Fraudulent Papers? Illegal Business? An American Success Story

This week in North Philly Notes, William Gee Wong, author of Sons of Chinatown, writes about his father’s immigration.

My father used partially fraudulent papers to legally enter the United States more than a century ago. In Oakland, California, where he landed in its cozy, tight-knit Chinatown, he operated an illegal business, selling lottery tickets, to survive the Great Depression.

Because he broke some laws, was he “vermin” who “poisoned the blood” of America? Or was he more an innocent, naïve outsider who wanted to be an insider in the fabled American Dream and who left a legacy of four generations of productive, law-abiding Americans of full or partial Chinese descent?

I’m biased, of course, but I look upon Pop – the English-language name I used when we shared 20 years together in Oakland’s Chinatown before he died in 1961 – as a typically hard-working immigrant who had to survive numerous pratfalls to grow a family in his adopted country that didn’t exactly embrace him and his kind.

Immigration is an issue that endures as an emotionally fraught political and cultural issue that was birthed in the last quarter of the 19^th century when the overwhelmingly white male U.S. Congress decided to exclude the ethnic group that Pop and I belong to. Some of us descendants of exclusion-era Chinese and other Asian immigrants get the distinct feeling that some longer-standing descendants of white European immigrants still don’t want us to share the American Dream. (Witness the outbreak of anti-Chinese, anti-Asian hate during the coronavirus pandemic. To be fair, some of the haters were non-white people.)

Far be it from me — a retired print journalist who is more a generalist than a policy wonk — to offer a sensible, humane formula to solve our immigration conundrum, when numerous legislators, scholars, and other experts haven’t yet been able to effectuate. But maybe Pop’s case offers to hint as to why many people from other countries are willing to break U.S. laws to come here for a better life.

Pop was a mid-teenager when he was processed through the Angel Island Immigration Station in 1912, 30 years after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and a year after the Qing dynasty fell to a republican revolution. To circumvent the exclusion law’s restrictions, Pop and his sponsor had to lie about aspects of his family and village life.

One category of Chinese immigrant that could legally enter under the Chinese Exclusion Act was “son of a native,” meaning an American-born citizen. Pop’s sponsor, his “father” on paper, was allegedly born in San Francisco in the late 19^th century. (Pop’s real parents spent their lives in isolated rural villages west of Hong Kong and Macao in a much poorer and chaotic China than today’s Superpower.)

U.S. immigration officials couldn’t disprove Pop’s paper father’s American birth claim in part because records were destroyed during the devastating San Francisco earthquake and fires in 1906. “Father” and “son” used coaching papers to create partially false stories of their personal and village lives to satisfy U.S. authorities that my future father was indeed eligible for legal entry. These paper son (and daughter) schemes were Chinatown’s civil disobedience to an unjust racist law.

Pop was far from unique. Chinese American scholars estimate that a large majority of Chinese immigrants during the exclusion era (1882-1943) were directly related only on paper. They had to take this “crooked path” to gain legal entry.

He learned English at the (American) public school. He returned to China several times, starting in 1919 to marry, grow a family, and start a business to help aspirational migrants find their way to America. Finally, in 1933, he brought his young family of wife, posing as his sister, and three young daughters to be with him permanently in Oakland, where three other girls and I, the only son, were born.

In the 1930s, he sold lottery tickets, an illegal business at that time. Many other Chinatown denizens did the same. Oakland’s white political and police officials were classic hypocrites in that they knew about these illicit activities but allowed them to exist after bribes and staged raids. In fact, the gambling industry powered much of Chinatown economically until the U.S. government imposed a punishing tax in the 1950s. Ironic, isn’t it, that the lottery is perfectly legal – and thriving – all over America today.

Pop made a bad decision that sunk his lottery business and tipped our family into temporary poverty. World War II helped save our family’s fortunes – Pop and his oldest daughter worked in a shipyard, then he and Mom opened a restaurant that fed hungry wartime civilian workers, catapulting us into the beginnings of American middle-class. Yes, a modest immigrant success story.

You would think many Americans of all ancestral heritages would celebrate this Good America. Somehow, collectively, we can’t seem to rest on those laurels. Instead, as America becomes less white by the day, a goodly number of descendants of white European immigrants want to go backwards to a whiter, more Christian America.

Those trying to fix our broken immigration system should keep in mind examples like Pop’s story to craft a solution that is fair, just, and understanding of why so many people still want to come here. These policy makers must also acknowledge that almost all these migrants are desperate for a safer, better life and aren’t sociopathic criminals and lowlifes, as labeled by a certain sociopathic criminal lowlife former president who wants to be president again.