 China Dolls takes place, starts out right here in San Francisco in 1938 when three girls meet at an audition at the Forbidden City. And this is a story of friendship. My novels have very much focused on the relationships between women, best friends for life, mothers and daughters, sisters. But I also have been long intrigued by the idea of three best friends. And how different that is from when you have two best friends. And my mother, for example, oh, I'm gonna get in trouble because this is being recorded. And I gave a talk earlier today and I said the names, but my mother has been best friends since seventh grade with, I'm just gonna put it out there, two friends, Joan and Jackie. And they have been best friends since seventh grade. So they're now 80, so that's a long time, 60 some years. I have known them for as long as I've lived and at any given time, one of them is on the outs. And sometimes there's one like Joan who was on the outs for about 10 years and they didn't renew their friendship until their 60th and high school reunion that happened just a couple of years ago. So wouldn't it be interesting to try to tell the story of a friendship between three friends? And I'd had that in the back of my mind. And then I do a lot of events and most of the events have a lot of women in them. And I'll watch them come through the book line to have their book signed. And I will see this group of three and two of them are chattering, chattering, chattering. And then one is over like this all by herself. And that combination of this deep hurt and anger made me think, okay, no matter what, the next novel has to have three friends. And so China Dolls does have three friends and they are Grace, Helen and Ruby. So Grace is a young woman who grew up in Plain City, Ohio where she herself says she is just a fly spec on the wallpaper of small town life. She's actually very typical of many of the performers who came out to San Francisco to work in various nightclubs. These were people who had grown up completely separated from Chinese culture. In Grace's instance, she's the daughter of the only Chinese family in town, but probably the only Chinese family for many square, well, maybe even a hundred square miles. And these were people who already had kind of broken the mold by leaving their Chinatown, whether it was San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and broke the mold by stepping away from culture, tradition, customs, to be out in the middle of the country where they could become the reddest, the whitest, the bluest. So what would a little girl in the 1930s who wanted to be the reddest, the whitest, the bluest aspire to be? Anyone? Shirley Temple, come on, dancers. So she takes a lot of dancing classes and she's learned to tap and learned to sing and situation arises where she runs away from home and comes out to San Francisco where it is the first time she sees anyone then in her own family who is Chinese. The next one is Helen and she comes from a very large, traditional Chinese-American family right here in Chinatown. She's actually an aberration as far as I know, or at least I never found anyone who really had grown up in the 20s and 30s here who then went to work in a nightclub. And why would that be? Because traditional girls, they weren't allowed to show their arms, bare arms and legs in public. They were supposed to stay home, learn to knit, embroider, tat, cook, take care of children, become good wives, become good mothers. So I thought a lot about what would it take for Helen's parents, for any woman's parents, young woman's parents to allow their daughter to dance in one of these nightclubs? What would she have done or what could have been done to her? Now she has lived in a very large compound, very much like the kinds of compounds that you find in China with a big interior courtyard with 30 of her relatives. And I know many of you are from here, but when I've been traveling around talking about this book, it's hard for other people to believe that there could be a compound like that here in San Francisco Chinatown. All right, then the next one is Ruby. And Ruby is Japanese American, kind of masquerading as Chinese American. These were originally Chinese American nightclubs. The proprietors were looking for Chinese American entertainment. But as you've already seen across the way in the exhibit, not everyone was actually full Chinese. And when I asked different people about why they had changed their names, and certainly when someone asked Ruby, why did you change your name? She says, I looked at the marquee and I thought about what had happened to a woman, Ethel Zimmerman, who saw her name up on the marquee and thought it looked too long. So she shortened it to Ethel Merman. And so this was something that people did. And certainly Dorothy Toy, who was the Chinese ginger Rogers had shortened her name to Toy to make it look shorter on the marquee. It would later have a good benefit for her and others. I think that there are other things that Ruby has that are different than with the other characters. She has grown up spending a lot of time in Terminal Island, down in Southern California, which had a large Japanese-American community, out in Oahu, a large Japanese-American community, in Alameda, a large Japanese-American community. But what did these three places also have in common? They all had naval bases and so lots of sailors. And so sailors love Ruby and Ruby loves sailors and just in general, men love Ruby and Ruby loves men. So three friends. And at one point, Ruby says something about women and friendship. She writes, or I wrote for her, a woman isn't just one thing. The past is in us, constantly changing us. Heartache and failure shift our perspectives as do joy and triumphs. At any moment or in any given day, we can be friends, competitors, or enemies. We can be generous or stingy, loving or petty, helpful or untrustworthy. So here they've arrived, 1938. And as you heard in the introduction, this nightclub era started really the very beginnings of it, 1936 and goes almost to 1970. So there was any time period that I could have set the novel. But as I looked at that long piece of history, I decided to settle on 1938 to 1948, one decade, no zero on the