The man who would later be known as Micah by a family of mixed American-English, Christian-Jewish heritage was nineteen years old when he sailed from China with a shipload of his countrymen in 1877. Mai Long Kwo was an educated boy with an unfortunate interest in politics and the more unfortunate habit of allowing his hot blood to speak up when he should not. His family scraped together the fare and prayed that, by the time he had earned enough to return, his nature would have cooled and the memories of the authorities would have faded.

Long Kwo, known to his employers as Mike Long, worked as a paid slave for twelve years on the railroad and the docks, sharing rooms with other men in houses that had neither plumbing nor gas lighting. But because he did not gamble or drink, because he worked hard and had learnt to keep his mouth shut, his money belt grew thick, and by 1890 he had migrated to San Francisco and sent home for a wife.

It was a difficult time for a man to send for a wife. Five years after Long had arrived, the American government had established what it called the Exclusion Act, which reduced the numbers of Oriental immigrants effectively to none; after eight years, there was no sign of the Act being loosened. In the 1890s, this meant that the only practical means of bringing in a Chinese woman was on a smuggler's boat.

It took Long a while to find a smuggler who could be trusted with both money and wife, and a while longer for Long's family to locate a bride they could afford for their distant son. What they came up with was Mah Wan, a young woman who looked frankly like a peasant: tall and strong, with unbound feet, a plain face, and a questionable horoscope. However, she was known to be a hard worker, and her father was willing to risk her on the high seas. She sailed for Gold Mountain, as the land was known, in the spring of 1891, arriving on the tail of a storm that left her and the other would-be immigrants more dead than alive. They came ashore on a moonlit night in pounding surf, heaved bodily into the small boats and rowed ashore.

One of Mah's companions took one look at the dark figures standing on the beach and cried aloud, and would have dissolved into hysterics but for the hard slap one of the sailors delivered. Mah herself, filthy, terrified, and weak from seasickness, nonetheless managed to keep her spine straight and her feet underneath her.

The figures moved forward and began to divide up the immigrants—six women, four men. In seconds, it seemed, they were scattering, and Mah looked at the man who was left.

“Long Kwo?” she said hesitantly.

“Yes,” said a voice, “come now, we must get off the beach before we are seen.”