A broker in Hong Kong had promised that she would have a job and perhaps marriage to a Chinese merchant in America. Gwai Ying was very tempted by the offer because the worldwide economic depression meant that there were few jobs for her in China. Marrying a wealthy Chinese merchant in the United States was an attractive proposition.
After she passed interrogations by immigration officials and was admitted to the United States, her life in the United States took a dark and sinister turn. The man who paid for her passage from China took away her legal papers.
He then sold her into the thriving prostitution business in San Francisco, where she remained essentially a slave until she found a way to escape.
By , there were 2, Chinese in San Francisco; most of them were male. Because of Chinese cultural mores against women traveling abroad, limited economic resources to pay for their passage, and the harsh living conditions in the American West, it was safer for a man to support his family in China from across the ocean. Later, Chinese men who wanted to bring their families to join them were prevented from doing so by anti-Chinese immigration laws like the Page Act, which prohibited the immigration of Asian women brought in for prostitution.
The Chinese Exclusion Act restricted the immigration of all Chinese workers merchants, ministers, students, and diplomats were exempted and allowed entry only for Chinese women who were daughters or wives of Chinese merchants or U. Because of these restrictions, the Chinese population in the United States was more than 90 percent male from to Chinese tongs, or secret societies, began to import Chinese women to fill the demand for prostitutes by Chinese laborers as well as by whites.
