Paper Daughter (21 page)

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

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 Exclusion 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

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.

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