Tye Leung Schulze and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee: Pioneering Asian American Activists
Five years after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, a Chinese American girl named Tye Leung was born in San Francisco in 1887. Her birth was rare and unusual because there were few Chinese families living in the United States at the time. It’s not known when her parents first arrived in the United States, but Tye was the last of eight children in the family. Her father repaired shoes at a factory and her mother worked in a boarding house. Together with an older aunt and uncle, the twelve-member family squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment in the city’s Chinatown.
Life was not easy. Discrimination against the Chinese had been steadily ramping up since the end of the gold rush and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Jobs became scarce. And although the Chinese comprised a miniscule 0.002 percent of the population, they became scapegoats for the declining economy.
When she grew older, Tye was often sent to beg for leftovers from nearby gambling houses to feed the family. On occasion, she attended a Presbyterian missionary school where she picked up some English and was converted to Christianity. By the time she was nine, however, the family’s struggles led Tye’s parents to sell her as a servant to another family.
Apparently, her uncle was so troubled by this that he asked the missionary school for help in getting the arrangement rescinded. They did and Tye returned to live with her family. But things came to a head again three years later when her 14-year-old sister, engaged to an older man in an arranged marriage, bolted before the wedding. The parents wanted to send Tye, at age 12, to take her sister’s place. But Tye refused and ran away from home.
She landed at the Occidental Mission Home for Girls on Sacramento Street (today known as Cameron House), a refuge for Chinese girls and young women who had been sold into slavery or smuggled into the country for prostitution.
It would become her home until she married in 1913. Her small stature – she never grew any taller than four feet – earned her the nickname of “Tiny.” In every other way however, Tye thrived, improving her English skills to become an indispensable assistant to Donaldina Cameron, the Home’s director who would be credited with saving thousands of girls’ lives over 35 years. Tye acted as translator and interpreter for newly rescued girls at the Home and accompanied them and Cameron to court when sex and slave traffickers sued to try to get the girls back.
She and Cameron fearlessly took part in many police raids of prostitution dens where Cameron would reportedly carry an axe to break down brothel doors. Once inside, as the only person who could speak Chinese, Tye was able to communicate with the victims to explain what was happening.
In 1910, when Angel Island, located in San Francisco Bay became a federal immigration center, Cameron recommended Tye for a job as a translator/interpreter. She took the Federal civil service exam, becoming the first Chinese American to pass and get a civil service job, a milestone noted in the several newspapers. The position was both an achievement and very controversial.
While the Center processed immigrants from all over the world the majority were from China. After an arduous journey by ship, they faced an even bigger challenge called the Chinese Exclusion Act (CEA), the first American immigration law that targeted a specific race or nationality. Banned from entering were male laborers, the very group that had been recruited in the tens of thousands to help build the Transcontinental Railroad.
After the CEA’s passage in 1882, only men who were merchants, diplomats, clergy, teachers and students with proper documentation were allowed to enter the United States. Chinese women had already been barred by the 1875 Page Act which was passed to stop prostitution but left it up to authorities to determine who was a prostitute.
Chinese residents already here, but not citizens, were not allowed to apply for citizenship, making them permanent aliens. And any who left the country and wanted to return to the US had to have a special ID and approval from the Immigration Service. These severe restrictions – which did not apply to immigrants from the rest of the world -- led to a black market of fake birth certificates. Overnight thousands of men became “paper sons” when they traded their birthright for documents identifying them as sons or relatives of Chinese American citizens.
At Angel Island, arriving immigrants were held without due process and subjected to lengthy interrogations that often took place over days or even months. The questions were designed to trip up applicants and involved minute details such as, “what direction did your family home face?” or “how many steps were at the entrance of the school you attended?”
Immigrants spent hours studying cheat sheets memorizing answers to potential questions. For Tye who served as the go-between the powerless and the powerful, her job must have presented a range of conflicting emotions. She understood the desperation of the immigrants yet could not help or advocate for them as much as she wanted to.
In 1911, California became the sixth state to give women voting rights in statewide elections. A year later, on May 14,1912, Tye was in the news again, when she cast a ballot in the state’s presidential primary.
“Celestial Maid Cast (sic) Her Vote,” declared one newspaper headline that claimed “For the first time in the history of the world, a Chinese woman exercised her right to vote yesterday when Tie (sic) Leung, a demure 21 year old Chinese maiden cast her ballot for her choice for presidential candidate.” When asked, Tye acknowledged her pioneering status. “My first vote? — Oh, yes, I thought long over that. I studied; I read about all your men who wish to be president. I learned about the new laws. I wanted to KNOW what was right, not to act blindly…I think we should learn, not vote blindly, since we have been given this right to say which man we think is the greatest.”
