 Testing one, two, testing one, two, testing one, two. Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us on this cool breezy summer night. Here at the Mechanics Institute at 57 Post Street, post sweltering heat wave. We are very pleased to welcome you to our program with Julia Flynn-Seiler for her new book, The White Devil's Daughters, The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown. And Julia will be in conversation with writer Bani Tsui. Before we begin, I'd like to find out how many of you are new to the institute, who's never been here before. Welcome, wonderful. So I'd like to encourage you to come back on Wednesday at noon and take the free tour of the library, which is on the second and third floors. You'll see our international chess club, which is right down the hallway. And you'll get an introduction to our events and programs, which are many, with author events, weekly, and our cinema film series on Friday night. The library has a multitude of book clubs and book groups and writers groups. Proust group tonight, as a matter of fact. And then the chess club has its ongoing tournaments and classes for chess. So please join us, become part of our ever-growing cultural family here at 57 Post Street. Also, before we begin, I'd like to make mention that our upcoming programs include our annual Bloomsday celebration with readings of James Joyce's Ulysses with Celtic music and song. And also, we celebrate the 200th birthday of Walt Whitman on June 29th, Saturday night, down in the data bar. We will be having a happy birthday Walt Whitman celebration. And we will be doing a reading of Leaves of Grass. It's an entirety of Song of Myself. And that's with actors and singers and music and the audience. So please join us at the data bar on Saturday the 29th. Now I'd like to introduce our guests. Julia Flynn-Syler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her most recent book is Lost Kingdom, Hawaii's Last Queen, The Sugar Kings and America's First Imperial Adventure. Her first book, The House of Mandavi, The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, was a finalist for the James Beard Award and the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Reporting. A veteran journalist, Syler is a long-time contributor and a former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal and has been a commentator on BBC, CNBC and CNN. And Bonny Tsu-Yi is a long-time contributor to the New York Times and the author of the award-winning American Chinatown. She has written about Michelin Street Food, Hong Kong's rooftop farmers, the world's first surf film, shark fin soup, the Baghdad swim team and other intriguing topics for the California Sunday, pop-up magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and other publications. And she has an upcoming book titled Why We Swim, which will be published by Algonquin. Also before we start, I would like to acknowledge our generous co-sponsors. First, we'd like to thank Lit Quake, Jane Ganal and Jack Bollewar co-directors for their participation tonight and just to remind everyone that the upcoming festival is October 10th through 19th. Also, we welcome the Chinese Historical Society of America. Thanks for coming. California Historical Society and also the Cameron House. So please, much thanks to all our co-sponsors tonight. And please welcome Julia Flynn-Seiler and Bonnetsui. For hosting us tonight and all the co-sponsors, I also want to give a shout out to the weather gods that this event was not last night because we're on the fourth floor and it would have been a little bit of a greenhouse, so it's breezed for tonight. Anyway, I'm so happy to be here with my pal, Julie, to help launch this terrific book into the world. Many of you know this, but I will give a little bit of this backgrounder. The White Devil's Daughters explores the little-known history of the missionary women who ran what was essentially a safe house in Chinatown for Chinese women and girls who were trafficked into slavery. A lot of people were behind these efforts, and the friendship of two major characters were the central, I guess, the friendship. I guess the anchor is this book, and I think that that is a really special thing. Donaldina Cameron, born in New Zealand to a Scottish sheep farmer, and Tianfu Wu, a former household slave who was sold by her father in China to pay his gambling debts. Lots of people have said lots of great things, praising this book. I will join them in saying that this is a really meticulously and deeply researched book, and it's a real pleasure to read and to get a sense of that when you're reading the pages that these people are real, and there's life in them, and there's reason to be talking about them now. Thank you, Connie. So you spent more than five years bringing this book to life. I feel like we always have to start any discussion with the title. Tell us about the White Devil's Daughters. Absolutely. We went back and forth, my editor and I, literally for about a year about the title, and we decided on this one, which is a little edgy, I think, but the idea was that Donaldina Cameron was so effective with her team of people of disrupting the business of human trafficking that she got the nickname, the White Devil. And this was in the papers of the time, and even the Presbyterian magazine at the time used that expression. And her daughters referred to the many thousands of women and girls who came through the home, some of whom called her literally mother or lo-mo, old mother. So that's where the title comes from. I have so many great photos in the book that I wanted to refer to them. Is Mark here? Our tech support. Well, that's okay. