Paper Daughter
Page 16
Maybe one day we'd have proof. With Mom's permission, we'd begun contacting agencies that might have information about Dad's birth parents. All we needed to find was the one missing generation. And since he was never adopted, we were hopeful that his name might lead us to his father and mother.
Meanwhile, Mr. Li, Mom and me, and Ian and his folks were all readjusting our notions of family.
It had been hardest on Ian, I thought, finding out that his beloved great-uncle wasn't a real relative. Not by blood.
But the last time I went over, they had the chessboard out again and were saying "Uncle watch your pawn," and "Nephew, your move."
Mr. Li's paper son status—and Sucheng Li's, as a paper daughter—were legal matters out in the open now. Mr. Li, accompanied by Ian's dad, who was a lawyer, had gone to Immigration Services and given their real names.
No one was certain what the outcome would be, but I wasn't too worried. I couldn't believe anyone would spend time pursuing an illegal entry made more than seventy-five years ago by a man now so elderly.
And I was sure no one would go after Sucheng Li, who lived in her own shadow world of madness.
***
Our dinner party was a success, and after our guests left, Mom and I sank gratefully into chairs to talk it over.
We were talking a lot these days. And we were remembering and bringing Dad back into our lives, where he'd gone missing.
Sometimes we speculated about how and when he began trying to be someone he wasn't. I thought perhaps he had started by deceiving himself, when being a lonely heart had got to be too hard.
Mom thought his complicated lie might have started by accident. "That first time I brought him home to meet my parents, he mentioned a summer job he'd had in the public relations office of a Boston museum. They knew the museum because its Thomas and Adele Chen Memorial Fund had supported some of their research. I think they may have just jumped to the conclusion that was his family."
"Did he tell them it wasn't?" I asked.
"Maybe he tried. I don't know if they gave him a chance."
"But he never tried to tell you the truth?"
"Maybe, early on," she said. "I might not have given him a chance, either. Or maybe he did tell me, but using words I wouldn't hear."
Now, sitting there with Mom, that's what I kept returning to. Even if we could somehow have Dad back and ask him what happened, he might not have a black-and-white answer to give. More likely, even for him, the answer would be in shades of gray.
But even though I realized that, I also knew it had been Dad's choice to live with his lies. Just as, finally, I believed, Dad had chosen to find the truth about who Steven Chen really was.
It would have been a choice not all that different, I thought, from the one I made when I stayed to hear Mr. Li's story, the part beyond what I already knew, whatever it might mean for me.
A FINAL WORD
I promised to tell you what I know about Fai-yi Li, and I have done that, though perhaps you know more. Perhaps you have heard his voice, perhaps been brushed by other whispers, too.
I also promised to tell you about myself. And although I have done so truthfully, I think I began with a statement that was only partly right. I said the important thing to know about me is that I am Steven's Chen's daughter.
I am, of course. His and Mom's.
But the important thing to know is that I'm more than that.
I think I understand what Dad meant, saying that at sixteen I don't need to decide who I want to be for the rest of my life.
I think that if he could have had just a few more minutes to talk—if he hadn't already stayed too long when he had a plane to catch and Seattle traffic to deal with—he might have said that who I will be is a question I should never stop asking. Or answering.
I think he might have reminded me that the world is big, and there are lands and people and stories beyond the horizon and as close as my new city.
Perhaps he would have promised that each time I dare to open my life to them, I will learn a little more of who I am.
—Margaret Wynn Chen Seattle
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
In researching my novel Hitch, I'd gone to the National Archives and Records Administration facility in Seattle to look at Civilian Conservation Corps material. Susan Karren, a NARA archivist generous and enthusiastic in her wish to convey the wealth of material there, introduced me to the Chinese immigration files. When she did, I knew I had my next book.
An author writes for many reasons, including the opportunity to explore other times and lives. Sometimes this means looking back to a slim slice of history, as I did in developing the story of Fai-yi Li. Sometimes what you find reminds you that the issues of today are not new ones. Certainly immigration isn't. What has varied over the centuries is who the immigrants are, why and how they have come here, what our laws say about their status, and how—or whether—they are welcomed.
A need for labor—particularly inexpensive labor—has fueled many immigration waves. It did in the nineteenth century, when muscle power was needed to dig mines and to lay the tracks of a fast-growing network of railroads. By the 1880s, however, the United States was struggling through an economic depression, and Chinese and American workers were in competition for jobs.
Violence erupted in places—a riot in Rock Springs, Wyoming, took twenty-eight Chinese lives; the Snake River Massacre in Hell's Canyon, Oregon, took another thirty-one. Up and down the West Coast, arguments raged between citizens who wanted to protect immigrants from what was called the Driving Out and those who wanted the immigrants, especially the Chinese immigrants, gone.
Meanwhile, shape was being given to laws that would collectively result in the years from 1882 to 1943 becoming known as the Exclusion Era.
