 Preface. 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 salvage from the earthquake and firestorms that raised 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 century-old raised lettering that read, Occidental Board Presbyterian Mission House. On a plexiglass sign mounted onto the bricks at eye level, I read, Cameron House established 1874. I climbed the steps and pressed an intercom button. A lock clicked. I pushed one of the tall doors open and walked into a dark wood-paneled foyer. I first visited Cameron House in 2013. By then it was mostly famous for being haunted. The staffer would later tell me he once sensed a ghost in its musty basement. There he said terrified former slaves, nearly all of them Chinese girls who'd been sold or kidnapped, had hidden in one of its dark corners from their former owners. The girls and young women who lived there under the care of two remarkable immigrant women, Donaldina Cameron, the youngest daughter of a Scottish cheap farmer, and Tin Fu Wu, a former household slave sold by her father to pay his gambling debts. Cameron served as legal guardian to most of the girls and teens living in the home. They called her Lomo or mother. She, in turn, often referred to them as her daughters. But Cameron's enemies used a racist epithet to describe her, the white devil of Chinatown. We'll end there. Thank you so much for that. So how many of you here have been to San Francisco's Chinatown? Every single person. Every single person, I would hope. I mean, it remains a huge tourist attraction and draw for locals, right? Absolutely. And as you mentioned in your book, it's the oldest in North America. But yet I think sometimes we go for the dim sum or the tachkis, but we don't know the history exactly. And something that I found so wonderful about your book was how it sort of uncovered this place that we've been to, shopped at, love, and yet reveals some stories that I think otherwise have not been as visible. And I was hoping you could kind of talk about that. The role of, you know, what Chinatown meant for these women, you know, both as a place where it was like a landing pad, but also there are elements of it that they felt they wanted to escape. Sure. Yeah, and that they kept Cameron House in Chinatown and not somewhere else. Yes. Let me ask a related question. How many people have been to Cameron House who are in this? Oh, many, many people. Yeah, okay. A few of you haven't seen it, though. Probably walked past it. For those of you who haven't been there, it's literally a block and a half down from the Fairmont Hotel, and it's right below the University Club. So from Nob Hill, you look down on the roof of Cameron House. But shall I start in the 1870s when this project really began? Exactly. Would that be okay? Yeah, okay. So Chinatown in the 1870s was not what we see today by any means. It was wood tenements for the most part. It was nearer to the waterfront, wasn't it? It was much closer to the waterfront. The landfill hadn't been built yet. It was extremely dense. It was roughly eight square blocks. There's some debate about how big it was. But within that small area, 12,000 people lived. It was by far the most compact part of the city. And I actually think it remains the densest neighborhood in San Francisco. Yes. And just like it is today, of course, it's a place where immigrants first came. And it continues back in the 1870s. Of course, the predominant language was Cantonese at that point. But probably the most striking thing about Chinatown in those days at the time the house was founded was that there were so many more men than women. There was a real gender discrepancy. And there was something the census takers said, ten men for every one woman in that area. And of course, that gender discrepancy created a huge demand for sex, both from Chinese men who were not without their wives or families for the most part, but also white men in Chinatown during that period of time had joined the Barbary Coast. Yes. So very similar to today, it remained an area where new immigrants would land, just as you mentioned in River of Stars. That's a key part of your book. Thank you. But actually what also struck me about your book was the fact that it was a tourist attraction from the get-go. Yes. It was that place where you could see exotic sights and walk on the wild side and get some good food. Yes. That was one of the most surprising things I dug up is the thriving tourist trade, and particularly in the 1880s and 1890s, but there were just enormous number of travel descriptions from that time. People who had been led by guides to see supposed opium dens, they may have actually been actors. Right. We don't know. Yeah. And then, so what was it, I guess, just to back up, what led you to the doorstep of Cameron House in the first place? Yes. I was interested in writing a book about the history of San Francisco and came across Donaldina Cameron's first person account of the 1906 earthquake. Which is a really gripping section of the book. Thank you, Vanessa. Yeah. And it was such a riveting account of that disaster and what happened. And she was responsible for a household of somewhere between 50 and 60, mostly girls and young women, even a few babies. And she and the other staffers of the home had to lead all those people to safety that night after the earthquake