end, but a very important decade for us in America. You have the end of the depression, World War II, and then the introduction of television in a big way into our homes. And so these three things drastically change America. It changes how we looked at each other. It changes how we looked at the outside world. It's changed how we dressed, what we ate, how we looked at entertainment, how we spent our free time, what we did with our families. All of that changes in just 10 years. And when you first meet Grace, she has come out West hoping first to get a job at the Golden Gate International Exhibition, which was on Treasure Island. And this was San Francisco's second World's Fair. This was unlike other World's Fairs. The organizers decided to focus on countries that dotted the edge of the Pacific Ocean. And it's the very first time that the phrase Pacific Rim is ever used. And of course, that's so important to us today. So there are going to be people coming to San Francisco from all over the world to work in this fair. People coming from all over America to work in this fair. But more important than that, the organizers were hoping for tourists to come from all over the world and all over the country to visit the fair. And so all of San Francisco embarked on this kind of cleanup campaign. It's sort of like what we do when the Olympics are coming to town. You build new hotels, you spruce things up, you plant some trees. And Chinatown wanted to be a part of that. And so they launched what was called the Shine for 39 campaign. And really at the heart of that campaign was to erase some of the old stereotypes, most of which were already gone by 1938. These was to erase things like the ideas of opium gambling prostitution. Now interestingly, the same thing was going on down in Los Angeles in the exact same year. I'm from Los Angeles. And within two weeks in 1938, two new Chinatowns opened. Again, with the same purpose of sort of erasing all of these negative stereotypes and replacing it with a place where anyone by anyone, I mean white people could go and have dinner and buy a curio and have fun and have their picture taken. And it would be fun for them. And so within two weeks, there's first new Chinatown, now called old Chinatown, and then also China City. So here in San Francisco, similarly, this Shine for 39 campaign. And part of that campaign was to bring in people who would open up bars and nightclubs that would feature Chinese American entertainment. As I was doing the research, of course, I wanted to find people who had been there on opening night, who knew very specifically about these clubs, who knew in particular about the Forbidden City nightclub, which was the first Chinese American nightclub anywhere in the country to be outside of Chinatown. And so I'm gonna digress here and talk a little bit about my research. I, for the opening night, I went to Tucson and interviewed a woman named Mary Ong Tom. You can see her photo across the way. She assigns her name sometimes as Buchi. And when I interviewed her, she was 93. She's 96 today. When I first met her, she was still teaching jazzercise. So a pretty amazing woman. And she had had a very difficult childhood. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother had bound feet. They owned a little grocery store in Tucson, 20 by 20 square feet. She had 11 brothers and sisters. And so they were very poor, quite desperate. And a family friend who lived here in San Francisco sent Mary's mother the money to send Mary out here on a bus. And she came out here and she was so poor that she would walk everywhere because she couldn't afford the nickel to ride the bus. And finally, she got an audition at the Forbidden City. She had never danced before, but Charlie Lowe did hire her to be one of the original eight Forbidden City dancers. So she gave me these wonderful details. There were so many other people who helped me. Arthur Dong, who I mentioned earlier who organized this particular exhibit. Eddie Wong, who many of you may know, was for many years the executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Foundation. And I had worked with him on many projects over the years. But somebody else told him that I was working on this. And he called me up and he told me that when he had graduated from college back in 1978, he thought he wanted to be a playwright. And so his first play would be about this Chinese American scene. And he went out and interviewed about 15 people who had been performers. Again, 1978, today all of those people are gone. But he, and he never became a playwright. He never used that material. He never even transcribed it. But he sent all of it to me. So now I had all of these voices that had just been sitting in a drawer for many, many years. There's Trina Robbins, who had written a book early on and going out again and interviewing people, many of whom are gone today and able to use that. I also want to talk a little bit about the children of some of these people. I interviewed the son of the Chinese Frank Sinatra. I interviewed Joyce Narlock, who is here tonight, who is one of Charlie Lowe's stepdaughter. And she was so helpful to me, talking to me about her father. He was really a visionary who wanted to show Chinese American performers at their best. You have to remember not a lot of roles in movies, right? So if you were actually talented, where could you go? If you knew how to sing and dance and you had a passion, where could you go? And you could go to someone like Charlie Lowe who would hire you and showcase you. He was also extremely supportive of women with small children. And so in addition to people like Joyce and people like Michael Ching, I also talked to a woman named Jody Long, who's an actress today. Both of her parents were performers. They had a song and dance kind of comedy act that they did at the Forbidden City, at the China Doll, but they also traveled around the country going nightclub to nightclub. And always Joyce was with them. And so these little kids, not all exactly the same age, but they would play backstage at the Forbidden City and they had all these wonderful stories to tell me, but from a child's perspective, including that there was one of those little boys who liked to