Navigating past the junkies and hustlers in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, You Mi Kim found the metal security door she was looking for, and pressed the buzzer. Inside Sun Spa massage parlor, the manager saw You Mi on the surveillance camera and threw some sea salt over the threshold -- a Korean practice to ward off bad luck. It was July It had been five months since You Mi was lured from her home in South Korea by international sex traffickers, who had tricked the debt-ridden college student with promises of a high-paying hostess job in America.

In the s, San Francisco, and the American West generally, was a hotbed of anti-Chinese sentiment. Spurred by racism, exacerbated by the economic uncertainty of an ongoing recession, the xenophobia manifested itself in discriminatory legislation and violent physical intimidation against Chinese men and women. Anti-miscegenation laws and restrictive policies that prohibited Chinese women from immigrating to the U. Motivated by their Christian faith, a group of white women set out to offer the immigrant women a path out of slavery and sex trafficking and, ideally, into what they viewed as good Christian marriages. In , they founded the Occidental Board Presbyterian Mission House and, for the next six decades, more than 2, women passed through the doors of the brick building at Sacramento Street, San Francisco. A revelatory history of the trafficking of young Asian girls that flourished in San Francisco during the first hundred years of Chinese immigration and an in-depth look at the "safe house" that became a refuge for those seeking their freedom. Slavery was technically outlawed in the United States with the passage of the 13th Amendment, but another type of slavery exploded in California in the years following.

Lakireddy Balireddy shocked the Bay Area a decade ago when investigators discovered how the Berkeley landlord transported young women and girls from India for sex. He served eight years in prison. His case still inspires reformers who want to put human traffickers away for longer.

What To Expect: Live On The Green 2019. Letter to the Editor: In response to Bauman, Never Again is now. Final freshman year reflections.