Ella May Clemens was born in 1871 as Ella May Clemmons (she changed the spelling of her name later in life and spuriously claimed to be Mark Twain’s niece). Clemens grew up in Palo Alto, CA, the daughter of a somewhat prosperous farmer, along with her two sisters, Ida and Viola (later Katherine Gould). After chaperoning Viola as she toured around the world with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Ella May ended up in San Francisco. In 1901, she “renounced the frivolities of the world” and opened a mission in Chinatown called “The Little House of Gold.” Her advocacy for San Francisco’s Chinese community earned her the nickname “Christ Angel of Chinatown.” After the 1906 earthquake, which leveled the vast majority of Chinatown (including the Little House of Gold), Ella May assumed responsibility for the area’s relief effort, operating out of a small tent in the Presidio. It was there she met future husband Wong Sun Yue when he joined her volunteer effort. The pair had marriage ceremonies at both a Chinese joss house and later a Methodist church and spiritually considered one another husband and wife, though they were not legally married. California law not only forbade interracial marriage in the state, but specifically voided interracial marriages performed outside of the state.

Using lumber donated by the Red Cross, the couple built their home and curio shop at 353 Grant Street, selling relics from the earthquake as well as giving guided tours of Chinatown and peddling various quack medicines such as a “miracle opium cure” that supposedly kicked her husband’s vicious addiction to the drug. The couple raised two mixed-race children, first said to be their own and then later claimed by Clemens to have been adopted. In 1915 they traveled to China to open a school, an endeavor financed by Clemen’s sister, Katherine Gould. There was an eventual falling out between them, for reasons unknown, and Gould pulled the funding and the project fell through. After both suffering a severe bout of malaria, Clemens learned that Wong already had a wife in China throughout the entirety of their relationship. The pair broke up and Wong remained abroad while Clemens returned to the U.S., her health and spirits broken. By 1938 she had linked up with a snake-oil salesman straight out of Agatha Christie, who was purporting to cure her ailments with “health regiments,” such as a diet of no water and, by contrast, a diet of only water. The sad truth is that he was slowly poisoning her while siphoning her wealth and having an affair with a woman posing as his assistant. He married Clemens very shortly before she succumbed to the poisoning. While he was accused of her murder, he was never tried nor convicted of the crime.