peek through the curtain to see the backside of the fan dancer and the bubble dancer. Okay, but of course the most important people that I interviewed were the actual performers. And we have some here tonight, but some of these people who were there from the very beginning. I think my favorite is a woman named Mai Tai Sing. And she again had had one of these very difficult childhoods, had been born in Los Angeles. When she was five, her family was so poor that they moved back to Hong Kong, but she must have been a pretty extraordinary little five-year-old because she kept saying to her father, I love glitter, I love glitter, I need to be in Hollywood. And for whatever reason, her father borrowed money and sent Mai Tai and her mother back to Los Angeles where they earned a living making paper cups, rolling paper cups at the kitchen table and selling them for two cents a dozen. By the time she was 13, she was supporting her entire family with her dancing. She had brought her entire family over from China. She is a woman who let's just say, cut a pretty wide swath. I think she slept with every man in Hollywood and then some. And on the very first book event for this book, I did an event in Pasadena, California, a man came through the line and he leaned down and he said, I knew Mai Tai. And I thought, well, I think you did. You know, it really seemed like you did. But then he went on to describe and list all these other people that she had slept with or had affairs with. And some of them were very, very, very famous. Anyway, at one point I asked her, Mai Tai, so what was your favorite costume in all the years that you were dancing? She said, oh, that was easy. It was a gown made out of 15 yards of monkey fur. Now, oh, I know, it's bad. But you couldn't make that up as a writer. You can't make up something like that. And that's one of those instances where fact really is stranger than fiction. And so the challenge for me was how to take a fact like that, which is so politically incorrect today. I mean, if you saw a dancer in 15 yards of monkey fur today, I don't even know what would happen. So how do you take a fact like that that was true to the time and make it so that people today can actually use it? I won't tell you whether I used it or not. Anyway, I have on my website a section that's called Step Into the World of the China Dolls. And it's on the page that's specific for the China Doll. And when you go there, I have gathered together interviews, some of the clips of these performers from movies and shorts. Some of them are just extraordinary. And you could find all of that stuff yourself on YouTube, but this is kind of like one-stop shopping. So the Forbidden City is going along pretty well. And all of these clubs are going along pretty well. And then Pearl Harbor comes along. And overnight, everything changes for our country, for the West, for San Francisco in particular, and for Chinese-Americans. Overnight, this city changes. And you have on the hills surrounding the city radar stations. They had tugboats that each night would bring these very heavy-duty nets from the San Francisco side over to the Sausalito side so that submarines couldn't get into the bay. During the day, they sent out blimps and planes to look for Japanese submarines just outside the Golden Gate Ridge. They never found a submarine, but they did, in real fact, sink several whales. This was a big defense-building area. And so you had people building ships, ambulances, tanks, trucks. At one point here in this city, you were producing one ship a day. Many of the people who worked in those factories were women, of course. This is where Rosie the Riveter was invented. But you also had a lot of Chinese-Americans who were, for the first time, getting jobs, men, I'm talking about, getting jobs outside of Chinatown. And I think of my own uncles, great uncles, who were down in Los Angeles. Some of them were pretty lucky. They'd been able to go to college. They'd gotten degrees in engineering, but no one would hire them. And once the war started, they were, for the first time, able to leave behind jobs as laundromats, dishwashers, waiters, bus, houseboys, and go and work in defense down there. And the same thing happened here. But also San Francisco became a liberty port. And so all of the men who were shipping out to the Pacific, all the men who were coming back from the Pacific, passed through San Francisco. And what do service men who know that there may not be a tomorrow? What is it that they want? Wine, women, and song. And as a woman yesterday at a lunch event, and she was about 80, and I said that, what do men want when they know that there's no tomorrow? She just called out, sex. But wine, women, and song might be a little more tasteful. So these clubs that have been going along all right, all of a sudden, it was just an explosion of business. And Chinatown was packed with people. And there were lines around the block to get into these various clubs. And shows, these clubs that had had maybe one or two shows now, had three packed shows every single night. At the same time, there are a lot of issues of racism and race. So here in the United States, we'd had the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which had barred the immigration of all Chinese immigrants to the United States. It also meant that Chinese could not become naturalized citizens. That was at the federal level. But there were also laws that were very particular to states. 