AFTERWORD

I first learned about Mary Stone and Ida Kahn a few years ago, when I saw them mentioned on the website of the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago (http://www.ccamuseum.org/). The two young Chinese women, who came to America to study medicine, seemed to be just the sort of women Emily Cabot Chapman might meet.

As usual, the wonderful collections of the University of Chicago Library provided a valuable starting point for my research. Later, Connie Shemo’s book, The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872–1937 (Lehigh University Press, 2011), provided a detailed account of Mary and Ida’s lives. But their actions in this book are entirely fictional. While they were indeed in Chicago during the summer of 1896, there is no documentation about precisely what they were doing while there. They returned to China in September 1896 to establish a clinic and later to build a hospital, named for the wife of a generous Chicago donor named Dr. Isaac Newton Danforth.

The two young women doctors did indeed become famous in China for their medical work. Neither of them married, but Mary adopted children with another woman missionary. After many years of work, she left China in 1937—during the Japanese invasion—and died in California in 1954. At one point, Ida returned to Chicago to study literature at Northwestern University and wrote a short story titled “An Amazon in Cathay.” It is about two cousins, one a nurse and the other a member of a women’s army unit during the 1911 revolution, a turbulent era of Chinese history. In my novel, Ida’s rebukes to Wong Chin Foo about violence are based on the sentiments expressed in that story. She died in China in 1931. Gertrude Howe was also a very real person, who raised Ida and other adopted Chinese children, despite prejudice from the missionary community.

Chicago’s Chinatown did not move to its current location until 1912. At the time of this story it was located in the Loop, near Clark and Harrison Streets. The book Chinese in Chicago, 1870–1945 (Arcadia, 2005) provides wonderful pictures of the early years, and Chinese Chicago (Stanford University Press, 2012) by Huping Ling provided much useful information.

Paul Siu’s famous sociological study, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation (New York University Press, 1987) outlines the realities of immigration for Chinese men at the turn of the century. I also had access to Tin-chiu Fan’s 1926 thesis, Chinese Residents in Chicago (University of Chicago), which provided a rich mine of information, including interviews with longtime residents such as Hip Lung.

There are many descendants of the Moy family still living in Chicago and I had the pleasure of meeting a member of the family through mutual friends. When I told her that my next novel included some of her ancestors, she recommended Clara Judson’s young adult novel, The Green Ginger Jar (Houghton Mifflin, 1949). It gives a nice flavor of a later generation of Chinese Americans growing up in Chicago. Exhibits and presentations of the previously mentioned Chinese-American Museum of Chicago also give a view into the history of Chicago’s Chinatown.

For a general depiction of life for Chinese Americans at the turn of the century I found Lisa See’s family history, On Gold Mountain (St. Martin’s, 1995), very helpful, even though her family lived on the West Coast.

As I write this series, I frequently discover people I’ve never heard of, who did amazing things in their time and who deserve to be remembered. In addition to Mary Stone and Ida Kahn, Wong Chin Foo is certainly one of these. A very real person, he was a Chinese-American journalist and political activist. Articulate and well educated, his own writings are available in journals of the time. His famous essay “Why Am I a Heathen?” is available in a number of places, including the Internet Archive (archive.org/stream/jstor-25101276/25101276_djvu.txt). There are wonderful newspaper articles written by and about him. He really did try to introduce a Confucian temple to Chicago. My scene regarding that event is inspired by an article in the Chicago Daily Tribune (December 13, 1896, p. 45). In an interview, he spoke of Sun Yat Sen in the same way I portray him doing so to Emily and Detective Whitbread (Chicago Daily Tribune, December 30, 1896, p. 1). The Chinese Viceroy Li Hung Chang really did visit Europe and America in 1896, and cut short his trip due to security issues, but the plot as depicted in this novel is entirely fictional.

