Liang May Seen

She overcame an impoverished childhood in China and teenage years spent in a San Francisco brothel to become a respected leader in the Chinese immigrant community in Minneapolis.

In 1885, at the age of fourteen, her parents sold her to a man who promised that Liang would be marrying a wealthy Chinese American merchant.

At the brothel, Liang May Seen was forced to provide sexual services for businessmen, but she plotted her escape.

[1] Woo Yee Sing had immigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen, moving to San Francisco in the early 1880s.

[1] Most of the Chinese men who came to the Midwest during the 1880s and 1890s moved from the West Coast to escape this kind of violence.

In 1912 a small bomb was set off near Woo's restaurant, and his son recalled being taunted and called racist names.

Others, such as suffragist Mabeth Hurd Paige, were friends through organizations like the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Westminster began teaching English lessons to Chinese men in 1882, and Woo Yee Sing was one of their first students.

As Minnesota's Chinese men achieved economic success, more of them were able to bring their wives and families from Guangdong Province.