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. We will be talking about some great photos in the book. But maybe we'll start by talking about how you came to discover this story and why you wanted to devote five years of your life to it. Sure. I was born and raised in the Bay Area. I'm a local girl. And I wanted to write a book about the history of San Francisco. And the challenge was how do you tell the story of a city that is so complex, but even more importantly, many of the records documenting its history prior to 1906 were destroyed in that. Oh, is it not? Can you hear me better now? You can't hear me. Thank you very much for letting me know that. Now we know where the tech support guy disappeared, too. He obviously realized there was a need for a little help here. So thank you for letting me know. I'm going to start that answer again. Hello. Is this better? Yeah. Okay. I apologize. You couldn't hear. So Bonnie asked me the question of why did I devote five years plus to writing this book and what inspired me to write it? And as I was starting to say, I was born and raised in the Bay Area. I wanted to write a history of our city and our area. And I quickly realized that one of the great challenges with so many records were destroyed in 1906. And I came across Donaldina Cameron's first person account of leading 50 or 60 girls and women across the burning city. And it was so vivid that I thought, why don't I know more about her? I probably seem her name somewhere, but I didn't know very much about her. And I quickly realized that there were a lot of primary materials to work with to tell the story and particularly to tell the story of the city through a single structure, through a single house, seemed like a really kind of novel way to approach this idea. Right. It's the house, the architecture. I mean, we could start with the house and the people who came through it. And one of the things we wanted to talk about, the image is lacking, but you can look in your books that you're going to purchase later. And we wanted to talk about what Chinatown looked like at the start of your book. Sure. What was it like? Absolutely. Who was there? I'll even take a step back from that. What was San Francisco like? What was San Francisco? My book begins in the 1870s and specifically in March of 1873, when a fairly small group of women wearing bonnets and corsets and ankle length gowns made their way across Union Square, which was then a residential area. It was planted in palms and there were paths. And they came to hear a missionary, a woman missionary, talk about girls in China and the condition of girls in China. And to take a step back, this was a time, let's see, March of 1873. So in August of that year, the first cable car would roll up the hills of San Francisco. Many of the streets were cobbled. At night time, there were gas lamps. The city was probably most famous for its vice district, which was known as the Barbary Coast, and adjacent to the vice district was Chinatown, which was a tightly packed ghetto of approximately eight blocks, where some 12,000 people lived. And it didn't look like the Chinatown we know now. It was wooden tenements, the stores were on the ground floor, and then up above, mostly men would live. And it was so compact and so crowded that a single bunk would have three different men sleeping in at different times, eight hours at a stint. And the most striking thing about San Francisco, and particularly Chinatown in the early 1870s, was there were so few women on the streets. It was a city of men. In fact, one of the newspapers at the time called it a cussetist place for women. What I love about the pre-earthquake photos of Chinatown, and there aren't really, I mean, we don't see them very much, but when you look in the book, you look at the neighborhood and you think, this is not the modern idea of Chinatown, and there's nothing... I think it's important to realize that the architecture of Chinatown, as we understand it today, is something that was kind of wholly manufactured after the earthquake. You know, after the earthquake devastated San Francisco, and especially the neighborhood. And Bonnie, you write about that so beautifully in American Chinatown. Well, thank you. But really, I mean, it is so much about how a people are viewed is what the representation is, right? And so is it self-representation, or is it externally constructed? And part of this story of what Chinatown looked like is a response to racism. And so I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit in terms of how the environment that these women were living in. Yes. So California was perhaps at its peak of racist animus towards the Chinese in the 1870s. That was about two decades after the gold rush had ended, and a number of people, particularly white people, felt the Chinese were stealing jobs. The Sandlot riots took place in 1877. Dennis Kearney was one of its leaders. And just a few months or 15 months before those church ladies first made their way across Union Square in 1873, there were lynchings of Chinese in Los Angeles. It was a shocking, shocking episode. So there was virulent racism, and the most despised people, certainly in the city of San Francisco, were the Asian women, many of whom at that point had been imported by traffickers to need the demand for sex, both from white men and Chinese men. I want to talk about a lot of the language around Chinese and Chinese immigrants and the Chinese community at that time really came out after the earthquake, raised the city and raised the neighborhood. And I mean, I'm still shaken when I think about the way that the authorities flush out the population, use the earthquake as an excuse to flush out the population. I think it was the Oakland Tribune. They talked about ridding the city of this filth, and it's shocking to our ears. Well, it is shocking to our ears, except that it is also shockingly relevant now because I think one of the things I want to talk about with this book is that there's so much resonance today, and how could you have predicted this when you started doing this project? Well, I didn't, and one way to look at this book is a story of how we treat immigrants, and this was a small group of mostly women supported by men and supported by some institutions that were very actively going against the racism and the prejudices at the time to reach out a hand to very vulnerable