At a time when American legislators are attempting to reform our immigration laws, perhaps it would be well to remember the very harsh Exclusion and Geary Acts, which were directed against Chinese immigrants, and were only repealed in 1943. There is much more that could be written about those practices and the underlying racism they represented. Wong Chin Foo took on these issues and had an ongoing feud with a prominent opponent. He was eloquent and outspoken and, even now, his writings can illuminate misunderstandings between the East and West. It was only as I was completing this book that Scott D. Seligman published his biography of Wong Chin Foo, The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo (Hong Kong University Press, 2013).

Hip Lung, whose actual name was Moy Dong Chew, was also a real person and a prominent community leader. He and his two brothers established the Hip Lung Yee Kee Company. A picture of the two young brides of Hip Lung and one of his brothers inspired the Moy ladies in this story. I have taken some literary license, however, as that published picture is dated 1910, which is somewhat later than this story. Some of the words I attribute to Hip Lung are paraphrased from actual quotes of his, as he was frequently interviewed as a representative of the Chinese community. Charlie Kee was a real relative of the Moys and acted as an interpreter, although his actions in this book are entirely fictional.

Another very real person who appears in this book, and is well worth remembering, is Emil Grubbé. As I researched late nineteenth-century medicine in Chicago, I found that medical education, as we know it, did not come into being until the early twentieth century. Before that time there were a proliferation of institutions offering medical training, without any oversight or certification. Grubbé himself was a student at a medical college that specialized in homeopathy. Medical education at the time of this book may have been unregulated, but medical advances that would become so important in the twentieth century were just beginning to appear. At the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago (www.imss.org) I found a whole room devoted to Grubbé’s work. When I discovered the fact that Roentgen rays, later called X-rays, were only discovered in 1895, but had spread to actual use by the time of this novel, it seemed too interesting a detail to leave out. Grubbé was a founder of radiological science and spent his entire life working in that field. His own book, X-ray Treatment: Its Origin, Birth and Early History (Bruce Pub. Co., 1949) provided much of the information I used. While I read later works that disputed some of his accounts, as a writer of fiction, I felt free to rely on him and even to include Albert Schmidt, whose existence was questioned by at least one author. Every year there is a meeting of radiologists in Chicago and they still present an award named for Emil Grubbé.

On the other hand, Dr. Erickson and his daughter, Charlotte; Mrs. Laura Appleby; the waiter, Chin; and the herbalist, Lo, and his paper son, are all fictional. And the activities I describe involving Emily Cabot and the real historical figures are wholly products of my imagination.

In my years of studying the Chinese language I have been able to read numerous works of that country’s literature. At the turn of the century, writers such as Lu Xun turned away from classical Chinese and began to write in language closer to that spoken by everyday people. The stories they wrote reveal a world on the brink of change, just as the people Emily meets in the Gilded Age challenged the existing social structures and introduced ideas that helped to shape what the twentieth century became. At a time when China has become prominent in the world, we should remember the turbulence and strife that accompanied the final downfall of the imperial system that governed that country for thousands of years. At the same time that Emily and her friends were excited about new discoveries in science and technology, young people in China were also excited about the future.

I purposely included some poetry in this book, as it seems to me that there is a rich vein of Chinese stories and culture that need to be appreciated to truly taste the flavor of that society. I have always been amazed to learn that, during the upheavals of the last century, especially those of the Cultural Revolution, most Chinese people seem to have retained knowledge of their traditional poetry and literature. Despite being repudiated as decadent, Chinese stories are too much at the core of that culture to be lost.

The first poem I included, by the Daoist Tao Chien, is one that a college friend wrote out for me in calligraphy, and that I still have hanging in my home. The final poem is by the same poet, but its excellent English translation is by the British writer Arthur Waley. The story of the cowherd and the weaving girl is one I have read in several forms, including an illustrated children’s book in Chinese that is on my shelves.

I also very much enjoy the mystery stories of Xiaolong Qiu, whose contemporary Shanghai police detective is a poet (much like P.D. James’s Dalgliesh). He weaves poetry into his novels, and provides literary influences for his characters.

As always, I hope the story in this book leads the reader to more interesting information about the real historical figures that appear within it. I apologize for any inaccuracies the reader may uncover.