Newspaper Coverage of Efforts to Free Mrs. Loo Lin, 1903

Background: In 1903, San Francisco officials prevented Pearl Mak Chu, the wife of a prominent New York restaurant owner, from joining her husband in the United States. For forty days, she was held in a crowded, unventilated, and filthy detention shed, while her husband, Loo Lin, appealed her case. He solicited help from his contacts at New York newspapers, who used the power of the press to pressure immigration officials into giving Loo Lin merchant status, so that Pearl Mak Chu could enter the country as the wife of a merchant. The empathetic coverage helped move popular sentiment toward a more liberal interpretation of Chinese exclusion in regard to the legal status of restaurant owners.

evidence to free mrs loo lin

new affidavits as to her husband’s business gathered by inspector berkshire

ill and despondent in the detention pen

yet she has gathered a class of chinese women there and is teaching them english

San Francisco, May 26—When the case of Mrs. Loo Lin, the Chinese woman editor and Christian teacher, imprisoned in the local detention shed, reaches the Treasury Department in Washington it will be the most complete presentation of law related to the landing of Chinese ever sent forward from this place. . . .

“In all my experience with cases of this character,” said Capt. Barnes, this evening, “I never of a decision upon which an immigration inspector could base a report that a Chinese merchant could be deprived of his legal standing because he also owned a restaurant, and in the mass of Treasury Department decisions which I have been examining in the past two days there is nothing that would offer the slightest pretext for such a ruling. 

“It is astounding that this little woman should be made to undergo the humiliation and suffering of weeks of captivity in the detention pen, and I cannot fathom the motive of it. It is the more mysterious because the only objective to be gained was to prevent a reunion of husband and wife, and turn back from these shores a woman who more than any other in China has labored for the Christian advancement of her sex.” 

Source: New York World, May 17, 1903