people. And those people were immigrants. And so, yeah, who would have known that it would be so relevant today? I really find the phrase of women's work for women really compelling. Can you tell us a little bit about who said that and sort of what they meant by that? Sure. So the women who gathered in 1873 decided they wanted to do something about the Asian women in San Francisco who had been trafficked. And so they decided to set up a safe house for them, essentially a rescue home for them. And in the very first annual report, which I have a very good fortune, they're all capped about a mile from our house at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, all of these records, the very first annual report described this work. And what they said they were doing was women's work for women. So it was very feminist. And it's so interesting, Bonnie, when you talk about language, they did not use the words, of course, human trafficking. They did not use the words feminism, but that's exactly what was going on. Those were some of the currents that were occurring in their movement. And it was really a movement of compassion. I think we should talk about Dolly Cameron. Okay. In the photos in the book, she's very strict. Yes. And serious. And it's hard to know what to attribute to that, too. I mean, if you think about how still you had to sit for photos back, you had to be super still. But she did this very serious work. But you were able to uncover these... Oh, we have the photos. Thank you, Mark. Actually, I do want to talk about this photo. This photo is... Go back a little bit. This photo is from... If I'm not mistaken, it's from the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. And it is... I don't know what the date is. Do you remember what the date was? It's pre-earthquake. So it's sometime in the late 19th century. She identifies this woman as a prostitute looking through a doorway in Chinatown. And I mean, really what strikes me about this photo the most is that she looks like a girl. She looks like a kid. And so maybe we'll come back to the other question. And to reflect on your observation, she looks so young. The average age of the young women, the girls who were being imported during the 19th century, was 12, 13, 14 years old. And the average life expectancy of those girls was perhaps four years. So they were very, very young. And there was a period of time and there were reports in the newspapers about how they were being auctioned off on... openly on the streets, which is stunning considering this happened after the Civil War and after the 13th Amendment was passed. Let's get to the next picture. Next picture, which is the earthquake, I believe. Pretty iconic. I'm sure we've all seen these amazing photos. Well, we're back at the earthquake. So can I say one thing about this photograph? Yes. And I think you may recognize it. But what's astonishing about this photograph is it was taken literally about 100 feet from the home. Cameron House, the site of Cameron House, what is now known as, is 920 Sacramento Street. This is taken right above that on Sacramento Street. So this is really the perspective from that actual building, which I find really amazing. And it was taken by a photographer that many of you may have heard of before. His name was Arnold Genthe. He was a German photographer and he became friends with Donaldina Cameron and took a number of extraordinary photographs of the girls and women in the home. And it was quite a resource to learn about his story and his friendship. Well, he photographed Chinatown and the Chinese community extensively and his photographs were published widely. And you talk about him in the book. Again, there's this complication with the white gays or the outsider gays on the Chinese community and also with this, you know, we have to talk about this idea of the white savior complex. I mean, how did you grapple with those issues in the writing of this book? Sure. Well, Arnold Genthe, I wanted to make a character because he had these extraordinary photographs, probably the most important collection of pre-earthquake, as you say, Chinatown photographs. And he knew Donaldina Cameron and he had written first-person accounts of the home. So he was a very good voice to include in the narrative. That said, just as important was seeking out Chinese voices and looking at the Chinese newspapers, which I would say that some of the earlier biographers did not do as much. And particularly, there's an extraordinary churchman-turned-crucating journalist named Nung Pun Chu, who married a young woman from the mission home and then had a long, decades-long relationship. As he became a crusader for Chinese American civil rights, he also supported many of the same feminist and other mission of the mission home. And in your sort of... Oh, and may I address the issue of a white savior complex? Okay. So there's been very important work done about Donaldina Cameron's. I'm sure everybody knows. In the 1970s, there was an article in Pacific Historian, which was a reappraisal of Donaldina Cameron following some biographies that had come out, and pointed out rightly so that she was not as culturally sensitive as she might have been. She was a Victorian woman. She was born in the 1860s. And certainly the demeaning language that is contained in the annual reports describing the home was very common at the time. So the larger criticism of some scholars is that we should look more critically at Donaldina Cameron as a white woman, a white Protestant woman rescuing Chinese or other people, because not all the women and girls came through the home were Chinese. Some of them were from Japan and other places. And I would answer to that that I was very, very conscious in my research of this issue, and that's why I decided to flip the story in many ways and look at it instead through the women and girls who came through the home to focus just as much on their stories and talk about agency. How did they get to the home? In fact, the first scene of the book, the prologue, is