To conclude AAPI Heritage Month, this edition of #SistoryLessons commemorates three women from East Asia whose stories are too little known—even within Asian communities, let alone beyond them: Ume Tsuda, Xue Jinqin (Sieh King King), and Pearl Mark Loo.
In a moment when immigrant communities are being scapegoated, jailed, and expelled, when history is being erased from classrooms, and when the rights of women and minorities are under sustained assault, and when far too many women "of color" are disunited (when we most need to collaborate), stories like these are not just interesting historical vignettes, I think they are sources of inspiration and at the same time, warnings about why not to be complacent or unaware/unengaged.
Let's remember that as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, it an era of exclusion laws, detention, patriarchy, and empire. These are patterns that we today understand are hard-wired into many of the systems of power, and we must remain ever-vigilant and always at the ready to push back against these retrograde actions!
Fully committed to their mission, these early 20th century-women meshed with the zeitgeist of the early U.S. feminism movement. They found venues and tools that assisted their quest for equality, but always while remaining true to their cultural heritage and legacy. In recasting the narrative who was "allowed" to shape the world, they set precedents in education, voting rights, and civic engagement that we can continue to learn from today.
And, viewing their activities from the arc of our contemporary world can provide a broader lens onto global feminism in ways that Black women, Brown women, and white women should celebrate. To continue to resist as well as envision and design a more inclusive and just future, we need all the inspiration and precedent we can muster.
Ume Tsuda: Envisioning a New Direction for Girls’ Education
The Meiji Era (1868–1912) was a transformative moment of rapid modernization in Japan that began with the collapse of the 250-year feudal military government known as the Tokugawa shogunate, and the restoration of Emperor Meiji to nominal power.
The emperor wished to rapidly modernize the country, which he believed would protect Japan from being colonized by Western powers the way long-time rival and enemy China had been. The new government had already sent male students and officials abroad to study Western law, military strategy, medicine, and engineering. But there was additional reasoning regarding girls: if Japan was going to produce a modern, educated ruling class, those men needed modern, educated wives and mothers.
What it must have looked like for Ume, arriving at the Port of San Francisco
It was therefore agreed that a Western-educated woman would raise “better” children, run a more “sophisticated” household, and serve as a cultural bridge between Japan and the West. Furthermore, cultivated Japanese women could represent Japan favorably in Western social circles, countering the perception that Japan was a backward nation. For all these reasons, a small cohort of Japanese girls was sent to the U.S. as part of this modernizing experiment. Ume Tsuda, often known as Tsuda Umeko, was the youngest of the group.
Sources differ regarding her age when she disembarked from the long sea voyage and was placed in the care of an American host family, either five or seven years old. More than mere hosts, the family showered her with great love and affection. Ume slipped rather effortlessly into her new Washington, D.C. life, improving her English and immersing herself in American schooling and the turn-of-the-century East Coast lifestyle, quite a contrast from the mores of Japanese empire.
In 1882, Ume returned to her homeland. The young woman felt disoriented and out of place. She had forgotten much of her Japanese language, and she returned to a society where “modernization” and “civilization” were being loudly promoted, but women were still expected to remain within narrow roles—the “good wife,” and subservient, wise mother.
Having become, quite Americanized, Ume refused to accept the notion that women’s education should be limited to domestic training. At age 24, in 1889, she returned to the United States for further study. There, she helped raise funds to support other Japanese women studying abroad. With the support of several suffrage-minded women donors, she founded a school for Japanese women in 1900 that emphasized serious academic study, language skills, and economic self-reliance.
That institution eventually became Tsuda University, one of Japan’s most respected women’s universities and a lasting bastion for women's in higher education. As someone who benefitted from a stellar girls’ school education, I admire the spirit of Ume’s vision!
Reflection: What bridges are you building between cultures?
Xue Jinqin (a.k.a. Sieh King King): The Words That Needed to Be Spoken
Xue Jinqin, or in her English name Sieh King King, was a Chinese feminist who moved between China and the United States in the early 1900s. She became known for public lectures that challenged foot-binding, child marriage, and the denial of education to women in her homeland.
