The San Francisco call., 1897-07-23
She Was Bruised and Beaten
Until Almost Bereft of
Her Reason.
STORIES OF RESCUED SLAVES

With her back covered with the scars
from the soaring blistering application of
q redhot iron; with her arms and legs
showing the effects of brutal lashings
with her mind half imbecile from con-
tinued neglect and cruel treatment, Tsau
Kuk, a 13-year-old girl, who was taken
from a famiIy-house in Chinatown, is a
living evidence of the extent to which
Chinese slave owners abuse the poor crea-
lures who are held in bondage.
In the Methodist Mission House on
Washington street are seventeen girls who
have been rescued from slavery in San
Fran cisco, and each and every one of them
tells story of cruelty and abuse that
shows the terrible condition OF the unfoT-
tunate human beings who are still held,
despite the law and despite the fact that
officials deny that slavery exists in this
CITY. They are a living object-lesson, and
while most OF them are now IN good health,
several are cripples and several are suffer
ing from the effects of disease contracted
while they were held as cnattels.
The story of Tsau Kuk, or "Topsey," as
she Is familiarIy called at the Mission
House, is sufficient In itself to condemn
not only those who hold possession of the
girls but also of the officials whose sworn
duty il is to see that such crimes are
abolished. Many OF these girls have
come into the country since the exclusion
act went into effect, and all of them have
been held in bondage since the passage of
the Fourteenth Amendment to the consti-
tuition, which prohibited forever the hold
ing of slaves within the borders OF the
United States.
Tsau Kuk, with her marks of .earings
and branding; Ian Ying, physical
wreck; Yuk Ying, crippled and phySlc-
ally incapacitated for labor, and Tsoi VI
treatment, present quartet of those who
have suffered almost TO deaths door and
are but moiety of the hundreds who are
still held and VINO are still undergoing he
tortures which only brutes can devise for
the punishment of their chattels. On all
OF their persons are the evidences of
crime-evidence of torture-and all OF
them say that better treatment than they
get is the exception rather than the rule
in the dark alleys in Chinatown, where
the law of the Nation and OF the City il
daily dehed and set at naught.
The stories OF these seventeen girls reads
like some romance brought from the dark
ages-like a story of slave-driving away
back before the war when slavery was done
away with, when the cotton and sugar
plantations of the far South were titled by
black men and women in bondage.
When Miss Hull of the mission went to
rescue the half-demented Tsau Kuk the
little girl held out her wan arms, covered
with bruises ana scars, and cried for deliv-
erance. When she reached the mission
house she barred her back, and the terrible
scars and burns told pitiful story which
the scared brain could scarcely form word
to repeat as the chilo endeavored to show
how she had been punished in the den
where she had been kept as a slave. For
every infraction of rules of the house she
was beaten; for each childish slip she was
lashed until the blood ran; for graver mis-
deeds in the eyes of her master and mis-