about a teenage girl who had been trafficked finding her own way to the home. So I would say that acknowledging the role of the Chinese staffers in the home also was something that I brought a 21st century view into the story. And I think one of the strengths of the book is that it talks about this work as a partnership. Yes. You know, it's a partnership between the who holds the power, right, who is able to do this work and also who in the community, and there were many in the community who tried very much to, I mean, they were successful and so there was a lot of resistance, hence the title of the book. But that, you know, these women, the women who are being trafficked themselves, they really, you elucidate how they work together to free themselves from their situations that were very problematic. And I think maybe we can skip to the next slide, Mark, which is a photo of the women and girls of the mission home, which was, yeah, I think we, let's talk about this photo a little bit because we see Donaldina Cameron right there. So that's Donaldina Cameron, her very old fashioned bouffant hairstyle, which she never really gave up. When she first came to the home in 1895, she had been hired as a sewing teacher. She was red haired, she was flame haired, and she had just come off of a broken engagement. And so this was going to be a nice job arranged for her by family friends. And almost immediately she realizes that that is not the case. There was a bomb threat very shortly after she got there. Someone who left sticks of dynamite around the house. She quickly realized also that the girls and young women who were in the home had been deeply traumatized. And it's not clear that she really knew what she was getting into before she walked in. And one of the things that to me is so striking about this photograph, which comes, I think this comes from the California State Archives, is how young those girls are. They're extraordinarily young. So just to make clear, not all of the women who were being trafficked were being trafficked for sex. Some of them were trafficked as mutesi. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Muiti. Mutesi. And they, in other words, they were being trafficked as child servants. And when they came of age, they might be sold into prostitution, forced prostitution. But this is so stunning how little they are, I think. And you can see some of the women are clearly the staffers who worked closely with Donaldina Cameron. Is, I can't remember if Tan Fu-Wu is in this picture. I don't think she is, but I see Tai Liang shoots, over on the left-hand side at the back with the kind of the sash around her hair. Yeah. Do you want to tell our audience a little bit about her? Sure. There's just, one of the great pleasures of doing this book was discovering some of the extraordinary women who found their freedom through this house. And one of them, her name was Tai Liang. And she was an extraordinarily smart girl and quickly soaked up all of the education that was offered at the home and was offered a job at Angel Island Immigration Station shortly after it opened. In fact, she became the first Chinese-American to work in the immigration services. She had quite an unusual path because she fell in love with a Caucasian immigration officer, a man by the name of Schultz. And they went to Washington State to marry because in California it was against the law for Chinese people to marry white people. They came back to California, both were promptly fired from the immigration services because they had broken the law. And I have quite a beautiful photograph. I was so thrilled to get this photograph actually shared with me by Professor Judy Jung, who was super helpful. And there's a photograph of Tai Liang Schultz behind the wheel of a great big automobile. And it was from one of the newspapers and they were describing her as a progressive Chinese woman. And the funny thing was that I hear from Judy that she actually Tai, or tiny, never learned to drive. It was a publicity stunt staged. Can we see the next photo? All right, Dolly. Dolly. Which she is probably in her finest. Right, I think this was her shining moment here, right, for Glamrsha. Yes. You, oh, so we started talking a little bit about how her personality came out to you through letters. Yes. And she spoke to you that way. So I want to hear about that. Yes. I did my research in many, many wonderful research libraries. Stanford in particular, UC Berkeley, the Bancroft Library, Yale, the Philadelphia Historical Society. And there were a number of letters, particularly between her and one of her closest friends and staffers. And her personality very much came through. She had a very, very warm heart despite her kind of stern demeanor, I think. And what, the place that I really came to understand her was having the good luck to find audio recordings made very late in her life of her telling her story, both at Yale and, well, actually, no, that one was not at Yale. It was at Stanford. And her voice was what convinced me to go ahead with this project. What does she sound like? I mean, I feel like when you hear someone's voice from so long ago, it's really magical and powerful. And you feel that you know them through how their voice is. And so I just wanted to share that a little bit. I was concerned she was going to be a Bible thumper, you know, a Kerry Nation super stern Bible thumper that I wasn't going to like spending five years with, honestly. And her voice, in fact, was super gentle. And she focused on teen, her lifelong friend. And that's what touched my heart, really. And likewise, at Berkeley, I found the audio recording made by the wonderful historian, him Mark Lai, probably the last recording ever made of Teen Foo Woo, who was her lifelong, or who was her long friend. And hearing Teen's voice was incredible. And it actually was kind of a family business because I had our older son transcribe all of those interviews for me. So he heard them, too. He probably has a very, very close relationship in his mind, too, with