From the Library of an Early Chinese American Activist
The Ways of Ah Sin
Publication: New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1923. First Edition.
Notes: A moralistic novel of Chinatown written by the founder of a Christian mission for boys and dedicated to Donaldina Cameron, the founder of a mission dedicated to supporting Chinese prostitutes. This copy, however, has an interesting provenance.
The novelist and playwright Frank Chin describes this book as the worst kind of stereotyping in A Companion to Asian American Literature: "The missionary casts himself as the hero of a melodrama and the champion of the good but cowardly Christian Chinese who cannot fight for themselves."
This copy was owned by a woman who did fight for herself, Tien Fuh Wu, who has written her name and her 144 Wetmore Street address on the front flyleaf. The Wetmore Street location housed some of the operations of the Donaldina Cameron House. Wu, a child prostitute who was sold by her father to settle a gambling debut, was removed from a brothel by a police officer in the 1890s and spent more than 40 years working for the Cameron House.
Wu (ca. 1886–1975) is one of the Chinese Americans profiled in Julia Flynn Siler's The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2019).
Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing, with no later printings noted). A very good copy in the publisher's original yellow cloth; lacking the dust jacket. With the ownership name and address of Tien Fuh Wu on the front free endpaper. The bookscout David Sachs (I recognize his writing) made numerous notes in pencil below the ownership name, mostly related to references to opium. The book formerly belonged to Ronald K. Siegel, who collected any book with drug references.
Item No: #363646
Price: $300