hit and then back across the city to get onto a ferry and then head to Marin County where they spent several months. Well, and then she had to run back in the midst of like all the danger to get their documents. Yes, because she was concerned that they had no documents that travelers could try to take them back or steal them back. So, yes, she made her way past the policemen who were guarding the area at that point. So, but how did you even come across that account? Like what was the thread that sort of first drew you to that? Hmm. You know, it was funny because I think I found it on FoundSF, which is a kind of a digital history of the city. And sometimes they post primary documents like this one. So I was, you know, I was just zooming around the web. I mean, I don't know how I found it other than that. When you're a writer, even surfing the web gets to count as work or a business expense. So just, you know, and I think what was so important, like, I think we were talking about how this is 150th anniversary of the Chans Continental Railroad, which is also covered in your book a bit. And just the fact that I know so many of the descendants or people within the Chinese American community have been pushing to have for the story to be told, because as they put it, these Chinese pioneers that, that often Chinese are considered perpetual foreigners, no matter how deep their roots. And what really struck me was stories of people like Tian Fu and other women who came up through Cameron House, just how inspiring they were. And it just, but also that they were, they were a part of San Francisco history. And is that something you thought about as, while writing this book? Absolutely. It was a part of the history that I think the wider community of San Francisco didn't know. And one of the wonderful things that's happened in the last few weeks is somebody came up to me who works for the city and said, I think we should have a statue of Tian Fu up there, too. Yes. Wouldn't that be great? That would be totally, that would be worthwhile and inspiring. Yeah. Yeah. So, and certainly, you know, I always loved journalists. I was a journalist for many, many years. And I just loved discovering the life story of Ngyung Poon Choo, the minister turned kind of crusading civil rights journalist who ran the Chung Sae Apol, the Chinese Western Daily. So that was such a wonderful story to follow him through that long career as well. Yes. In the book, she chronicles how he kind of came up through the ministry, but then thought he felt that journalism might reach more people. Yes. Well, he, and it did, he probably did, but he ended up marrying a woman who came out of the mission home. And so he was kind of a natural, he was an advocate for it over the years. And many of the issues confronting the larger Chinese American community, of course, he wrote about in his role as editor of this paper. It was just a wonderful way to follow the larger evolution and legal battles and issues confronting the community. Yeah. I thought you did a wonderful job sort of, sort of looking at these larger social issues but told through personal stories. Thank you. But though with the, that journalist, what I also remember was during the quake, he had a whole book. Yeah. That he'd written, unpublished about the history of Chinese, but the soldiers wouldn't let him back in and it burned. Yes. And it was very frustrating and a very strong contrast to Donaldina Cameron who was able to retrieve her book and he was not. Right. So, yeah. She used her, her white privilege. Yes, white privilege. Yeah. Yeah. We're something. Exactly. Exactly. So what was it, the other thing that really struck me was that both Donaldina and her sort of protege aid, Tian, you know, they, they remained unmarried their whole lives. And what was it that, you know, maybe they didn't find that special someone or what, do you think the fact that they remained unmarried given sort of the roles and expectations for women at the time, that's what enabled them to take on these sort of like lives of, of fighting for justice that otherwise they might be saddled down with other expectations? Well, certainly all of the women I write about who came through the home were living outside the Victorian woman norm. Right. They were abused women or women who had been trafficked. Or they were women like Donaldina and Tian who decided, I don't want to marry. I don't want to have children. I want to work for justice. Yeah. So absolutely that was one path for them at a time when women couldn't vote, didn't have very much political or financial power and had very few options. Yeah. And yet in some ways the sort of happy ending for girls through, it was a matchmaking bureau in a way. Can you talk about that? Yes. It was kind of a de facto marriage bureau and in fact there's quite a Cameron House diasporas. I know many of you know there are families all over the country where a grandmother, a great grandmother came through Cameron House and I probably visited half a dozen archives all over the country and at Yale was a particularly interesting archive to go to. And there was a scholar there who had tracked the families particularly in the Midwest that had come out of Cameron House. So that was interesting. Well I think it just goes back again to the point that Chinese have been here. We're