The first of these laws, passed in 1882, suspended immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and also established groups—teachers, students, merchants, and travelers—that would be exempt. The Geary Act in 1892 continued the suspension and also required Chinese to register and obtain certificates verifying their right to be in the United States. Other laws added more provisions, and court decisions modified interpretations. And then, in 1904, another act extended indefinitely all Chinese exclusion laws then in effect.
Chinese immigration did not completely stop during the four decades that followed. There were those who could immigrate because of exempt status. There were those who could come here because they had a parent or spouse who was a legal resident. And there were the paper sons.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed the Hall of Records there, with its documentation of births, marriages, and deaths. This opened the way for immigrants to claim they'd actually been born on United States soil, which would make them and their children citizens. And it fueled the growing practice by which a Chinese man who resided in the United States would claim to have living in China more children than he actually had and apply for permission to bring them here. He might then give away or sell the extra "slots," perhaps to relatives or friends, perhaps to strangers. On paper, he would be their father; a person taking such a slot would be a paper son. And the slots almost always did go to males rather than to females.
Immigration officials watched for these schemes, conducting detailed interrogations that were designed to expose someone who was falsely claiming to be from a particular place or family. Whether an immigrant was a paper son or a true one, his fear that he might be deported because he answered a question incorrectly was a valid one. Transcripts of interrogations that ask questions such as "How are the houses arranged in your village?" "How many in each row?" "Is there a wall?" are part of the archived files.
The Exclusion Era laws, which focused on Chinese immigration but also affected other groups of immigrants, including Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos, were not lifted until 1943. Then, in the middle of World War II, with China being an ally, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Act to Repeal the Chinese Excl
usion Acts, to Establish Quotas, and for Other Purposes. It ended the Exclusion Era and set the stage for future legislation that would gradually ease remaining restrictions.
***
However, exploring and writing about other times and lives is not confined to looking into the past and examining the present in light of it. It's also about trying to capture a changing present in a way that invites speculation about tomorrow.
When I first went to work in a newsroom, I sat at a typewriter. Not long after, the Underwoods were gone, replaced by computers, but a reporter's work stayed the same: talk to people, dig through files, go out and see for oneself. Write up what was gleaned so that readers would have the information they needed to understand events and to make decisions. The Missoulian, with its big pages and fat sections, was delivered every morning and was the first, main source of news for most folks in western Montana.
Now the days of the newspaper —meaning only inked lines on paper—are gone, and the industry—print, broadcast, and even online—is struggling through a painful rebirth. The Internet offers reporters research possibilities unimaginable when I sat before that typewriter, but it also means that the business side of a news organization must find ways to compete in a marketplace where new forms of competition seem to appear overnight. I've tried, in writing Maggie's story, to capture a newsroom straddling the change from traditional to electronic format or some combination of the two.
And I've tried, also, to say that although—like Harrison—I hope newsprint will stream across press rollers for years to come, what's really important is that the news itself continues to be covered honestly and completely. As he tells Maggie, a democracy depends on a population that knows what's going on, and people depend on good, dedicated journalists to find out and pass it along.
—Jeanette Ingold, 2009
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Mea Andrews, Kathi Appelt, Carol Brown, Tom C. Brown, Beverly Chin, Peggy Christian, Sneed B. Collard III, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Jodee Fenton, Karen Grove, Elizabeth Harding, Kimberly Willis Holt, Kurt Ingold, Susan H. Karren, Wendy Norgaard, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, Lola Schaefer, Lynn Schwanke, and Bruce Weide.
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References and Suggestions for Learning More
BOOKS
Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. New York: Viking/Penguin Group, 2003.
Kung, S. W Chinese in American Life: Some Aspects of Their History, Status, Problems, and Contributions. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962.
Ling, Huping. Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Sung, Betty Lee. Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967.
Tung, William L. The Chinese in America 1820—1973: A Chronology & Fact Book. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Oceana Publications, 1974.
DOCUMENT
NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
Reference Information Paper 99, compiled by Lowell, Waverly B. Chinese Immigration and Chinese in the United States: Records in the Regional Archives of the National Archives and Records Administration, 1996.
INTERNET SOURCES
Angel Island Association in cooperation with the California Department of Parks and Recreation homepage with link to Immigration Station material.
www.angelisland.org
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication homepage.
aejmc.org
Associated Press homepage.
www.ap.org
Harvard University open collection of Exclusion Era—related material. ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/themes-exclusion.html
Library of Congress homepage.
www.loc.gov
National Archives and Records Administration homepage.
www.archives.gov
National Park Service Ellis Island homepage.
www.nps.gov/elis
Newseum homepage, with links to museum activities and teacher and student resources.
www.newseum.org
Newspaper Association of America homepage, with links to NAA Foundation programs including Newspapers in Education (NIE) and the Youth Editorial Alliance (YEA).
www.naa.org
NewspaperIndex.com homepage, with links to newspapers and front pages from around the world.
www.newspaperindex.com
Radio Television Digital News Association.
www.rtnda.org
University of California's Calsphere collection of primary sources homepage with link to Chinese Exclusion Act documents and photographs. www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu
University of Washington libraries digital collections homepage.
content.lib.washington.edu
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