Shaketown: The Madam's Daughter--Now Available!

Published by Quile Press: Shaketown: The Madam's Daughter is the story of Cayley, an Irish servant who becomes the most powerful and wealthy madam in 1890s San Francisco, and her cohort, an educated Chinese immigrant in trouble with warring tong associations in Chinatown. Both struggle with prejudice--cultural and racial--and their own conceptions of good and evil. Together, they become leaders of an underworld elite. The glittering city, with its crytal-heavy hotels and squalid slums is the perfect, misty backdrop for this tale of family, both born- and chosen.

I worked on this book for ten years--getting the history right (especially since the book is based on a real character) was important for me; history played a big part in my travel books, and has always been a topic of interest. And I grew up on the outskirts of San Francisco, sure that it was the city of my dreams. I did end of moving there for many years, and I wasn't disappointed. Quite a few of the landmarks that appear in the novel are still in existence--maybe a walking tour will be created around it, who knows! You can purchase the book in E-format and as a paperback at Amazon and a number of other outlets including Book Country/Penguin Press.

COMING SOON! SHAKETOWN in Print!!!

Quile Press, a publishing association of writers and artists, will release SHAKETOWN as a trade paperback in May 2014. Be sure to leave your name and email in the comment box so I can let you know when it's available....and a big THANK YOU to the many wonderful folks who have ordered SHAKETOWN as an ebook in the past few months...

The REAL Nellie Bly

 

In 1890, at 25 years of age, Nellie Bly became the most famous woman on earth. In Shaketown, Cayley was so impressed with her efforts, she fought for her own independence.

In 1880, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane was hired by a Pittsburgh (PA) newspaper  after she wrote an intelligent and scathing rebuttal to an article; she took up a nom de plume taken from a popular song: “Nellie Bly”. Her early writing focused on the travails of working women, but she was eventually pressured into writing about fashion, gardening, and society tea-parties--the women’s section.

She quit and spent a year in Mexico, but returned to the States to take a  job offered by Joseph Pulitzer. Her first story held the New York World's readers spellbound: she went undercover as a patient into New York’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum, revealing the brutality and neglect uncovered there. Nellie Bly became a household name.

In November of 1889, she attempted to beat the mythical Phileas Fogg's journey in the Jules Verne book “Around the World in 80 Days,” saying she could make it in 75. Bly followed the route proposed by Verne scrupulously, traveling with one tiny suitcase, writing that “if one is traveling simply for the sake of traveling and not for the purpose of impressing one’s fellow passengers, the problem of baggage becomes a very simple one.”

She landed by steamer in Oakland (not San Francisco, as Phineas Fogg did), and arrived back in New York seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her departure— a record for circling the earth. New York greeted Nellie with fireworks, brass bands and parades. Songs were written about her, dolls and games were created, and her face and name appeared on posters, and advertisements; Nellie Bly had become the most famous woman on earth. The epitome of the gilded age's "New Woman", Bly said, “It’s not so very much for a woman to do who has the pluck, energy and independence which characterize many women in this day of push and get-there.”

Ghosts of Angel Island

Angel Island Detention Center, 1910

Many early Chinese immigrants to San Francisco and beyond were processed at Angel Island, now a state park in San Francisco Bay; more than 97 percent of the immigrants processed on Angel Island were Chinese. Unlike Ellis Island in the East where prospective European immigrants might be held for up to a week, Angel Island typically detained Chinese immigrants for months--sometimes up to two years--while they were interrogated to validate their papers. Some detainees expressed their feelings in poetry carved into the wooden walls of the detention center; some of these poems may still be seen by visitors today.
In 1940, a fire that destroyed the administration building caused the government to decide to abandon the Immigration Station on Angel Island. The "Chinese Exclusion Acts," which were adopted in the early 1880's were repealed by Federal action in 1943 (by that time, China was an ally of the US in World War II); in conjunction passage of the War Brides Act, Chinese-American veterans began to bring their families to American outside of national quotas, leading to a major population boom during the 1950s.

Tongs in Chinatown

Unlike Shaketown's English-speaking Wo Sam, most Chinese immigrants arriving in the United States knew only various dialects of Cantonese, one of the major branches of Chinese spoken in the Zhujiang delta. In the late nineteenth century, most Chinese immigrants saw no future in the United States; assimilation was impossible. Legally discriminated against and politically disenfranchised, Chinese Americans established their roots in Chinatowns. They developed a high degree of tolerance for hardship and racial discrimination and maintained a lifestyle similar to that formerly enjoyed in China. This included living modestly, observing Chinese customs and festivals through social or political organizations (tongs) and family associations that represented the collective interests of persons with the same family names. These organizations acted to arbitrate disputes, help find jobs and housing, establish schools and temples, and sponsor social and cultural events. Some organizations (such as the fictional Chee Kong tong that Wo Sam and Wo Li join) became powerful and oppressive, growing rich through smuggling, the opium trade, gambling and prostitution; by the early 1880s, the population had adopted the term "Tong War" to describe periods of violence in Chinatown.