At a time when Western audiences often indulged in cultural superiority, “othering” and exoticizing Chinese women, universally reducing them into a one-dimensional stereotype oppression, Xue’s critique of patriarchal practices also chastised Western arrogance. In her belief, the “liberation” of Chinese women was not a Western charity project; the women of her homeland deserved transformation, agency, and dignity just as their American and European counterparts sought for themselves.
Imagining Xue's speech
In 1902, as a young foreign student in San Francisco, Xue delivered a major speech in which she denounced foot-binding and advocated for women’s education and political participation. Newspaper reports describe her as poised, forceful, and unafraid to challenge both Chinese male elites and white American listeners in the same breath.
Arguing that a country could not be strong while half its population was physically constrained and intellectually suppressed, she provided a confident and clear-headed speech that inspired and incited her multicultural audience. We can acknowledge her oratory an early example of trans-national feminism that, in its awareness of cultural competency, was really ahead of its time.
Reflection: What speech that needs to be made today?
Pearl Mark Loo: Early, and Largely Forgotten, Chinese American Suffragist
Pearl Mark Loo — known in Chinese as Mai Zhouyi (麥肇譓) — was a teacher and missionary from Canton (Guangzhou) who became one of the earliest Chinese American voices for women's suffrage and immigrant rights.
The public record regarding her arrival in the US is sparse, but it is widely believed that she sailed from her home in Guangzhou to join her husband, a New York restauranteur, in the early 1900s. However, upon her arrival in San Francisco, she was detained at the wharf for more than forty days, under the Chinese Exclusion Act. This was a difficult welcome for an educated woman who had had taught school in Guangzhou and edited the Lingnan Women's Journal. But such was the climate of suspicion and restriction around all Chinese arrivals faced, regardless of their background or credentials.
San Francisco's Chinatown reminds us today of what 1900s neighborhoods looked like
Once finally admitted into the country, Pearl became active in the burgeoning women’s movement. 1903, she stood before a congregation of 1,500—Chinese and white, women and men—at Chinatown's Presbyterian Church in San Francisco to relate her horrendous personal experience of injustice, being treated as suspect simply for being Chinese.
Nine years later in 1912, she was one of the women marching up Fifth Avenue in what was then the largest suffrage parade the country had ever seen. Wearing traditional dress and participating in the parade as a member of New York Chinatown delegation, she made both a verbal and visual plea for citizenship and the vote for Chinese women, both of which were rights denied them at the time.
Reflection: What stories of attaining voting rights feel most important to share in this moment when the Supreme Court has basically killed off the 1964 Voting Rights Act?
Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone
In honor of Ume Tsuda: How has education—formal or informal—opened new doors for you? Describe a moment when learning changed what you believed was possible for your life.
Thinking about Xue Jinqin (Sieh King King): How do you use your voice to push against what is “supposed” to be normal? Describe a time you spoke up for change, even if your voice shook.
Reflecting upon the work of early suffragists like Pearl Mark Loo: What’s the significance of speaking out for expanded rights, especially in a historical period where rights are being retrenched?
HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color
To be more like Ume: When have you carried knowledge from one setting back to your own community? Write about how you translated that experience so it could actually serve your people.
In the spirit of Xue’s courage: How do your personal freedoms intersect with your culture’s expectations of you? Write a poem, letter, or manifesto that names your vision for what liberation could look like where you live.
Carrying Pearl’s work forward: How do you replenish your energy and stay true to your cause even in the face of diminishment or unfairness?
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
In solidarity with Ume’s students: Recognize Asian women educators and organizers as foundational to global feminist movements. Learn about and support international girls’ education initiatives led by local communities instead of imposed from outside.
In response to Xue’s insistence on nuance: Read about a feminist leader from a culture different from your own whose work pre-dates, complicates, or resists Western feminist narratives. Notice how your own framing of “women’s rights” shifts.