not all recent immigrants that part of the American story. Well I love this story too because it's a cross-cultural story. It's not just a story about the Chinese American community. It's a story about women bonding together. Across culture. Across cultures. And in 1874 in the first annual report of this project it was described as women's work for women. Which was kind of in my view a very early feminist statement. Right. Well even to consider that someone from a different background was a full woman as well deserving of all the women's rights. And so do you think the fact, can we talk about religion? Sure. That was part of the book where there's a question like did someone truly convert or they quote unquote a rice Christian. Meaning they wanted the bowl of rice in return for saying the Lord's prayer. So what was that something that you grappled with while reporting and writing the book. Just like how to examine issues of faith and good deeds that come with strings attached. Well there were metrics to measure conversion. So the women who ran the home kept very detailed records. Those records are kept at the San Francisco theological seminary. And each year they would note how many women who converted, residents of the home had converted. And in a typical year there might be two or three women who converted whereas 60 women would come through the home. Something like that. So it was not a condition that you convert to live in the home. But there were expectations that you would go to church and that you would study the Bible for sure. Grappling with faith. I'm a nonfiction writer and so it's one of the great frustrations I think is you can only see so far into the interior life of people to the extent that they left a written record behind. Right. And I had a lot of written, official written written records from the Presbyterian church. But I, you know, I had fragments of diaries and things that might offer more kind of less guarded revelations of what people were really thinking at the time. The closest I came were letters and there were letters that I found all over the country between, for example, Dolly Cameron, Donaldina Cameron, and Tian. And those did give me glimpses into what they really felt. And I certainly think Tian was an absolute person of faith. I think she really did believe. And so that same thing with Dolly. Yeah. The letter that you close the book with is between Donaldina and Tian is so tender. It is tender, isn't it? Yeah. It is so touching. And one of the most tender things I thought was traveling to Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles, which is one of the oldest cemeteries in the city. And for many, many years, it was segregated. So Chinese people would not be allowed to be buried in the same area as white people. But I tracked down the Cameron family plot. And sure enough, there's Tian Fu Wu buried in that same plot. Side by side. Wow. And the other thing to remember is that they lived fairly recently. Donaldina only died in 1968. And Tian died in the 70s. So it wasn't that long ago. Right. Well, like all things that we think is historic or distant actually have contemporary relevance. Yes. And so maybe we could talk about that as well. Another aspect of the book that was so heart-wrenching was that sometimes women would get rescued, but then they would get deported. And back to war-torn China in some cases. And I just know with what's been happening at the border and families being separated and children being kind of kept in these detention centers, have you been thinking about the sort of way the past is resonating today? Absolutely. I mean, on the one hand, if you take a step back, this book is a story about how we treat immigrants. And this was a very compassionate way to treat immigrants. In fact, when the Angel Island immigration station was opened, the house sometimes would be a place that was a better place for women to stay rather than spending months in that immigration center, which was the conditions were not very good. I also think it's so interesting the periods of history when we've seen surges and empathy. Certainly at the beginning of the British abolitionist movement to try to stop the transatlantic trade in Africans. And this was an example of that surging empathy because certainly the white world around Chinatown in the 1870s when this project began was extremely hostile. And so those women were acting against the larger prejudice. So I think, you know, one last point I would make about it is that individual actions can be important. They can make a difference to people's lives. And one of the things that I found most interesting in researching this book was to try to track the lives of some of the women who came through the home. One of them was Dr. Bessie Zhang, who became the first Chinese-American woman to graduate from your alma mater at Stanford University. Oh, right. Is she the one who went to the private girl school in Philadelphia? No, that was Teen who did that. Actually, reading your book, I kept thinking I could turn this into a novel and I could turn this into a novel. Someone's already making a novel out of one of the characters. Oh, OK. I just had a walk with her. Oh, OK. Which is to say this book is stuffed with interesting characters that you will want to follow everywhere. So maybe we could talk a bit