80 Years of Exclusion

Chinese emigres aboard ship, from Harper's Weekly, 1876

From 1882 to 1965, only diplomats, merchants, and students and their dependents (such as Shaketown's Wo Sam and Wo Li) were allowed to travel to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act greatly reduced the numbers of Chinese allowed into the country and the city, and in theory limited Chinese immigration to single males only. Exceptions were in fact granted to the families of wealthy merchants (hence the inflow of "wives" and "sisters", brought in for the purpose of prostitution), but the law was still effective enough to reduce the population. All Chinese were confined to rigidly defined areas ("Chinatowns") in major cities across the country. Chinese were deprived of their democratic rights: By congressional and judicial decisions, Chinese immigrants were made ineligible for naturalization. The Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, particularly the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought in a new period in Chinese American immigration. In 2009, the California Legislature passed a Bill, apologizing to Chinese Americans for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and other unjust discriminatory laws that resulted in the persecution of Chinese living in California.

Mark Twain in Virginia City

A big hunk of silver ore

Boomtowns of the west held quite a fascination for American readers, and Virginia City, home of the Comstock Lode, was first among them. In February 1863, 20 years before the mines were played out, Samuel Clemens, a reporter on the local newspaper Territorial Enterprise, first used his famous pen name: Mark Twain. In Shaketown, Wo Sam and his cousin are sent to Virginia City after the boom is well over. Economic development defined patterns of settlement for the earliest Chinese immigrants. Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigrants followed work in the western states: because mining and railway construction dominated the west, Chinese immigrants settled mostly in California and states west of the Rockies. The earliest immigrants were able to bring their wives and family members from China prior to the Exclusion Acts (at the time, the Chinese population in the United States was about 110,000). As railway construction and mining declined and anti-Chinese sentiment increased, the Chinese fled into small import-export businesses, service businesses and small manufacturing in such cities as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Others moved into abandoned towns and took over mining claims, such as those in Shaketown's Virginia City, forming their own tightly knit, well-functioning societies. In spite of the distance, a number of Chinese businesses (especially gambling) were controlled by San Francisco tongs.

No Gilded Cage for Victorian Women

Mrs. Lawrence Lewis

Late 19-century urban middle- or upper-class women--such as Shaketown's Mrs. Rolifer--were frequently characterized as "only a bird in a gilded cage", a song popular at the time. Such women were viewed as fragile and endangered; in the first 20 years of the new century, they increasingly began to flex their political muscle. The late 1890s brought major changes in the way many women interacted with the world at large. Though working-class women (often immigrants) like Cayley were brought into the work force the moment they could stand (child labor laws were either non-existent or not enforced), they usually filled positions of the lowest sort. Most women of this ilk were in survival mode. However, women in more stable situations were often at the forefront of movements such as suffrage, temperance and anti-corruption. Those without political connections sometimes paid a high price-- suffragettes such as Mrs. Lawrence (Dora) Lewis and Lucy Burns were beaten and starved for their political beliefs. Today, it's difficult to believe that women were considered property and were unable to vote until the hard-won passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, almost entirely due to the relentless self-sacrifice of women like these. This Snopes article refers to a true email that is circulated about members of NWP, the National Women's Party: http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/womenvote.asp

The REAL Cayley Wallace

The REAL Tess Wall

   Cayley's character in Shaketown is based on a real woman by the name of Tess (Theresa) Wall. Though I pulled many elements of Cayley's life out of thin air, Tessie's real life was so compelling I felt I had to create a character that honored her. Like Cayley, Tess was born to a poor Irish family "South of the Slot" (Market Street), worked as a domestic servant for a time and married a fireman with a weakness for drink. How she came to be in "the business" was pure conjecture on my part, but the fact that she was the most notorious and successful Madame in San Francisco is true. I can only hope that she had close friends like Opal, Ellen and Beatrice as Cayley does in the book. One fact about Tess' life is well-known: she married a gambler by the name of Frank Daroux. An acrimonious divorce followed by Daroux' subsequent affair led her to shoot him, uttering the famous line, "I shot him 'cause I love him, God damn him!" Daroux survived, but refused to prosecute--he left town shortly thereafter.