In conversation with Pearl’s activism: Pay attention to Asian and Asian American women’s role in the early suffrage movement. Alongside Black feminists, their stories are too-often obscured by the prevailing narrative regarding white suffragist leaders.
More on Their Lives
Ume Tsuda – (1864–1929) — Educator and Early Feminist
In the biography of Ume Tsuda’s life in The White Plum: A Biography of Ume Tsuda, Pioneer of Women's Higher Education in Japan and a remarkable companion volume, The Attic Letters, which collects Ume's own correspondence to her American host mother, we glean much about her life and evolution as an educational visionary.
At the age of six, Ume— the daughter of a samurai — was sent on a mission by the Japanese government with four other girls to the United States, their noble task being to educate themselves in modern ways and Western learning, and then return to bring that gift to their sisters in Japan.
At age seventeen she returned to her home country, but once there, Ume felt adrift. The new Japanese government was unprepared to make use of her acquired skills, and the cultural divide was difficult for her personally. She no longer could speak, read, or write her native language fluently, and it is said she even had forgotten how to use chopsticks.
Ume realized she had a mission: to make modern higher education available to Japanese women and serve as a bridge across cultures. She returned abroad for advanced study, first at Bryn Mawr College in the US and then England’s Oxford University. Eventually, she was able to raise money from progressive American feminists in her network, and went back to the Tokyo area, where she founded Joshi Eigaku Juku, which would become one of the most prestigious women’s schools for higher education in Japan.
Tsuda Umeko was encouraged to marry by those close to her and was introduced to prospective partners, yet she chose to remain single in a society where over 90% of the population got married. Devoutly Christian and dedicated to education and cultural ambassadorship, she also founded the Japanese YWCA and maintained correspondence with leading figures of her day, including Theodore Roosevelt, Helen Keller, and Florence Nightingale.
Ume died in 1929 at the age of sixty-four. The school she founded was renamed Tsuda University in 2017, and while, like many other heroic women of her time, she bore no children, her legacy lives on through the “progeny” of the many Japanese women who attended—and continue to attend—Tsuda College. In a lovely gesture of recognition, Tsuda's portrait now appears on Japan's 5,000 yen banknote.
Xue Jinqin (Sieh King King) - (1883-unknown)— Transnational Feminist Speaker
Xue Jinqin was born in Guangdong Province in 1883 and came of age during a moment of profound upheaval in China—dynastic decline, foreign invasion, reform movements, and early revolutionary organizing. She traveled to the United States as a student and became involved in both Chinese reform politics and local feminist networks, navigating two worlds that were each, in their own way, deeply ambivalent about what a woman could be or say or demand.
In 1902, at just eighteen or nineteen years old, she delivered a widely reported speech in San Francisco to a mixed audience of Chinese and white listeners. In it, she denounced foot-binding as a system that mutilated women's bodies and blocked the nation's progress, and she called for girls' education as essential to China's strength and survival. Her talk was remarkable on multiple levels—it challenged Chinese patriarchy head-on, while simultaneously pushing back against Western spectators who assumed Chinese women were passive victims waiting to be rescued, rather than agents of their own liberation.
Xue also participated in reformist organizations tied to movements like the Baohuanghui (the Protect the Emperor Society) which sought constitutional monarchy and modernization as an alternative to both imperial stagnation and outright revolution. Her feminism was no Western import, it was nuanced and deeply intertwined with urgent debates about how China could resist foreign domination and transform itself from within, on its own terms, maintaining its own cultural identity and heritage.
After returning to China, Xue continued her work as an educator and activist during one of the most turbulent periods in modern Chinese history. The country was moving through the end of the Qing dynasty, the founding of the Republic, and years of political fragmentation, revolution, and war. During this tumultuous half century, little is documented about her life (that itself is a type of erasure) but her fearless advocacy for a future China has in many ways, been brought to bear over the ensuing years, making her a figure in both Chinese and Chinese American feminist history who is worthy of more consideration.