them after transcribing all of their words. And what did she sound like? I mean, I just find that so magical. I'm so compelled by that. She sounded, she has an obvious sense of humor, for one thing. A little bossy to me, just a tiny bit. And partly my view now is colored by all the other things I know about her and all the other materials about Teen. But it was her humor that, again, made me think she's worth spending a lot of time with. How did they talk about in these interviews about the work that they did? Because it's really interesting to think about how they viewed their work at that time. Again, it's weird looking at through this lens today. And it's, you know, rear-looking, but also forward-looking. And so I wonder how they framed that work. Dolly surprisingly framed it in very, very personal terms. My daughters, my Teen, I remember Teen when she was little bit little. I remember how honest she was. I remember super personal, her talking about her work. And again, God didn't come into it even though I know she was a woman of faith. She didn't talk about that at all. And Teen talked about it, but a lot of the focus of him, Mark Lies, recording with her was the moment when she was sold by her father to pay his gambling debts and her memories of that. And it really isn't an absolutely incredible thing. One of the challenges of writing a book like this is that so few of the women and girls who were trafficked left behind oral or written records of any sort. Besides the official perhaps immigration records, maybe. But very few of these vulnerable women left first-person accounts behind. And that's what I tried to gather in this book. Let's hear them talk about their experiences. I realize that we haven't actually talked about what it was like to escape and how harrowing that could be. And in the very opening pages of the book, you set that scene so beautifully. And so I wonder if we could talk about the sort of logistics of how this would happen. Sure. So the beginning of the book is set in 1933 in December. It's a teenage girl whose traffickers have brought her to a beauty shop to have her hair done before an engagement with some men. And she's left alone at the beauty shop for about a half an hour. And she'd heard, she'd been warned not to go to the house on Sacramento Street. And she decides to make a run for it. So in that case, she saved herself. She got herself out of this absolutely terrible situation where she'd been repeatedly raped for months. She would, anyways. In other instances, the staffers of the mission home, usually Donald D. Nutt, plus Chinese aid to translate, plus a policeman or detective would receive notice through a letter or some other ways that there was a girl in trouble. And they would go to the home or the apartment or the brothel. Sometimes they would climb ladders, scramble through skylights, and rescue them, you know, physically lifting them out of a situation. Other times they would break down doors. They didn't always behave in a totally legal fashion. And other times, you know, they would be engaged in incredible court battles again and again and again trying to protect the girls or get custody of the girls. What did those court battles look like? I mean, I was really fascinated by the extent to which they had to fight those battles and, you know, legal battles. And at the same time, they're carrying on this logistical challenge of removing them physically from dangerous situations they had to. They were pioneers in the courtroom. Yes. Yes, they were. And I was also surprised by that. And that so much of the perseverance and sheer kind of force of will happened in those courtrooms. And they were aided by men who volunteered their legal help to try to fight these battles. But the traffickers also often had very, very good legal counsel and often got the girls back. What are the, we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, what are the, you know, given all of these charged, you know, and very salient topics now. I mean, this book is a story about how we treat immigrants and how this question persists over and over and over again over successive waves of immigrants to this country. You know, there are stories of, you know, there are the idealistic stories that we hear about this country and we, I think, many of us believe in those. And then there are the realities of how there's always been, always been resistance to every single wave of immigrants that comes this country or resistance against the, and a xenophobia that is just really vitriolic and can surprisingly seem like this broken record that just goes on and on and on. So how do you see this book as contributing to, I don't know, some kind of hope for understanding or hope for the reconciliation of the tension of those two ideas that we hold in this country. I mean, it's just this fabric of this country. I think one thing is that it was a relatively small number of people who organized to bring about change and it began in a very small way. It began with a house and a place that was safe for vulnerable girls and women to go to. And then it did spread. It's spread and they, you know, one of the great joys of writing this book is to watch the gradual, what's the right word? The gradual increase in power both of women, when they started this house in the 1870s, of course, women couldn't vote. Women couldn't hold property as far as I know. Women had very little financial power. Yet they did this anyways, because it was part of a bunch, you know, upswing and charitable works by women and women organizing. And then as we pass through the decades, we see kind of step by step the rights for women and also rights for the Chinese. And by the time the book ends in the 1940s, all of a sudden the Chinese Exclusion Act is gone as a result of the Second World War in part, but also a lot of legal battles fought for many, many years. And some of those same women were involved with those. Yeah, I really like that idea of the daily acts of heroism that are small and quiet, but then, you