to archives and I went to an archive in Lincoln, Nebraska, because I'd been invited there to give a talk. And when I went in and asked for what they might have on Chinese in the 19th century, the woman said to me, nothing, we ran them all out, all the Chinese. I said, well, if you ran them out, then they were here. And so if they were here, then you must have something in your archives. And she would have none of it. And so I didn't spend a great deal of time fighting it out with her. I could see I was going to lose. And so I went to a different archive nearby and out came this newspaper clipping, Man Without a Country, China Minute Valentine Cannot Speak Native Tongue, Served in the Civil War. To me, this article seemed like a sign from the Civil War veterans themselves that I had to write about them. But I was then working on a book about the plant wizard Lao Gam Nong from Toisan. And that book took me 10 years to research and write. And by the time I finished it, there were 10 names in my file on Chinese in the Civil War. Seven fighting for the Union and three for the Confederacy. If you consider that there were almost 3 million combatants in that war, 10 is a minuscule number. It took me two years to research and write about these 10 men. And in 1996, my article, Chinese in the Civil War 10 Who Served, was published in the Chinese Historical Society of America's Annual Journal. And if any of you are interested, that article is actually on my website, so it's accessible to anybody. So I thought, well, I've done it. And I'm out of the war again, and I'm going to stay out. And I began working on a book about village girls in southern China battling tradition to lead independent lives. While I was working on that book, personal computers were getting ever more sophisticated. The internet was created. And a lengthy summation of my Chinese Civil War essay was posted on an early and now defunct website that served as a forum for people interested in the topic. And I found myself fascinated by the discoveries that kept popping up in western Pennsylvania. They had found a grave of a Civil War veteran. And the person who had found it was Richard Hoover, a Vietnam vet with a passion in history, local history. And he was actually researching his own family's history when he read a few paragraphs about a Chinese man who had fought in the Civil War and then settled in a place very confusingly called Indiana, Pennsylvania. So he belonged to an organization called Sons of the Union Veterans. And Thomas' grave that they found of this Chinese man, Thomas Sylvainus, was very weathered, needed restoration. They found three others and they were planning to dedicate these graves and they wanted to know if there was anything special that they should do in the dedication ceremonies for Thomas since he was Chinese. Well, even in the partial records that the Sons of the Union Veterans had gotten, it was clear that Thomas had become completely westernized. And so both Gordon and I agreed that he should have the same ceremony as all the other men. And on July 10, 2005, the four graves were dedicated and I knew that Chinese Yankee would be my next book. Ai Wei, an orphan, had been brought to America from Hong Kong as a boy for an education but fallen into the hands of a doctor who took him to Baltimore and then just simply gave him away. When baptized, Ai Wei chose the name of Thomas in honor of a sailor who had been kind to him on the voyage to America. Then, only 16 at the outbreak of the Civil War, Thomas ran north to Philadelphia, joined the Freedom Army and although blinded and discharged, stayed in the fight, he even saved his regiments flag during the bloodbath of Spotsylvania and survived nine months' imprisonment in the dreaded Andersonville Stuckade. If it wasn't a true story, to me it would have been unbelievable. Yet Thomas lived it and despite thousands of books about the Civil War, I felt that he would offer readers a completely fresh story, one that would be a page-turner about what, if anything, is worth the cost of war in injury, death, and destruction. So I began researching. From my previous Civil War research, I knew to get Thomas' military record as well as his complete pension record and dig out leads to pursue. Here is the census schedule, as it's called, for that 1860 when Thomas was living in Baltimore and it's the year before the war breaks out. He's 15 years old and he's a male. He's working as a servant in the household. You could be black, you could be white, or you could be mulatto. And the other servant in the household is Mark as mulatto. Down the schedule there are a few blacks, but the whites, the census taker just left blank. Very white. And for Thomas, the census taker noted that he was from China, but when it came to color, the census taker just did a swipe of his pen like, heck, I don't know. And this is not surprising because after all, at that time, there were only 200 Chinese east of the Mississippi. So most people on the east coast had never seen a Chinese before. There were only two in the state of Maryland. And it was because of this that Thomas and other Chinese were able to enlist in the Union Army even at the start of the war because at the start of the war, the only people allowed to fight were white males. And this includes the Union Army. And so officers, as confused as the census taker, did enroll Thomas into the Union Army into a white regiment, the 81st Pennsylvania. Now in 1860, Thomas had been 15. Now he's 19. In one year, he got four years older. Why is that? Well, he ran away from Baltimore to Philadelphia to enlist. And as somebody under age, he would have had to have parental permission or guardian permission. Obviously he couldn't produce that. And so he lied about his age. At the start of the war, a lot of boys actually lied about their age. But they all had to swear that whatever they said in their muster in was true. And so many of the boys would write 18 on a piece of paper and they would put it between their feet and the soles of their feet and their shoe so that when they were asked, and how old are you, oh, I swear, I'm over 18. Where there's a will, there's a way. Thomas's 1862 discharge, his military records included this. So he signed up in 81 and by 82 he was discharged. The spring of 1862 was, there was a brutal peninsula campaign and what was called the Seven Days Battles. It was like an almost continuous fight. The men were marched all night, sometimes double quit time. They had to go from marching right onto the battlefields. Very often their officers got lost. And so instead of, even if it was only like 15 miles between the battlefields, they would end up walking 30 because they were going back and forth trying to find the battlefield. And so it was really grueling and brutal. And even so, Thomas thought that he had survived unscathed. But a week or two after the series of battles, he woke up and