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.

Celebrating the Good America while lamenting the Bad America

This week in North Philly Notes, William Gee Wong, author of Sons of Chinatown, writes about growing up in Oakland’s Chinatown and how that shaped his—and his father’s—worldview

Until I was 13 years old in 1954, I thought the world was, well, Chinatown, where I was born in Oakland, California. It was such a safe, secure place, like a yellow blanket warming me up against the cold, white world nearby. The first words I heard were in my parents’ Chinese dialect, but I quickly acquired English-language skills going to the neighborhood “American” school.

Then I started the 9th grade in a mostly white high school two miles from Chinatown. Uneasy and mostly mute at first, I learned to adapt, got friendly with white students, did well in my classes, and became active in student journalism activities, eventually becoming editor of the school yearbook. This new environment disabused me of my illusion that the world was Chinatown.

My father never had this identity transformation. A mid-teenager from an obscure, isolated rice-growing village, he came to America in 1912 during the height of China’s quake-like governance revolution and the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred most Chinese from entry into America. He managed to get in legally using partially false papers, settled in Chinatown, went to the nearest “American” school to learn English, worked and lived in an herbalist shop, and returned to China several times to marry and have three girls before bringing his young family to settle for good in Oakland’s Chinatown, where he operated small businesses until his death in 1961 at age 65.

I tell our shared and divergent stories in Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America to shed light on a rarely told positive American immigration story that began under negative circumstances. How Chinese migrants, like my father, survived the century-long period of unofficial then official discrimination isn’t widely known. Sons of Chinatown illuminates America’s ongoing complex, solution-defying struggles to address its deeply confounding immigration conundrum.

The positive part is my father’s hard work, resilience, and legacy of four generations of law-abiding, productive wholly or partially ethnic Chinese American citizens. For example, I emerged out of the Chinatown bubble to gradually join the white-dominated mainstream by serving my country as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of the Philippines and as one of a small group of Chinese American/Asian American pioneers in newspaper journalism. My commentaries unveiled untold Chinese American and Asian American stories, captured in Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America (Temple University Press, 2001).

The negative part is the continuing racism against us on an individual and systemic basis despite our multiple generations of rock-solid Americanness and adherence to the core constitutional values and principles espoused by the wealthy white men who founded the United States of America. After so many generations as Americans of Asian descent, some of us wonder whether we truly belong in the land of our birth or legalized national adoption.

During my father’s time and early in my life, there were relatively few of us of Chinese and Asian descent in America. Beginning in the mid- to-late 1960s, thanks to a major liberalization of U.S. immigration laws, many more immigrants and refugees from East, Southeast, and South Asia came to America, the vast majority of whom are valuable, if not exemplary, cogs of our powerful multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, freedom-loving society.

I celebrate the Good America while lamenting the Bad America, with more hope than fear that collectively we will resist the bad aspects of who we are to further embrace the good and forge ahead to be even better.