In the mid-19th century, thousands of Chinese women were trafficked to California to be exploited in the sex trade or sold info forced marriages. In many ways, these patterns reflected the commodification of women that was embedded into the legal code and daily social structure of late-Qing-dynasty China (Lu, Weijing. “Gender and Social Life in Imperial China.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 30 Oct. 2019). Treating women as legal dependents, Chinese law negated the concept of female consent and formalized women’s absolute status as “property.” They belonged either to their father or to another man to whom they had been “sold”: into arranged (or forced) marriages, as concubines—formal sexual partners without a wife’s status—or into domestic, agricultural, or sexual enslavement (Ciarcinska, Katarzyna. “Objectification of Women in China.” ResearchGate, Jan. 2019). In practice, although the social status accorded to these women differed, all were denied legal or personal agency or rights.

In the US, the exploitation of women was facilitated both by criminal organizations and discriminatory legal and judiciary practices that marginalized Chinese women. Daughter of the Sun and Moon engages with this cultural history. The “tongs,” which began as mutual-aid societies for (male) Chinese immigrants, evolved into criminal gang networks that controlled vice rackets; the Hip Yee Tong, the organization that buys Petal in the novel, was a real San Francisco tong that trafficked an estimated 6,000 women between 1852 and 1873 (Wong, Edward. “Broken Blossoms.” Prologue Magazine, vol. 48, no. 1, 2016). American law failed to prevent this exploitation. Although the 1875 Page Act, the first restrictive federal immigration law, explicitly forbade the importation of Asian women for “immoral purposes,” in practice, immigration officials used this law to prevent all Asian women from immigrating legally (Hutchinson, Jocelyn. “Page Act.” EBSCO, 2023). This effectively drove the immigration of women into an illegal trade, increasing trafficking and denying Asian women legal migrant protections and documentation. The law and its implementation also increased discriminatory attitudes toward Asian women in US that stereotyped them as “immoral.”

The novel also draws on historical instances of racist violence against Chinese immigrant communities, including the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871. On October 24, a mob of roughly 500 Angelenos descended on the city’s small Chinese community, lynching at least 18 residents, including a doctor, Dr. Chee Long Tong. The massacre, which killed over 10% of the city’s Chinese population, resulted in eight convictions for manslaughter, but the California Supreme Court overturned them on a legal technicality in 1872, and no one ever served time for the murders.