about the research. Just what sort of you said the research librarians here were great and you come through archives, but kind of go through that process with us. How do you even keep track of everything? Well, Vanessa and I are both members of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and I think at the beginning of this project, I sent out a note to everybody and I said, is there any easy way to scan documents? And I quickly got a message back saying try turbo scan. Oh, OK. Which just rocked my world as a researcher because I could go into archives, take pictures of my iPhone. And now my iPhone's not right here, but it's close by. I have all of these searchable PDFs. I have tens of thousands of documents. Oh, they're not JPEGs or PDFs. Oh, that's perfect. Yeah. So that was interesting. And what I usually tell people too is chronology is your friend, especially as a nonfiction writer. And that was the very first thing that I did, which is do a very, very detailed chronology and figure out where characters were at certain points at time. But I'm a serious research fall down the whole kind of person and spent a lot of time upstairs in the fifth floor of the San Francisco History Center, which is an absolutely wonderful place. Has everybody been there? A few of you. Oh, it's fantastic. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed working there and also the librarians I work with were wonderful. There's a woman named Christina Moretti who was in the San Francisco Chronicle not long ago. She's known as the photo detective because she'll track down things. She's very, very good at it. I mean, I think we're fortunate to have sort of, that these are public documents and that you or me or anyone has access to it. Well, I would say that one part of the book involved private documents. Oh, yes. So Cameron House has records that date back to 1874, and mainly the oldest and the most important one is the log book in which every single girl or woman who came through the home was described. So there was the date, her name, and why she was there. And it's quite an exceptional document. And I had the great good fortune of working with the former executive director of Cameron House, Doreen Durham-Cloud, who organized those records over the years. And for certain key people and cases, she was very generous and let me look at those case files. That's wonderful. Yeah, how did you, given that you're not Chinese yourself, can you talk about what it means to sort of gain the trust and access into a community that isn't your own at first and then just sort of what it means to write this book at all, I guess? Well, I work very closely with Doreen and with other people involved with Cameron House and met some of the directors. I see people that I've met here over the years. The late Bob Kwong was extremely helpful. He was a longtime supporter of Cameron House. But I would say it took a very long time. I did not see the actual room in which all the records that Cameron House were kept until four years into the project. So it took a long time for, I think everybody to feel I would treat the materials and the stories with the respect they deserved. Did you ever sense a ghost? Yes, I did. Absolutely. So the basement is very, very spooky and you can kind of see where girls probably hid. Might have hid. Might have hid. And there really is a tunnel, which is probably an old coal chute going up to the street. Generations of Cameron House kids probably looked up at that tunnel and wondered if they could get out that way. Just a little bit more about this ghost. Did you sense a chill, a presence, a door slam? What happened? The house hasn't changed very much. It was rebuilt right after the earthquake in 1907, 1908. It was retrofitted back in the 1970s, 70s I think, maybe early 80s, but really it hasn't changed in about a hundred years. And the basement especially feels, I just, maybe I have too much of an imagination, but the first tour guide I think that took me around, he believed there was a ghost. The air felt heavy with something. It did, novelist. Well I think we have time for a few questions. Yes. Absolutely. I'm sorry if I wasn't clearing about that before. The house was founded in 1874. It was really a charitable project. It was a group of Presbyterian church women who saw the plight of Chinese girls and women in Chinatown and wanted to create a safe house for them. And initially they rented an apartment and then that got too crowded. They bought a house across the street. Then that was destroyed in 1906 and rebuilt what we now know as Cameron House. The girls got there in all sorts of different ways. The traditional rescue would be that staffers from the home, usually accompanied by a detective or a policeman, would go to the brothel or go somewhere that they'd heard the girl was, was being kept and tried to take her. So that was a traditional rescue. In many instances, in fact, the first story I tell in the book is a young woman who herself runs across Chinatown, finds the house because she had heard about it and asks for help. So she effectively rescues herself for saves herself. A pregnant teenager. A pregnant teenager, yeah. So thank you for that question. And so some 3,000 perhaps went through. Maybe other, what are some of the, and it sort of expanded. Maybe you can talk about how it