The Way Back Home

They were told they could not be together, kept apart by cultural oppression, discrimination and the law. Then she vanished. A race for love across a San Francisco transformed by the railroad and the immigrant labor force the city prepares to abandon.

MAY 1889

Ah Ying had a choice to make that would put her life on the line. 

The strikingly beautiful Chinese immigrant lived at the Mission Home on Sacramento Street in San Francisco. Inside she was safe from the threats against her. She had all the clothing and food she needed from the institution’s matrons. But she was missing something: freedom. One of the freedoms she lacked was to choose with whom she could marry, live and start a family.

Today the eagle-eyed oversight at the Mission Home was lax. 

Today she saw a chance for the love she never thought she’d have.

It was time Ah Ying took matters into her own hands. 

She stepped outside. From the Mission Home’s perch on the hill, the vista led all the way to the deep blue bay and the fog that frequently crept in and blanketed the city. 

She dashed away from the institution, rendezvousing with the man she loved. In a few hours time, they had eloped. For a while, nobody knew where they were. It hardly mattered that their great escape started by situating themselves just down the hill from the place she had fled. For the first time in her life, Ah Ying had a home she could call her own. Here a man and woman kept a hostile world at bay, betting on a future that was theirs together, however uncertain. In the land they called “Gam Saan,” or Gold Mountain, where massive steamships sailed back and forth over the Pacific Ocean and a railroad cut through the mountain range and across the continental United States, in the streets of San Francisco roaring with both newfound wealth and vice, their unexpected love took root—a relationship that was rare, special and forbidden. 

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