After being forced to stay in Dallas overnight because of the horrible weather in New York City, I finally arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the morning of January 3rd. Soon I found myself at the registration desk of the Phi Alpha Theta Biennial Convention, picking up everything I needed for the weekend.
Phi Alpha Theta (ΦΑΘ) is an American honor society for undergraduate and graduate students and professors of history. It was established on March 17, 1921 at the University of Arkansas by Professor Nels Cleven. Today, the society has over 350,000 members, with about 9,500 new members joining each year through 860 local chapters. The 2014 Biennial Convention was open to faculty and students at all levels undergraduates, Master’s candidates, Ph.D. students, as well as students who have graduated. Besides me, three other history majors from Rollins were also going to present their research to the history scholars around the United States.
Although I arrived in Albuquerque a day later, I still had time to spare before my own presentation at 3:30 that afternoon. So I met up with my friends Wendy and Sydney and attended a session on LGBT history. In that session, Daniel Manuel’s presentation, “Lafayette is No Exception’: Sexual Revolutions and the Development of a Gay Community in Lafayette, Louisiana, 1968-1975” amazed me because of how much oral history work he had done to support his arguments. The presenters and the audience also engaged in discussions after their presentations. I was impressed how the presenters could answer some of the tough questions, which showed how prepared they were and how much extra work they had invested in their projects.
When the session was over, we headed over to lunch. Having been a poor college student traveling in New England over winter break, I consider the lunch buffet to be the best meal I had in weeks. What is even more awesome about the lunch is the engaging speaker on the first world war, and the diverse students at our table. I made friends with a Chinese student, Mengyuan Zhu, from Pepperdine University at my table. She and I clicked immediately as we discovered that we were the only Chinese students at this conference, which speaks to how rare and difficult it was for foreign students to study history in the United States.
For support, I went to Mengyuan’s session next, in which she presented on the rivalry between Manchester and Liverpool beyond soccer. Her paper was interesting in that it dealt largely with the impact of industrialization in the two cities. It brought back a lot of my memories when I visited Manchester and Liverpool in the fall semester of my junior year to collect primary sources on the conditions of child labor during the industrial revolution. In the same session, Victoria Conlin from Georgetown University presented on “Peddlers, Prostitutes and the Plague: Debunking the ‘Golden Era for Women’ Myth of Late-Medieval English Economic History.” I was intrigued by the contrast between her paper and mine, since both dealt with prostitutes but in a different country during a different time period.
After keeping myself busy by going to other people’s sessions, it was finally time for me to present my paper: “Sold, Sexed, and Discriminated: The Chinese Prostitutes in San Francisco Before the Exclusion.” This was a paper I wrote for the History of American Sexuality class in the spring semester of my junior year. As an upper level history class, I was to pick a topic for a research paper. While our professor provided us with a list of themes, none of them stood out to me. I read Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, a collection of documents and essays, to frame a research question. In the book, the letter from Wong Ah So to her mother caught my eye. Wong Ah So was a Chinese prostitute in San Francisco. When she was nineteen and still in China, a Chinese man persuaded her that he was a rich man in San Francisco looking for a wife. She followed him to America, only to find out that the man had tricked her and sold her into prostitution. Luckily, a missionary worker rescued her from her misery. The story of Wong Ah So intrigued me. I knew that many Chinese men came to the United States with the discovery of gold in 1848, but I had assumed that their wives came too, until Wong Ah So’s story suggested otherwise. Her story spurred me to think about the experiences of Chinese female immigrants. Further research showed that there were many women like Wong Ah So in San Francisco, women who had been kidnapped and sold into prostitution. I decided to set my research paper topic on exploring the experiences of these women.
My presentation attracted a lot of interest and a lot of questions. Fortunately, I was able to answer most of them as my interest over the Chinese prostitutes had prompted me to write my senior thesis on the perceptions of Chinese female immigrants in San Francisco. Nevertheless, the panel chair gave me some suggestions as to how to further my research, and some audience’s questions also provided me with some areas to look at that I never thought about before. I was glad that the audience enjoyed my presentation. An editor of a history journal approached me and suggested me to submit my paper to his journal, which made me very happy.
Now that my own presentation is over, I could finally enjoy everything that the resort and the conference has to offer…