S1 • E11 May 13, 2020 10m
Tye Leung Schulze (1887-1972), the youngest daughter of low-income immigrants from China, was forced into domestic servitude at age nine, and escaped an arranged marriage at age 12. She began her career translating for victims of human trafficking in San Francisco's Chinatown working for Donaldina Cameron's Presbyterian Mission Home. In 1910, Leung Schulze became the first Chinese American woman to work for the federal government, as assistant matron and an interpreter at the Angel Island Immigration Station, a detention center designed to control the flow of Asian immigrants into the U.S. under the Chinese Exclusion Act. While there, she fell in love with a white immigration inspector, Charles Schulze, and married him against both their parents' wishes and California's anti-miscegenation laws. In 1912, the year after California granted women the right to vote, Leung Schulze became the first Chinese American woman to vote in a U.S. election. Interviewees: Julia Flynn Siler, author of The White Devil's Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery; Ted Schulze, grandson of Tye Leung Schulze; Judge Toko Serita, New York Acting Supreme Court Justice who presides over the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court and the Queens County Criminal Court.