know, there's an accretion of that and a gathering of momentum that can really, and this book is an example of how big change can happen from. Anyway, so I take hope from that. So I want everyone to. It does feel overwhelmingly discouraging when we have systematic discrimination and policies that are so awful towards immigrants. And I hope this book is a little bit of a tonic for that, that small groups can make changes that are positive. I guess this is a good time to advance to the next slide. Our partner in crime. Our partner in crime. So shall I tell you who this is? Please do. Okay, I just love this photograph. This is a photograph of Teen Foo Woo. This is the girl who was sold by her father in the 1890s, arrived in San Francisco around 1894, ended up in a brothel working as a servant, was abused by her owners, was burned badly, and her plight came to the recognition of police and the police brought her to 920 Sacramento Street. And she didn't like Donalina Cameron very much when she first met her at all. She resented the newcomer. She had gotten there 15 months before Donalina had gotten there. And she was first, let it be known. Yes. And she was probably my favorite character in the book because she left behind such a rich record of playing in the basement of 920 Sacramento Street at the turn of the century, bearing birds, walking around on platform, kind of what they pretended were platforms, as if they were, you know, playing with other girls. I'm not being very articulate about this. But this particular photograph I love because as you probably noticed, the suit doesn't fit her very well. The sleeves are too long. It looks a little bit too big on her. Well, she's on her way to go to Philadelphia. And she was one of the very few of these girls and women who found a sponsor. And she was sent to a very elite school in Philadelphia and ended up going to college as well. And then she eventually tried to go back to China to find her family. And there was such a tumult, and there was so much chaos in China she never could locate her family. So she came back to 920 Sacramento Street and she worked with Donalina Cameron for almost 40 years. And beyond that, she, I mean, Donalina Cameron could not have done her job at all without Teen and without the other staffers who were there. I want to, the fact that Aunty Wu and Dolly stayed friends for the rest of their lives beyond the work at the Mission Home was, I think, that really moved me because their friendship was so deep and so enduring. I just want to talk about that a little bit because they were great, great friends. They were great friends. They were great partners. There was a vast amount of business correspondence between the two of them, but they would often assign their letters love or hugs to you or take care of yourself or there's a lot of affection between them as well. And that they occupied roles that were outside of the ones that were prescribed for women at the time. That they had unconventional lives and had, you know, neither of them married. And yet they were able to lead very full lives that at the time, you know, many people would have said like, you know, they're spinsters, they're this, they're that, and look what they did. Look what they accomplished. Yeah. And they testified in front of legislators. They went to Washington. They became public persona, both of them. And they, you know, can you imagine basically a child who'd been sold traveling around the country on business in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s? Well, 1920s, 1930s. Right. Yeah. The final slot, I think, is of the home. Do you have any sort of last thoughts about the building itself? I mean, we talked about that. We started with the building. It's the story of a house. And this is the history of it and its people. I don't know. You probably got quite an affection for it. I have quite an affection for it. This is a photograph I took about a year ago. And actually somebody who grew up in Cameron House and who volunteers there today was holding over the, opened the door a little bit so you could see the numbers on it. And it's made with clinker bricks. How many people here know what clinker bricks? Probably everybody. So clinker bricks, for those of you clinker bricks are bricks that were salvaged from the 1906 earthquake and they're misshapen. And this was a very hastily thrown up building right in 1907, 1908. It was one of the first buildings in the neighborhood to go up. Very blocky. The people who lived and worked there complained that it was freezing cold in the summer and the winter. And it's probably most famous these days because some people think it's haunted. And in fact, you know, kids talk about it. And if you go down the basement where the food is kept for the food pantry, there is kind of what looks like a tunnel. It's probably an old coal chute up to the street. But generations of kids have talked about the tunnels out of Cameron House. So it's a very, very special place. It is a key social services agency in Chinatown with most of you know. I want to leave time for questions. But I guess I'll close with the question for you first, which is what do you want people to come away with with this book? Well, I hope it's inspiring. I know it grapples with a dark, dark chapter of our history and one that's a shameful chapter of our collective American history. That said, you know, I hope that people come away and think maybe we should treat immigrants better. Maybe there are models for humanely reaching out to vulnerable people in our country's history as well. I think that's a great note to end on. Thank you, Julie. Thank you. I'd like to know what was conceived of as the purpose of the home beyond rescue because apparently if they accepted new people, people also moved on. Was there a plan for that? And it seems that there was a plan also for lobbying to change laws. So what was the overall purpose conceived of as? Well, these were good Victorians who set up this home. Victorian church women for the most part. Eventually, the