From Slave Girls to Salvation

The 1870s movement to eliminate Chinese prostitution in California inspired white missionaries in urban Chinatowns to establish rescue homes for girls. One of the first was Presbyterian Margaret Culbertson’s Occidental Mission Home for Girls in San Francisco, later renamed Cameron House after the famous Donadina Cameron, Culbertson’s successor. Others soon followed. Shelly D. Ikebuchi provides an in-depth study of the interplay of gender, race, class, and national and international implications by looking at a mission home for Asian women in British Columbia. Although this home was based in Victoria, it served Vancouver and its outlying areas and was similar to other late nineteenth-century Chinese missionary rescue homes.In 1886 John Vrooman Gardiner and Reverend John Edward Starr of the Methodist Missionary Society (MMS) were determined to save Chinese slave girls and indentured servants. To do so, Starr and Gardiner established the Chinese Rescue Home in Victoria. In 1888 they turned over control and management of the Home to the Woman’s Missionary Society (WMS), a subordinate branch of the MMS, and thus empowered these white women politically, economically, and in their churches both nationally and internationally in a manner otherwise unattainable in the late nineteenth century. Each matron had her unique style, but all were controlling. Like those of Cameron House, the goals of the Home included the evangelization of Asian women and children, the teaching of English and white middle-class values, especially those centered around domesticity, family, and marriage and around the raising of funds and support for the WMS and mission work, especially female missionaries and teachers, at home and abroad through public relations activities and newsletters. However, due to racial prejudice and religious discrimination, converted Christian Asian females could never be regarded as assimilated into Canadian society and were permitted to perform missionary duties only in Asia and not in Canada.Christian identity, aspirations, and practices were drilled into the minds of the Home’s residents. In 1889 a local newspaper, the British Colonist, described the model resident of Victoria’s Chinese Rescue Home as a young Chinese former slave girl/prostitute who spent two years in the Home and had been “civilized” through her training in domesticity and her newly acquired knowledge of “whiteness” and Christianity. She married her former lover in a ceremony at the Home because he could now afford to provide her with a European-style furnished house near a white neighborhood that allowed her to have her English friends over for tea (56). Presumably, the children resulting from the marriage would be raised with good Methodist values.The first forty-six Chinese residents were rescued from prostitution or slavery, but over the next ten to fifteen years the Home included Japanese women who were not regarded as prostitutes but who wanted to learn English and Western ways. These Japanese women wanted to gain a sense of belonging by having the Home members as their new “family”; have greater upward mobility socially and economically through marriage or working as servants in white households; or perhaps escape a difficult home situation, such as an abusive husband acquired through the Japanese “picture bride” system. Chinese women were in similar positions. In 1909 the Chinese Rescue Home’s name changed to Oriental Home and School as the goals emphasized transformation and education and included children (but no boys over the age of ten or eleven). Although admission to the Home was supposedly voluntary, the fence around the Home was topped with barbed wire to keep the residents secluded. There were written reports of residents who attempted to escape from the facility.Unfortunately, none of the residents left memoirs or any written records of their experience, but Ikebuchi examined archival materials from the Home, missionary societies, missionary newsletters, local and regional newspapers, court records, investigations by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, and other government documents from the period 1886 to 1923. The Home did not close until 1942. She studied its infrastructure, the attitudes of the different matrons and Home leaders, and the relationship to the missionary movement, local community, and the state, and she linked them together to produce a fascinating story. The newspapers and court documents reveal the plight of the Home’s residents. For example, Walter Menzies, one of the Home’s founding members, was charged with selling the Home’s young women to “husbands.” After a lengthy trial and much publicity, Menzies was convicted of selling 14-year-old Ah Lin to the much older Ah Chee. This cast a negative light on the work of this Home and, by inference, other “rescue missionary homes.” The missionary women wrote case histories of a few of the residents, but their perspective was very biased. They labeled some residents “bad” women without ever defining the term.The state became involved in the work of the Home in several ways. For example, when the state adopted an interventionist attitude toward marginal families with the Children’s Protection Act of 1893, the Home took a stricter stance on its admission of and policies governing the care of children. In habeas corpus cases, the court often determined parental or guardianship rights when the Home tried to maintain custody of the child. In 1900, for example, Sam Kee argued that he was the legal guardian of Soy King, and the court agreed with him but refused to grant him custody on the basis that he was an unfit guardian. Ikebuchi detailed several other cases that set precedents for children’s rights issues.The book is well written and sheds light on an aspect of Asian American/Canadian history that has not been documented in such detail before. I highly recommend the book to historians, sociologists, and anthropologists

Race (biology · Sociology · Successor cardinal · White (mutation · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History