Paper Sons of Paper Sons: My Immigrant Family's Hidden Stories (Part 3)
This article first appeared in Salon.com, at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.
Like them my father had his own hidden history, which I stumbled on after finding his old social security card a long time ago. The name on it was Leon Ford, phonetically similar to Onn Fot, his real, legal name. When he was six, my father and his family came to the United States and settled in Ohio. Was he Onn Fot then and later became Leon Ford? When did he become Onn Fot again? I don’t know, he never talked about it and now his memory is uncertain and fading.
What else did I not know? I had always believed my father had only two brothers, until one day, when returning to the old house for a family wedding, I was looking through an ancient photo album. The pages were stiff, the sepia pictures cracked and faded. Then the photograph: my father, Uncle Toy and Uncle Charlie—all young boys in their home in China—with an older girl no had ever mentioned. Eventually my cousins told me about the aunt I never knew. She had married and moved to Indonesia, losing contact with the family as was common back then.
Unlike my mother, my father, born in Canton in 1924, is a U.S. citizen by birth. How could that be? We never asked about the past and our parents never spoke of it. In the absence of facts, I had always imagined a great grandfather arriving in the United States to build the railroads; a grandfather born to him in this country and later moving to China to have his own children, who would be foreigners by birth but U.S. citizens by birthright.
A cousin, who used to visit us at the old house, only this year filled some gaps in the family history. For a time my father’s father lived in San Francisco and worked in a grocery store there. How bad was China if opportunities were better stocking vegetables in America, thousands of miles from home? I picture a dark, stifling room in a tenement filled with Chinese men, all escaping war or poverty, working for money to send to their families. One of them had decided to return permanently to China and sold his citizenship papers to my grandfather, who then adopted that man’s identity.
I don’t know the year, but it was almost certainly after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which set fire to the city and destroyed public birth records. At the time almost anyone could claim to have been born in the United States and therefore were citizens—because no proof existed otherwise. If upheld, their children born in China automatically became U.S. citizens and would receive supporting documentation. So my grandfather was a paper son, and my father must be the paper son of a paper son, perhaps without even knowing it.
