Erskine Holmes

In 1899, in a crowded apartment in San Francisco's Chinatown, twelve-year-old Tye Leung was told that she had been promised in marriage to a much older Chinese man in Montana. She had never met him. She ran. She was the youngest of eight children. Her father repaired shoes for twenty dollars a month. Her mother ran a boarding house. The household was large and hungry, and a daughter sent to Montana was one less mouth to feed. Some of Tye's earliest memories were of asking for leftover food at San Francisco gambling dens. She had been sent out to work as a domestic servant when she was nine. She did not run far. She ran to the only place in Chinatown where a Chinese girl could escape an arranged marriage. The Presbyterian Mission Home on Sacramento Street, run by a Scottish-born missionary named Donaldina Cameron. Cameron was already a legend in Chinatown. She was famous for raiding brothels with a fire ax, breaking down doors to rescue trafficked Chinese women and girls. Over three decades, Cameron and her staff would rescue between two and three thousand of them. Cameron took Tye in, taught her English, and recognized very quickly that the small, quick-witted girl in front of her had a rare talent. Tye was barely tall enough to see over a courtroom railing. Cameron nicknamed her "Tiny." She stood just over four feet. By her late teens, Tye was accompanying Cameron on the brothel raids as her interpreter. She was the voice the rescued girls heard first, telling them in their own dialect that they were safe, that they could come out, that no one in the room was going to hurt them. She was so good at it that Cameron later wrote: "There is hardly a court in San Francisco or Oakland where Tye Leung is not known and welcome as an excellent interpreter." In 1910, the United States Commissioner of Immigration came looking for a Chinese woman to interpret at the newly opened Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. Angel Island was the federal apparatus that enforced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law in American history to bar a single ethnic group from immigration. Tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants were detained there, often for weeks or months, interrogated under harsh conditions and frequently turned away. Cameron recommended Tye. She sat for the federal civil service examination and passed it. She was the first Chinese American woman to do so. She was the first Chinese American woman ever employed by the United States federal government. She was twenty-three years old. Asked by a reporter whether the work was dull, she answered: "Dull? Never. Always sitting there listening to my countrymen. I listen for little scraps about the great new movement over the sea, that is setting them free over there as I have been set free here." In 1911, California became the sixth state in the country to grant women the right to vote — nine years before the Nineteenth Amendment. On May 19, 1912, Tye Leung walked into a polling place at the corner of Powell and Pacific streets in San Francisco and cast a ballot in the presidential primary. She was the first Chinese American woman in the history of the United States to vote. The San Francisco Call, reporting on the event the next morning, went further. It declared her the *first Chinese woman in the history of the world* to exercise the electoral franchise. A reporter asked her how she had decided. "My first vote?" she said. "Oh yes, I thought long over that. I studied. I read about all your men who wished to be president. I learned about the new laws. I wanted to know what was right, not to act blindly. I think it right we should all try to learn, not vote blindly, since we have been given this right." While she was working at Angel Island, she met an immigration inspector named Charles Schulze. He was the German-born son of an immigrant doctor. He was six feet three inches tall. She was a little over four feet. They fell in love quietly, because they had to. California's anti-miscegenation laws made marriage between a white man and a Chinese woman a criminal offense. In October 1913, they crossed into Vancouver, Washington — one of the few states where interracial marriage was legal — and married there. She gave her own account of the cost. "His mother and my folks disapprove very much," she said. "But when two people are in love, they don't think of the future or what might happen." When they returned to California, the Immigration Bureau pressured both of them out of their jobs. Tye, who had passed the civil service exam through merit and translated for hundreds of detained women through grace, was forced to walk away from the federal government she had served with distinction. Charles lost his career too. They built a life anyway. They had four children — Frederick, Theodore, Louise, and Donaldina, the last named for the woman who had once opened the door in Chinatown. Tye learned bookkeeping. She kept the books at the San Francisco Chinese Hospital. Beginning in 1926, she worked the night shift for two decades as a PBX operator at Pacific Telephone's Chinatown Exchange — a voice in the dark connecting a community the rest of the city largely ignored. She translated for neighbors. She raised her children. When Charles died of a heart attack in 1935, she raised them alone. After the Second World War, the same federal government that had pushed her out for her marriage came back asking for her help. The War Brides Act of 1945 had finally allowed Chinese American servicemen to bring their wives into the United States. The Immigration Office hired Tye Leung again as an interpreter for those women. She helped them navigate the same screening apparatus she had once worked inside on Angel Island. In 1948, at the age of sixty-one, she was arrested. The charge was that she had been driving women to clinics for illegal abortions. She had been doing what she had always done — serving as the bridge between the women of her community and the institutions that ignored them. In December 1948, after an investigation and a trial, every charge was dropped. She kept working. She became, by the late 1930s, locally famous as a Chinatown pinball wizard. Tye Leung Schulze died in San Francisco on March 10, 1972. She was eighty-four years old. She had been a translator, a federal civil servant, a wife in defiance of the law, a widow, a bookkeeper, a phone operator, an interpreter for war brides, an underground driver to abortion clinics, and a pinball champion. She had cast a ballot decades before the rest of America's women were allowed to. She had run from a closing door at twelve years old. She spent the rest of her life holding doors open for the people who came after her.