Paper Sons of Paper Sons: My Immigrant Family's Hidden Stories (Part 2)
This article first appeared in Salon.com, at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.
From the time before grade school, I remember the milkman delivering milk in glass bottles, a photographer walking around the neighborhood with a pony, a neighborhood so newly developed that the trees were saplings and the yards didn’t have fences. Delving even deeper, my earliest memory is only fragmentary: standing in the darkness, in the aisle of a movie theater and head high to the armrests, watching the big screen flickering black and white. What was it? My impression is that it was a newsreel, like the ones played before the feature film. History.
The end of memories is the beginning of history, and from the time before the house we have the stories, such as when my father felt it was time to find a wife. After finishing college he put out word to friends and relatives and promised one hundred dollars to the one who found his match. An aunt introduced him to my mother at a tea in Hong Kong. Though they spent only one afternoon together, my mother decided to take a chance because she wanted to go to America and rejoin the rest of her family, who had already immigrated to New York City years before.
Returning to the United States, my father needed a year to arrange the paperwork for my mother to reside here. Her flight from Hong Kong across the Pacific was on a noisy prop plane. Only eighteen at the time, she was horribly airsick and frightened, and has never been on an airplane since. Despite the upsetting journey, my parents did manage to marry on Christmas Eve 1955, though my father somehow never paid the $100 reward to his aunt. Eventually they settled in Columbus and bought the house that would stay in our family until now.
Although he worked as an aerospace engineer, my father originally wanted to be a farmer. By the time he decided farming was too hard, he had already earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in horticulture from Ohio State University, which he attended under the G.I. Bill. My father had enlisted in the U.S. army in 1943 and trained in Florida for 13 weeks. For the remainder of World War II he served near Batangus in the Philippines, maintaining a power plant and helping to rebuild parts of the city.
Shortly after my mother was born, in 1937 near Hong Kong, most of her immediate family left for America in advance of the Japanese invasion of China, leaving her in the care of her grandmother. During the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) the two of them fled deep into the countryside, where they nearly starved and had to eat their dog (in one variation of this story, they merely had to eat “a” dog).
For a long time I wondered why my mother was left behind. Why she and her siblings here in the U.S. have different last names. Ng. Set. Yung. Only recently did I learn the history. The Chinese Exclusion Act, in effect from 1882 to 1943, had all but eliminated Chinese immigration to the United States. Some, with relatives already residing in the country, had the chance to join them after detention, scrutiny and interrogation on Angel Island, San Francisco. One by one, when they could, my mother’s family bought false identity papers and entered the U.S. as members of other families—so called paper sons and paper daughters—adopting new names and lives until they had even forgotten their own birthdays.
Not until the mid-1960’s would Immigration Amnesty be granted and those with fraudulent identities could become legal residents. My mother’s siblings could have reverted to their original family name, but each chose to keep the names they have lived with and been known by for so many years.