kind of changed over time to involve boys or, yeah. Absolutely. So best estimate, 2,000 to 3,000 women and girls came through the home from the period 1874 to the mid to late 30s. After that period of time, it changed its mission. Initially, the women and girls had been trafficked. So many of them were forced into prostitution. As time went on, there was more of a situation where it was almost a social services agency. So young girls who were orphaned might end up there. Or women who had been abused by their husbands might come to the home for refuge. So there were all kinds of different circumstances. In fact, some of the photographs and probably the most famous photograph taken by Louis Stelman, which is in the California State Library, many of the girls in front of the house are extremely young. They're not sexually mature at that point. Yes. Yes. So this image, it came from Cameron House. Cameron House was very generous in providing us with historic images. We don't know the story behind this girl other than she probably was a resident at the home at some point. We don't know her identification. No, it's not... We used a number of Arnold Gemfes photographs. This is not one of them, though. It does look similar. So we don't really know what the origins of that image are. And if anybody has any ideas, I'd love to hear it. It looked like one of our characters, and we did compare a number of photographs to try to decide whether this might be her, but we don't know. In the background are the records of the trafficker from the National Archives in San Bruno. And so these ended up in the court case that brought down a very famous slave girl ring in the 1930s. The Wong C Duck. Yes. I wouldn't say rescues. The traffickers almost... The traffickers tried to get the girls back, and there were bars on the outside of the windows to keep them out. The doors were always guarded 24 hours a day. The girls, for the most part, weren't allowed outside unaccompanied because of the fear that they would be snatched back, essentially. And the traffickers also employed lawyers to try to wrangle them back through the court system. Was it solely Chinese girls and women, or were also non-Chinese women, females, and also males rescued by Cameron House? The quick answer to your question is yes. So yes meaning it was also Japanese women. At least there were a number of Japanese women, particularly around 1900 to 1914. There was a Syrian woman. There were boys. There were boys who were born in the house, or babies, boys who came, and so much so that Donalina Cameron urged the founding of a boy's home that was headed up by a Catholic missionary. I think, do you have another question? I was just... Which was called Chung Mai. Yeah. The former Chinese orphanage in El Cerrito. Yes, that's Chung Mai. Was that also founded by Donalina Cameron, or Cameron House? Yeah, no, that's a great question. It was founded by a Catholic missionary at the urging of Donalina Cameron. She was saying, I can't take care of these boys. We need a boy's home. So that's how that started. Likewise, there was a girls home started in Oakland, and the building was designed by Julia Morgan, and it's now on the Mills campus, and it is the Julia Morgan School for Girls, and there's a Donalina Cameron room, which is kind of cool. Right. That school opened in the wake of the quake, right, because they were looking for some place to house them afterwards. Yeah, yeah. I'm a Cameron House alumni, and my daughter went to the Julia Morgan School for Girls. Oh, wow. And I was wondering if you could talk more about the Mingkwang home, and what's your research from? Sure, so I did write a couple chapters on that home and the founding of that home. It was funded by the man who owned the biggest steamship company between China and San Francisco, and he was a Presbyterian, and he underwrote it, and it was mainly again that there were so many young girls and boys coming to the home that the staffers, including Donalina, decided it was much better to separate the younger from the older women. And the original place where the young ones were housed in Oakland was absolutely awful. It was unhygienic. The girls were getting sick. There were all kinds of problems, and Julia Morgan's building is quite a beautiful one if you ever have a chance to see it. Donalina seemed very skilled at getting wealthy patrons to, you know, the Carnegie's or this steamship guy. How was it that she was able to sort of make a pitch that there should be empathy and humanitarian aid? Well, I think she was very striking. She was a tall woman. She had an auburn hair. She had a Scottish lilt when she spoke. Her family had fallen on fairly hard times, but she came from quite a prominent and moneyed family in the UK and in Scotland originally. And so she had this ability, I think, to go into the drawing rooms of the wealthy of the time and also to work in extremely modest circumstances herself. One of the details that really struck me was that she lived in a room for many, many years where it was, she had such a small closet, there was only room for two pairs of shoes. So she lived herself extremely modestly, even though she was a good fundraiser. There was a very sweet moment in the book where she goes away and the girls, as a surprise, redecorate the room for her. She's in her fifties. Yes. Yes.