Pearl Mark Loo – (late 19th c-unknown) — Speaking Out for Justice, Decades Before Movements
Pearl Mark Loo, known in Chinese as Mai Zhouyi, was born in Canton (now Guangzhou), where she trained and worked as a teacher before emigrating to the United States in the early 1900s. She crossed the seas in order to join her husband, a restaurateur who had built a life in New York, but when her ship docked in San Francisco, she immediately confronted the harsh reality of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Despite her husband's standing as a businessman, immigration authorities chose to reclassify him as a "laborer"—a status that, under the law, made her inadmissible. She was held at the wharf for more than forty days before she was finally allowed to continue on to New York.
Mai Zhouyi did not suo ccumb tthe silence the system tried to impose on her. In 1903, she spoke to an audience of 1,500 people at the Presbyterian Church in San Francisco's Chinatown. Addressing a mixed audience of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans along with white men and women, she laid out, in great detail, what she had endured at the docks, indignities that were routine for Chinese women trying to enter the United States. Her frank testimony was recognized by an Asian community that was already grappling with exclusion and humiliation. The white audience, who had largely been told a very different story about who Chinese immigrants were, found it to be a very eye-opening speech.
By the time she settled into life in New York, Pearl Mark Loo had become a teacher and missionary in Chinatown, working alongside a small but determined group of Chinese American women that included Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and Grace Yip Typond. On May 4, 1912, New York City held the largest suffrage parade the country had ever seen — an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 marchers up Fifth Avenue, led by fifty women on horseback (including the sixteen-year-old Mabel, at the head of the parade). Pearl Mark Loo marched with them, in traditional dress, alongside Lee Lai Beck (Mabel Lee's mother) and others.
This photo caption is problematic: "White Suffragists and their Chinese Allies"—these women, often unnamed, were suffragists in their own right. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee is to the immediate right of the woman at the podium
Their audacious demand — U.S. citizenship and the vote for Chinese women — would not be granted until 1943, with the passage of the Magnuson Act, which repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and finally allowed Chinese immigrants to become naturalized citizens.
Pearl Mark Loo is rarely named alongside the white suffragists whose marches she joined. But as a foremother of Chinese American civic life, of the suffrage movement, and of the long Asian American tradition of immigrant women speaking back to power, her story is one that deserves more attention and research.
What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
Ume, Xue, and Pearl show us that the drive for equal rights is not just the province of white suffragists and early feminists. None of these women are household names, yet they were vital parts of a movement that eventually extended agency and rights to all (or most) women. As we continue to endure the hostilities of a xenophobic government and the continued fracture amongst women from different racial and ethnic divides, it’s more important than ever to interrogate and expand upon the “legacy narrative.” Women of all races, ethnicities, and class designations made significant contributions to our liberty today.
Who will future generations remember from our time?
P.S.: The Cruel and Yet Sadly “On Brand” 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
Passed into law in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act represented a dark period in American history for people of Asian descent, and frankly, for us all. It was enacted just four years before the dedication of the Statue of Liberty (so think about that, in terms of the mythology of who the “huddled masses yearning to be free” really was), in an America still reeling from the end of the Civil War and upset about Reconstruction (1865-1877), which was in the eyes of nativists, giving the formerly enslaved Black humans too much… humanity. This Exclusion Act was the nation’s first major law to explicitly ban an entire nationality from immigrating.
The legislation did not just pop out overnight. It was the culmination of decades of organized anti-Chinese hostility that had been building on the West Coast since the Gold Rush of 1849, when Chinese laborers (“Gold Mountain Men”) first arrived in large numbers. They came to dig for the precious metal, and then were put to labor building the transcontinental railroad—backbreaking, dangerous work that white laborers often refused to do.
