Judy Yung writes, “Whereas the majority of white prostitutes came to San Francisco as independent professionals and worked for wages in brothels, Chinese prostitutes were almost always kidnapped, lured, or purchased from poor parents by procurers in China for as little as $50 and then resold in America for as much as $1,000 in the 1870s” (Unbound Feet, 27). By the 1920s, the price reached from $6,000 to $10,000 in gold (Martin, Chinatown’s Angry Angel, 239).
