" in Southern China during a time when workers were being smuggled into North America despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Young women were still being sold as Mui Tsai in China, or Karayuki-san in Japan, often ending up in the United States, where they worked as slaves or indentured servants, more than fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. "

― Jamie Ford , Love and Other Consolation Prizes