An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Chinese laborers—many recruited directly from Xue Jinqin’s Guangdong Province—had built roughly 90% of the Central Pacific Line. They worked in the most dangerous conditions, were paid less than their white counterparts, were denied the bonuses white workers received, and when they went on strike in 1867 to demand equal pay and shorter hours, they were starved back to work by having their food supply cut off.
You should be aware that without Chinese labor, the great iron spine of the American West might never have been completed. How ignoble that when the eastern and western spurs of the Transcontinental Railroad met in 1869, there were major celebrations and photo ops—not one of which included the Chinese workers. The famous photograph taken at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869—the so-called "Champagne Photo" celebrating the driving of the golden spike—shows a crowd of workers, engineers, and dignitaries from both the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. Not a single Chinese face appears in it. These men had blasted through the Sierra Nevada with nitroglycerin, hand-drilled through granite at elevation in brutal winters, and built the far more technically demanding western half of the railroad, but they were neither invited to the ceremony nor mentioned in the speeches. Understand how erasure is a design principle.
The "Golden Spike" photo is celebrated, but we need to be aware of who is deliberately erased in such moments of hoopla
Beyond being unheralded, they found themselves soon scapegoated as well. White laborers, facing economic hardship and competition for jobs, turned their frustration on Chinese communities with a ferocity that was well organized and very violent. The propaganda that accompanied this hostility was relentless and deliberately dehumanizing: newspapers, political cartoonists, and politicians portrayed Chinese immigrants as racially inferior, morally corrupt, and culturally unassimilable—a "yellow peril" that threatened white American civilization. (A meme revitalized a hundred years later with the hysteria over Black men and “law and order” governing. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, as they say.)
The Chinese immigrants were caricatured as opium addicts, disease carriers, and economic parasites, stealing the work of the white man but actually, of course, doing the grimy and dangerous work white workers despised, and for low wages they would never accept. Even the fact that early Chinese American community members worked hard and built stable neighborhoods was twisted into evidence against them; the haters (a more accurate word than “detractors,” in my view) claimed, that the Chinese were clannish and uninterested in becoming American. Their industriousness was weaponized against them as readily as poverty was used against other immigrant groups (which, remember, during this era also included Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrants, among others—before they became “white.”)
The anti-Chinese rhetoric soon tipped over into violence. The 1871Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles, in which a white mob killed at least eighteen Chinese residents, was one of the largest mass lynchings in American history, yet few of us have ever heard of it. In 1885, three years after the Exclusion Act passed, white miners massacred dozens of Chinese workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming. These were not isolated incidents but part of a pattern of terror that local and federal authorities largely refused to prosecute.
Barring most Chinese laborers from entering the United States and making Chinese immigrants already in the country ineligible for citizenship, the Act was the first major U.S. law to single out a specific national group for exclusion, and it helped institutionalize anti-Chinese discrimination for decades. It was renewed in 1892, made permanent in 1902, and not repealed until 1943—and then only because China had become a U.S. wartime ally against Japan, making the law a diplomatic embarrassment. Even then, the repeal allowed only 105 Chinese immigrants per year into the country. The gesture was largely symbolic.
The Chinese Exclusion Act's reverberations touch law, culture, politics, and identity in ways that are still very much alive. The law established the legal and cultural framework for subsequent immigration restrictions targeting other Asian nationalities, and it normalized the broader idea that some people were simply too foreign, too different, too threatening to be welcome in America. When contemporary debates about immigration restriction flare up, they frequently draw on legal and rhetorical frameworks road-tested on Chinese immigrants in the 1880s. The "yellow peril" propaganda of the nineteenth century resurfaced most recently during the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a dramatic surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, fueled by stereotypes and lies about “the Kung Flu.”
A formal congressional apology for the Chinese Exclusion Act did not come until 2012, 130 years after its passage, under the Obama administration.
P.P.S.: Meiji and Victoria: Two Empires, in an Era of Rapid Transformation for Women
The Meiji Era (1868–1912) and the Victorian Era (1837–1901) unfolded almost simultaneously, and the parallels are striking. Both periods were defined by industrial transformation, imperial expansion, and a profound—often violent—anxiety about what women were becoming. In both Japan and the West, modernization created the very conditions that made feminism possible, and then worked really hard to contain and suppress those very forces.
