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A stretch of Joice Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown is to be named to honor one of the neighborhood’s fiercest heroes.
Tien Fuh Wu spent half a century rescuing trafficked women and girls and taking care of them at 920 Sacramento St., then known as the Occidental Mission Home. Wu herself had been sold into a life of servitude when she was a small child. She was trafficked to San Francisco from her home in Zhejiang, China, so her father could pay off his gambling debts.
After being rescued in 1894 and raised by Presbyterian missionary Donaldina Cameron at the Mission Home, Wu began working alongside Cameron in her teens, as a translator, aide and travel guardian for the young women in their care, and as a fundraiser. Together the duo rescued thousands of enslaved Chinese girls and women and stayed lifelong colleagues and friends. Wu received regular death threats for her trouble…