Noel C. Cilker

For a historian, research is fun. It's probably the biggest reason I quit teaching. I realized this when I used to arrive at my classroom at 5:45 in the morning, spend the next hour and a half online looking for a letter or speech that conveyed the ideas of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (or the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the Black Panthers, or women on the home front in World War II, or . . . ), and feet a stab of dread as the bell for first period rang. It wasn't that I disliked the students. They were generally good and tried to learn, and at the very least didn't screw around when they weren't interested. Rather, the sound of that bell meant that my researching was done and I had to go on stage. After three years of ruing that first period bell, I finally admitted it to myself: I would rather make  the lessons than teach  them. Fast forward a few years and here I am, seated at a desk, a mountain of books to my left and my laptop to my right. What a perfect way to...

Working on a book focused on Ah Toy specifically and the Chinese in general has formed for me a nice symbiosis. Because I married into a family of Chinese descent, I felt naturally drawn to studying a Chinese character. Researching Ah Toy has inevitably led to researching Chinese culture itself, and while I knew I didn't know much about it ( which would make Socrates proud ), I quickly realized I didn't know anything at all! (Which would make Socrates ecstatic!) While my book isn't meant to be a sociological study of the Chinese community, I had to know something  for the story to come across as authentic, so I dove into a couple of highly regarded books. One is called  Things Chinese,  written by James Ball in 1893. "Too old!" you might think, but I found it to be quite valuable. Cultures, despite deeply ingrained philosophies and traditions, change over time. The closer to the 1850s I could get, the better, and with sections titled "Acupuncture," ...

For the past few weeks, I've been giving you a sense of what Old San Francisco looked like: the drawings, the photos, the buildings, the ships-turned-hotels-and-what-not, and the descriptions of Portsmouth Square in all its interchangeable forms. For so small a town, San Francisco was a feast for the eyes with never a dull sight to behold. But as Ah Toy debarked her ship in 1849, the sounds of San Francisco hit her just as strongly as the sights. Not immediately, of course, because she saw San Francisco before she heard it as she sailed through the Golden Gate (or rather, saw it soon after ... the town wasn't visible from the Golden Gate). But as her ship pulled into the harbor and the town grew closer, she began to hear the sounds of life become louder and louder. She also heard her fellow passengers become more and more excited and chattery. After leaving the ship and walking up the wharf with her belongings, Ah Toy heard the hum of voices of people debarking some ships a...