28 states that had miscegenation laws. Other states that didn't allow Chinese down to a quarter to own property, certainly in this state. Other laws that targeted Chinese in very specific ways, that if you were Chinese and you owned a laundry, you paid a higher tax than if you were white and owned a laundry. Now, all of a sudden, China and the US were allies. And this law could no longer stand. And finally, after all of these years, it was overturned. And now, Chinese could become naturalized citizens. They could become drafted. And all of the things that had been held against the Chinese for so many years, all of these negatives suddenly shift over to the Japanese. And so all of that that had been leads eventually to internment. We had a lot of friends in my family who had been interned. And I grew up hearing these stories of internment. My grandfather had two best friends. He was a little group of three. One of them was Tyra Swong, the artist. There was a big retrospective of his work recently at the Disney Museum. The other one was a man named Benji Okubo, also an artist. And he was sent to Heart Mountain. My grandparents stayed in the house of the Okie family with my father, who was about 13 years old. And they stayed in the house of the Okie family to protect this house while the Okies were in Manzanar. And they stayed in that house until the war was over. And they could return the house and all of the family belongings back to the Okies. After the war, I had several uncles and great uncles who married women who had been in various camps. And so again, I had grown up hearing so many stories. But I wanted to find people who had been performers or who had wanted to be performers who had been sent to camps. And so I talked to Jody Long's mother, Trudy Long. And she was sent to camp when she was about 16. And she described to me how when she got off the bus, it was during a terrible, terrible sandstorm. And she put out her arm like this and she couldn't even see her hand. She was another one of these remarkable young women, kind of a dreamer. She wasn't a dancer, but she had a great love of Hollywood and gossip and this idea of nightclubs. And so she read all the magazines and all the columns and people like Walter Winchell. And one night, she took it upon herself to start writing to each of these people who had written columns in the movie magazines and the gossip magazines to see would one of them sponsor her at age 16 to leave the camp. And one of them did, Lee Mortimer, who was the nightcrawler editor for the New York Daily News, did sponsor her. He brought her to New York and eventually he got her a job as a dancer at the China Doll. There were also people like Goro Suzuki who was a very popular standup comedian who had played many clubs in San Francisco. And he was sent to Topaz and he applied to get permission to go out into the Midwest to places like Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit to continue doing his standup act. And he did get permission, but when he left the camp he changed his name from Goro Suzuki to Jack Sue. And he then went on to become a quite well-known actor on Broadway and eventually on television as the first Asian-American to have a regular, ongoing job in a television show on Barney Miller. And then there was Dorothy Toy. And Dorothy Toy, when I interviewed her, she was 93 years old, she's 97 today. And she was the Chinese, Ginger Rogers. Just an amazing person, I really recommend that you look up her performances on, again on YouTube or on my website. Very small, but very athletic, very beautiful dancer, but again an athletic dancer, strong. And when I talk to her, and I won't go into how she was caught, but when I talk to her she described how eventually she had gone through much of the war as the Chinese Ginger Rogers. Dorothy Toy sounded Chinese. No, she hadn't been sent to camp, but one of her friends ratted her out. And so the FBI and the War Relocation Authority came to her and they said, you know, you're famous, so we're going to give you a choice. Either we will send you to the camp where your family is, or we're going to, or you must leave the state, and that's what she did. And she spent the rest of the war traveling around the South with her sister, who was a singer, going from club to club. And what she said to me was, they'd never seen a Chinese, they'd never seen a Japanese, they didn't know the difference, I knew I'd be safe. So relationships, three women, friendship. I also have another triangle. Two women and a man, always complicated. I also thought a lot about the relationships that we have to our parents and our family, that these are the people who give us our very greatest gifts, but they're also the ones who give us our very greatest burdens. We often keep secrets from them, and they often keep secrets from us. And when those secrets come out, it can be so devastating. So even though I think in many ways, China Dolls is perhaps the fluffiest of the novels that I've written, I did write it, so there's an awful lot of darkness and a lot of secrets that will eventually come out. In my writing, I've been trying to follow three ideas, and this is my ninth book, I hope I'm getting better. The first two of these ideas come from the 17th century women writers in China, who had two beliefs. The first was, art is the heartbeat of the artist. And I believe that these books are my heartbeat, and these words that I write are my heartbeat. The other is that you have to cut to the bone to write. I don't know how many of you have read my books, but they can be pretty dark. And to go to some of those places, it's hard, it's hard for me. I try to approach it though as I do as a reader. And what I love as a reader is when you open up a book and you go in and you start to connect to those characters, whether they're real or imagined, and you think, what would I have done in that situation? What would I do in that situation? But by extension, really what you're doing is trying to connect to the human condition, to connect to what it means to be human, to connect to humanity. And so to get to that, to try to get to that, what it means to be human, that means you have to go deep and you have to go right down to the bone. And the last piece is something that I got from Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. And I use this as the epigraph in my very first book On Gold Mountain, which is about my family. And he wrote An Angle of Repose. And when I used this in On Gold Mountain, I had no idea the impact that it was going to have on me that I would continue to sort of follow this to today. So what he wrote was, fooling around in the papers, my grandparents, especially my grandmother left behind, I get glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize, but don't completely comprehend. I'd like to live in their clothes for a while. And that's what I've been trying to do, just live in their clothes for a while. And for me, that's been an honor and a privilege. Thank you.