home served as a de facto marriage bureau. There was a great disproportionate number of men in the West Coast and particularly in San Francisco compared to Chinese women. And this is where you could find Chinese women. So there were marriages that came out of the home and there was hope that these marriages would produce families of good Christian Chinese Americans. That didn't always happen, but there were a lot. There's this incredible diaspora of Cameron House families across the country. Question here. Thank you. What in the course of your research, Julie, knocked your socks off that you were not expecting? Ooh. Well, one of my favorite little finds was the Panama Pacific Exposition. There was a kind of shocking exhibit that caused quite a lot of anger in Chinatown and it was initially called, I think it might have been called Underground Chinatown. And it exploited the idea that in Chinatown you could go through tunnels and you could see slave girls and you can see people smoking opium and it was a tourist attraction as part of the fair. And so a number of leaders in Chinatown at that time signed angry petitions saying, this is racist, this is wrong. We need to change this and shut this down. And one of my great delights was going through the papers of the Exposition at the Bancroft Library. And sure enough, there is Donaldina Cameron who's one of the few white people who signed those signs. And so it was Teen Woo Foo Woo. She signed too, as did the newspaper editor that I focus on quite a bit. So that was great. And it eventually was changed to Underground Slumming, but there were still slave girls. Question in the back. The story is wonderful. Charles Wobbleforth was a great Christian abolitionist who spent his life in London and knowing there was somebody like this in San Francisco that was driven by action, not just words. What was the danger? Was it ever fire bombed or attacked? Because clearly this interfered with a source of income for a lot of people. Absolutely. It disrupted the business of human trafficking. There were sticks of dynamite placed around the home. There were shots fired at the nearby Methodist home, which was a rival safe house. The women were spat at. The women were sued. The women were slandered. And that happened for decades, those kind of attacks. Question here. Thank you so much for tonight's talk. Emily Murase, Department of the Status of Women, joined by Women's Commissioner Julie Sue, and I want to acknowledge Reverend H.E.C. retired from Cameron House. My question is about funding. How was this home funded and what strategies did they use to raise money? It's an extraordinary story that really rings true to me in trying to support a variety of nonprofits in our city now in that they were always begging for money. And basically, you know, they were about a block and a half. The home was about a block and a half from the top of Nob Hill. It was very close to the Fairmont Hotel, very close to some of the grandest salons in the city. Donald and Dina Cameron would go up there and have tea with those ladies and beg for money. I mean, that's essentially what happened. And one of the very, a number of society women supported the home at the beginning, particularly Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the Gamble family, which is very prominent at the time in Palo Alto. But going through the records, the church records, there were gifts that ranged from one jam jar or one quilt to, you know, $250 from that crusading editor of the Chinese Western Daily. So there were all kinds of gifts and they ranged. So thank you for asking that. Question here. Thank you for writing the book. I'd like to know how much information you learned about the underground tunnels, because I'm with the Chinese Historical Society, and baby boomers have come in and talked about using those tunnels. And I'm very curious. Well, I'm not an expert on the tunnels. Maybe someone in this room is. I do believe that some of the sense of the tunnels have to do with the geography of Chinatown and the fact that it's built on hills, and so it gives the appearance of tunnels. But we have an expert on Chinatown here. So I'm going to turn the question over to you. I'm going to punt that. I don't know a lot about the tunnels, the architecture of the tunnels, but I know that there were certainly, you know, that alleyways were the, you know, oftentimes the default ways for getting, you know, to and from places hidden in your book. You talk about how there were shortcuts for people to, well, some of the girls to flee to safety in those alleyways. And they would sort of navigate their way to freedom sometimes in that respect. So again, I don't know about tunnels, but I know about alleys. And actually this seems like a good time to point out our Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory cookies, fortune cookies in Ross Alley. This is supporting local businesses near and dear to my heart because my grandfather, my uncle, worked in a Fortune Cookie Factory in New York's Chinatown when I was growing up. And he hand folded the cookies with his fingers bandaged to protect against the hot dough the same way that they still do this at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. And that's why they're so delicious because they're made with blood, sweat, and tears. But they're really special. And I was really excited that Julie was bringing them. So they are in a bowl over there for you to take with you. Please help yourself. Question front row? Yes. According to family history in Bancroft, who was a California historian, it was actually my great, great, great grandmother, Emily Amanda Gray, who started this Chinese home for rescued girls. And it went through several names, of course, by the time that Donald Dino Cameron came there. But they were big Presbyterians. Daniel Gray gave a full block in San Francisco to Children's Hospital, and he gave another one to the San Francisco Theological Seminary, which then sold that, I guess, to go on over to San Enselmo. But there's