EP19: A Mighty Voice for Chinatown: The Great Tye Leung Schulze – Meridians: History and Science

Today's episode is about Tye Leung Schultze. She had a profound life as an interpreter and barrier breaker. I'll also touch on why so many Chinese immigrated to the United States in the late 19th century as well as child labor during the industrial revolution. Checkout my substack: meridianspodcast.substack.comFor more info:www.meridianspodcast.comFor feedback:feedback@meridianspodcast.comMeridians is a podcast created by Charlie Noble. This isn't a history or science class; it's a relaxed journey through time. I'm sifting through interesting tidbits and trying to learn something new while I'm at it. There are no sensationalized stories or conspiracy theories here—just a straightforward examination of facts. My goal is to maintain a positive perspective while honestly reflecting on our world.

1. EP19: A Mighty Voice for Chinatown: The Great Tye Leung Schulze 23:06
2. EP18: Two Fates during the California Gold Rush 38:29
3. EP17: Master of the Sea: Joshua Slocum 27:34

Latest articles from Substack

• The Opium Wars: The story of Great Britain getting China hooked on opium for profit
  February 16, 2025 by Charlie Noble
  A Q and A featuring Meridiots Ol'Sandy and Sam
• A Mighty Voice for Chinatown: The Great Tye Leung Schulze
  February 9, 2025 by Charlie Noble
  During a wave of immigration into San Francisco, there was a hero for those without a voice.
• Two Fates during the California Gold Rush
  February 2, 2025 by Charlie Noble
  The stories of James Marshall and the Murphy Brothers
• Sailing Alone Around the World
  January 26, 2025 by Charlie Noble
  The Adventures of Joshua Slocum, Part 2

About

The whole concept of this podcast came from this game people play on Wikipedia. Two people start on a random page and compete to see how fast they can get to a specifically chosen page through links on the page. It’s kind of fun but since Wikimedia relies on donations to keep it running, I don’t recommend playing it, unless you’re going to donate to them, which you should do, by the way.

With Meridians, I wanted to take that game concept and turn that into a podcast. As I started writing, I realized that the podcast shouldn’t just have me jump from topic to topic without any kind of continuity. The real fun for me was actually finding the connections themselves.

So what I try to do now is start with a given topic and learn about it. Whichever branch of that topic I find the most interesting, I follow until I find another topic that I feel should be examined and talked about.

I’ve always found history and science more fun to talk about than mundane everyday life. I spent a lot of time in my 20s working from a freezer truck. I filled the driving time with 7-8 hours of books on CD. The library only had so many dorky Sci-fi novels so I started to branch out. First I listened to a lecture series about ancient Egypt, then started reading a few books about science, which led to all kinds of books. Then I learned about Audible and also started listening to a bunch of Podcasts. I became a history and science nerd pretty quickly.

My professional background is in software development, which means I know zero about writing (I failed English in High School). Also, I’m not much of a public speaker. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time and have zero credentials to be explaining history or science. I really just lean on what I can find and try to make the show interesting. I’ll do my best though, and hopefully I improve my writing and presentation. I don’t want to deliver a lazy product. I do take this very seriously.

I did come up with some rules for my show which I’m going to try to follow very closely:

1. Connecting topics needs to be interesting. I’m not going to try to connect one topic to another using too wide reaching aspects of that topic. For example, if one topic starts off in WW2, I’m not going to use the war itself to connect those topics. That would be lazy and it would get old. A few other things I’ll avoid are: Any other large war or long-term event, Any large organization (i.e. The Catholic Church, The British Empire, etc..), or any widely known public figure, like Jesus, Julius Caesar, Gandhi , etc..)
2. I will try to keep the podcast to the truth. Speculation is going to happen, but I’m not going to entertain ridiculous ideas that have zero merit. Also, I’m not going to make this podcast into a debunking podcast where that’s all I do, but if the right topic comes up, I’ll stick to being a skeptic. The truth matters. If I get something really wrong, I hope someone calls me on it and I can call out a correction.
3. I want to keep the show positive to a degree. There is enough doom and gloom bullshit in the media, trying to bait you in with fear. I want you to come to my show expecting a balanced episode that isn’t going to leave you feeling miserable afterward. However, some topics are too important to ignore and need to be referenced. I will try to tactfully shape the show so that we can still examine these topics fairly, without being ignorant and while also keeping all of our mental health in mind. There’s a balance there that I’m going to strive for.
4. This show will cover topics from all over the world. I’m from the Midwest United States, so I’m plenty familiar with Western culture. This show would be pretty lame if I only talked about popular topics from American and European history. I want to try to examine the whole world and across cultures. The world is turning into a large melting pot of cultures with people interacting online across cultures like never before in history. I think it is beneficial to fully embrace that. The more you know about another culture, the less alien they are to you.

That’s all the rules I have for now. We’ll see where we go from here. I’m looking forward to it.