Navigating modernity as well as they could. Unnamed women in this photo.
In Victorian Britain and America, industrialization restructured women’s labor, pulling many into factories, offices, and schools while making their work more visible in the public sphere. This new female population began to organize around suffrage, property rights, and access to higher education. By the 1880s and 1890s, suffragist organizations were marching and petitioning on both sides of the Atlantic, with waves of arrest and imprisonment emerging more forcefully in the early 20th century. The world Ume Tsuda encountered at Bryn Mawr, and that Xue Jinqin and Pearl Mark Loo navigated in San Francisco and New York, was part of this zeitgeist.
Japan's Meiji government was watching all of this carefully—and with some consternation. It had imported Western technology, law, and military organization with enthusiasm, while selectively resisting and suppressing Western ideas about women's political independence. The official ideal remained ryōsai kenbo—"good wife, wise mother"—which cast women's education as acceptable only insofar as it produced better homemakers and mothers of soldiers. Women could be educated, but only in service of the nation and the family, never for themselves.
Victorian society operated on a comparable, if not identical, contradiction. The so-called "separate spheres" doctrine held that men belonged in the public world of commerce and politics, women in the private world of home and virtue. Women who stepped outside that sphere—who demanded the vote, attended university, or spoke publicly about politics—were considered not just transgressive but biologically dangerous, their health and femininity supposedly threatened by too much intellectual exertion. The medical establishment was enlisted to pathologize female ambition, much like as Japanese Confucian tradition was enlisted to the same end.
Yet, and this is the important lesson for us to glean from this history is this: time and progress march on. Ume Tsuda founding a university, Xue Jinqin denouncing foot-binding before a mixed audience, Pearl Mark Loo marching up Fifth Avenue in traditional dress, they were all part of global feminist awakening that crossed national borders. Even in an age when information traveled much more slowly than today, people found out what was going on. Japanese women read about Western suffragists; Ume Tsuda’s time as a special student at Bryn Mawr—then led by the formidable suffragist M. Carey Thomas—placed her in close proximity to the Anglo-American women’s movement, even as she was building something distinctly Japanese.
What were progressive women doing in the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Similarly, they were pushing for a more liberated landscape for women, but in different ways, adhering to the strictures of racial hierarchy. White American women participating in the suffrage and reform movements largely pursued gender equality, but without troubling the existing social hierarchies. Their focus on voting rights, temperance, and civic reform was often grounded in ideals of respectability, domestic virtue, and moral authority. Crucially, the mainstream suffrage movement rarely challenged the racial and economic systems that structured American life, often demanding liberty for themselves while reinforcing racial hierarchy. Sensible within the morés of the post Civil-War/pre-Jim Crow environment, but historically deflating to think about.
Mary Church Terrell
During this period, Black American women were advancing a broader, more integrated vision of freedom—one that wove together racial justice, gender equity, economic survival, and community uplift. Through club organizing, anti-lynching campaigns, educational leadership, and grassroots institution-building, Foremothers like Ida B. Wells,Mary Church Terrell, and Anna Julia Cooper articulated what might be understood as an early form of intersectional liberation work, even if that language was a century away. Their insistence on addressing multiple forms of oppression at once paralleled the efforts of women across the globe who were forging locally rooted, culturally specific feminist frameworks under conditions of empire and colonialism.
These intellectual and political visions would carry into the second feminist wave of the 1960s–70s, which coincided with global decolonization movements and the rise of Third World feminism and what would come to be called transnational feminism—which explicitly rejected a one-size-fits-all Western model and instead centered the voices, histories, and struggles of women across the Global South and diasporic communities. This is the legacy I draw upon in researching, writing, and teaching through Brave Sis Project, and I owe these Foremothers across all identities a debt of gratitude. And I hope you feel the same way!