Tye made headlines again when she married Charles Schulze, another immigration inspector at Angel Island. In 1913, inter-racial marriages were illegal in California. So, the couple traveled next door to Washington, the nearest state where they could legally wed. Neither of their families approved of the marriage and many friends advised against it.
When news of their union was revealed, their bosses at the Immigration Service pressured them to resign. They both had difficulty finding steady employment. Schulze became a mechanic and repairman at the Southern Pacific Railroad company while Tye worked as a bookkeeper, clerk and social worker before becoming a telephone operator for Pacific Telephone. She provided translation services for community organizations in Chinatown becoming a local advocate.
In 1946, a twist of fate brought Tye back to her old job at the Immigration Service. The War Brides Act now permitted American GIs who had wives overseas or had married during the World War II to bring them to the United States. This included thousands of Chinese and other Asian Americans who had enlisted and served. With this new wave of immigrants, Tye was hired to help handle the massive influx of women immigrants. She died in 1972 at the age of 84.
The same week Tye was making history in San Francisco, a Chinese American teenager named Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was also shattering stereotypes on the other side of the United States. On Sunday, May 12, 1912, a brigade of horsewomen led 10,000 women up New York City’s Fifth Avenue in one of the largest suffrage marches ever.
Sixteen-year-old Mabel was among the youngest and the only woman of color. She rode a white horse and wore a black tri-corner hat and a “Votes for Women” sash.
Mabel had arrived in the United States just seven years earlier under the restrictive CEA.
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was born in either 1896 or 1897 in Guangzhou, China, the only child of a pastor named Lee To and his wife Lai Beck. Because Lee had arrived in the United States as a merchant and laborer two years before the CEA was enacted in 1882, he was able to travel back and forth to China. During his time in America, he converted to Christianity and gave up his business. He attended missionary school, completing his theological studies in New York City. When Mabel was still young, the American Baptist Home Mission Society appointed her father minister at its Morningside Mission in Chinatown. Mabel and her mother were still living in China and moved to Hong Kong to live with relatives. There Mabel attended the missionary school, learned English and eventually won a scholarship that allowed her and her mother to come to America.
In 1905, the family was together again. Their new home on Bayard Street was one block away from the mission. As she began settling into a new life, Mabel became aware of the rumblings of a revolution in China that would eventually overthrow the centuries old imperial system, replacing the country’s emperor with a democracy. At the same time, at Erasmus Hall Academy where she attended high school, Mabel also became aware of the American suffrage movement. American suffragists were “glad but irritated too,” by news that the revolutionaries in China had beaten the American government by giving Chinese women voting rights.
At a planning meeting for the spring suffrage march, they invited several Chinese American women including Mabel and her mother to talk about this new development in China. Mabel shared information about how Chinese women could potentially become enfranchised and used the opportunity to advocate for overturning the CEA and other discriminatory laws.
As someone who had benefited from a scholarship, she also urged more opportunities for Chinese students in America. Her poise, passion and intellect impressed the audience enough that parade organizers felt Mabel deserved to be a prominent part of the event.
That same year, Mabel was accepted to attend the all-women’s Barnard College. She became a member of the school’s debate club and joined the Chinese Students Union at Barnard/Columbia College. She wrote many essays for the group’s monthly publication. One in particular stands out. Entitled, The Meaning of Suffrage, Mabel wrote that “true feminism was…an extension of democracy…social justice and equality of opportunities to women.”
She wasn’t shy when it came to speeches either. She advocated for equality on all fronts in both her native and adopted countries. A New York Times story about the event quoted her saying, “no nation can ever make real and lasting progress in civilization unless its women are following close to its men, if not actually abreast with them.”
She felt that education and Christian values were key underpinnings of a society that would provide equality among sexes and justice for all races. Practicing her beliefs, in 1916, Mabel graduated from Barnard with a degree in history and philosophy.
Three years later, she earned a master’s degree in teaching from Columbia’s Teaching College. And in 1921 she was awarded a Ph.D.in economics from Columbia, reportedly the first Chinese American to receive a doctoral degree in the United States.
She returned to China to pursue her next dream: establishing a school for girls. But it was not to be. In 1924, Mabel’s father died of a heart attack and she returned to the US, becoming director of the mission, today known as the First Chinese Baptist Church of New York. She also founded and led until her death in 1966, Chinatown’s Chinese Christian Center, which offered health care through its clinic, English lessons, a kindergarten and vocational training.
Even though Mabel campaigned all her life for women’s rights, it’s not known whether she ever became a citizen or was able to enjoy the fruits of her labors. In 1920, when the 19th Amendment was enacted, only white women were allowed to vote. In 1943, the CEA was repealed allowing Chinese Americans to become citizens and entitling them to vote.
2024 © Alice Look
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Stories