a huge list of things that they did. And so I'm going to look a little more into it and go over to Cameron House and see what information they have. Thank you for sharing that. That's really interesting to hear. Yes. I have one. So I'm assuming a lot of this started with Cooley Labor, which is known as yellow slavery to some. But is that pretty much correct? I mean, how the Chinese came over here was mostly, wasn't that for labor? They came to build the railways. Right. Much of the infrastructure work in the state. When did that actually begin? Well, that would be right around the gold rights. That's what I was thinking. And then very quickly, a little more about Angel Island, because there was an immigration station, but it was also kind of an internment. There's a jail still there. I'd like to know a little bit more about the process of how they came over here, whether it was forced or it was their choice or a combination. So starting up until about 1910, the steamers would pull into the Embarcadero, and there was a particular area. It was a big warehouse, a big wooden warehouse, where particularly Asian immigrants were kept as they passed through the process, the immigration process. And it was a very, very unsanitary, nasty, horrible place. So the alternative was Angel Island, and that opened around 1910, 1911. And I think you were absolutely right that a number of those immigrants ended up there for months, if not longer. And there are still stories of people's grandparents who had very long stays there, and there's been amazing work by local historians documenting that, including Judy Young and Eddie Wong, I should say, yeah. Question in the back. Thank you for writing this book, truly. Thank you. Through your research in Ms. Cameron's writings, what's your take on how she would perceive our present policies, especially with immigration? What do you think she would react? Oh. Thank you. Well, that's such a wonderful question. It's one of those questions I'd like to give more thought to. My first reaction to it would be that she would be familiar, very familiar with the dynamics of it, and overcrowded conditions, corrupt immigration authorities, and chaos, because that's what it was like in San Francisco at the 19th century. But it's a provocative, important question you ask, and I probably would like to give it some more thought. So thank you. Question here. Thank you again for the book. I just wanted to, when Bonnie mentioned her gung gung, so my gung gung was a furrier in San Francisco, and he was born in San Francisco in 1892. And in coming to this event, I reviewed Eddie Wong's writing about the broken blossom and the teenage girl in the opening of the book who escapes, and that's where the lawsuits came to sue the traffickers. But my grandfather, I think Eddie showed these photos of some of the women traffickers who were decked out in furs because they made so much money off of these girls. And so it made me wonder now, and I want to do some research, whether or not my grandfather actually sold furs to these women. Most of his clientele were white in Marin County and in Pacific Heights. So, but this just raises a lot of issues. And as San Francisco talks about having women statues and women heroes, I've always thought about Donald Dina Cameron. So I'm hoping that your book provides the impetus to have Tin Woo and Donald Dina Cameron as the women icons in San Francisco. I love that idea. Yay! Thank you, Julie. Looking forward to reading the book. Thank you. Some stories in there that are pretty close to my heart. I didn't expect this. My grandmother was rescued in the 1890s. She was matched with my grandfather. And my grandfather used to sell nickel samples of opium for the tourists as they came through Chinatown. Not fortune cookies, but the real stuff. So, but the question I really have for you is, was it an advantage for her to be white and how far did her influence extend politically, socially, religiously? That's a lot of stuff, but what should you take on that? And probably in your book, I'm sure. First of all, thank you so much for sharing your family story. I got, as we say in Hawaii, chicken skin hearing you talk about that. Thank you very much. I think for Donald Dina, absolutely was an advantage to be white because Chinese Americans had no rights at all. They didn't have any rights. So it had to be other people who stood up for them. And certainly Donald Dina became not only a statewide figure, but a national figure who testified and spoke all over the country. So, I don't know, Bonnie, what do you think about that? Thank you for sharing your story. I feel like I'm still recovering from it. I mean, because it's when it's our family stories, it's really powerful to read history, but when it is your own history tied in that, it makes it even ever more meaningful. And you kind of want to find out more. And I don't know. I have to think about this. This will be our last, you have a question? Last question. Comment. Last comment. Thank you. So Harry Chuck's comment is very personal and it is talked about in his film, Chinatown Rising. So I'm going to see. Hope everybody can get a chance. A couple weeks. I can't wait. Yeah, July 6th. 11 a.m. Hope everybody can get a chance to view that because it's touching for the community. It's just really talks about how community members were drawn together with leadership. With leadership from the heart with Harry. The name of the movie, the film is Chinatown Rising and Harry can talk more about it. Excuse me. There's going to be a screening on July 6th. It's a Saturday. It'll be in Japantown at a small theater called New Peoples. There'll be four screenings on that day. So check out our website, Chinatown Rising Notespaces.com. Absolutely. I can't wait. I will be there at 11 a.m. Thank you. This is the Reverend Harry Chuck. So I'm so honored you're here. Thank you. All right. I want to thank Julia Flynn-Syler and Bonnie Tsu for this inspiring and profound talk tonight. Thank you so much for sharing our San Francisco history.