ABSTRACT
In December 1906, five-year-old Mary Paik Lee arrived via ship with her parents in San Francisco, California. Having left their native Korea a few years earlier, the family had spent time in Hawaii, where Paik’s father worked as a plantation laborer. Their first moments in San Francisco were memorable, but not in an exhilarating Ellis Island arrival sort of way. “As we walked down the gangplank,” she recalled, “a group of young white men were standing around, waiting to see what kind of creatures were disembarking … They laughed at us and spit in our faces; one man kicked up Mother’s skirt and called us names we couldn’t understand.”1