he was completely blind. And months of treatment and convalescence restored some of his sight, but they couldn't rid him of what were called cataracts from trauma. And as you see, the surgeon deemed Thomas incapable of performing the duties of a soldier because of partial blindness from cataract of both eyes. Where old age cataracts are visible to others, trauma cataracts are not. And of course, a military surgeon examining Thomas would have been able to detect the cataracts. But physical exams at that time to get into the army were very often cursory. And with the war dragging on year after year, the need for men had become so desperate that surgeons were passing people without any sort of close examination. And by then, men were also getting drafted. Any man between the age of 18 and 48 was subject to the draft. And their name would be put into a lottery. And if their name was drawn, then they had to fight unless they paid the government $300 or they paid somebody to fight in their place. That was called getting a substitute. And Thomas in 1863, he enlisted as a substitute for a George Dearborn. So I wondered who was this George Dearborn. And the limitation of the census is that it only gets taken every 10 years. So if you want to find out about somebody in the in between years, you're going to have to find out about them somewhere else. And what can be very useful is city directories. So I wrote to the New York Public Library asking if they could look up George Dearborn in the city directories because I figured the man must have been a merchant of some kind or in order to have the money to pay for somebody to fight in his place. And sure enough, it turned out he was an umbrella merchant. But I also got an unexpected bonus because Thomas had apparently also served in the 51st Regiment Pennsylvania Emergency 90 Day Militia. Since he was near blind, how was Thomas able to fight? The truth is there was so much smoke in battles that no one could see clearly. This doesn't take away from Thomas's gumption or his achievement, but it helps explain how he got away with it. Officers very often would have to crawl under the smoke in order to see what was going on. Thomas did so well that he was promoted to corporal. And even after he injured his leg at the Battle of Cold Harbor, he stayed in the fight. Clearly, he wasn't a quitter, not on the battlefield and not as a prisoner of war. Andersonville was so horrific that when new prisoners arrived in the stockade, some of them just sank to the ground and never got up again. Thomas was semi-blind, lame, and he survived nine months, including a stint in the stockade hospital from which patients left as corpses more than as able-bodied. Since rations were in the words of one prisoner barely enough to keep their lice alive, it's truly a miracle that anyone survived. Well, the grit that got Thomas through Andersonville also saw him through his post-war challenges as a disabled veteran and lone Chinese in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where he settled after the war. Much as you can do research on the Internet, I still feel that there's nothing like going to a place. So I actually walked the battlefields, every battlefield that he had been on. And as a writer, I'm always working on a shoestring budget. And the way I got to these battlefields was that when my book God of Luck came out and the publisher wanted to do a promotional tour for it, I made sure that every city we went to was close to a battlefield. And so that's how I got to the battlefields. Now I had to figure out how I was going to get to Indiana, Pennsylvania. And puzzling over that, I remembered that one of the articles about the grave dedication ceremony had been in Asian Week. And I noticed in his article that he quoted a man by the name of Gay Chow, who taught at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania. And I wrote to him and said, I really wanted to come and research the life of Thomas Sylvainus, but I didn't have the money. And could I trade doing talks at the university in exchange for spending a week there to do research? And happily for me, he made that possible. And when I go to a place to do research, the very first thing I always do is go to the grave of the person that I'm writing about. And as you see, Thomas, though he served in three regiments, there's only one regiment listed and it's the New York Regiment. Why is that? Because of government bureaucracy, you are only allowed to have one regiment on your gravestone. And it has to be the last regiment that you served in. Before I went to Indiana, I had not met Richard Hoover, the man who had found the grave. He is an amazing researcher and this is a photograph of him and his wife on. He served one tour in Vietnam, fell in love, went back, worked as a civilian, and he truly understood in a way that nobody else in the town did or could understand what it meant to be an Asian in that town. There's a very small community of African Americans, but they have the very deep roots there because Indiana, Pennsylvania was a stop on the Underground Railroad. But the number of Asians in the town, even today, is very small and Thomas was the only one. So I came across a lot of newspaper articles when I was doing research. For example, Commonwealth versus Thomas Sylvainas, Fornication and Bastardy. Not a true bill, meaning he wasn't guilty of what he had been accused of. Prosecutor, his accuser, Margaret Brocken to pay costs. Well, thanks to Richard, he helped me, he introduced me to a person at the prosanotary office and with her help we got the documents for every single case that Thomas was involved in. What this meant was then I would know who everybody, who his accuser was. I could then research that person's life. I knew who represented him and I was really able, I even knew who the jurors were. And so that's how I was able to piece together his life little by little. And Thomas, this is really why I wanted to write about Thomas and not about anybody else. As you know from the few stories that I shared with you about other Chinese who had fought, many of them have interesting stories too, but Thomas's was the most compelling because he didn't just fight on the battlefield, but in all the years afterwards. When he was accused falsely, he didn't just take it lying down. He took the person to court. When somebody threatened his children, which they did, he took them to court. When someone struck his children, he didn't take it lying down. He took them to court. When an employer failed to pay him the wages that he was due, he took them to court. And I just really admired the courage that this took. And so obviously I could go on and on and on, but I will spare you. And I think you have enough of an idea of what it takes for me to research and piece together a life like his. And it is a lot of work, but it's work I absolutely love. Thank you. Thank you very much.