For “paper sons” and “paper daughters” – Chinese men and women who assumed false identities to circumvent exclusionary immigration laws – starting a new life in America required mastering someone else's history.

[music] AM: Hi, Sabrina! SO: Hi, Anne! AM: What’s going on? SO: Well, I've been thinking about what you said in the first episode -- about how a historical event or person, like the Gold Rush or John C. Fremont, can be written about in so many ways. And when that happens, it becomes hard to tell what really happened and what just happened to fit into a tidy narrative. AM: Such a good point. SO: ...did you just compliment yourself? AM: Oh! Umm, maybe I shouldn’t drink coffee in the afternoon. But let’s get back to your point! [laughs] SO: Well...I'm wondering if the people wrapped up in those tidy narratives ever took part in their own creation. And if so, were they ever able to write their own story? AM: I think I see what you’re getting at. Especially when thinking about the mythically wide-open West. How easy would it be to disappear into a narrative--or even an identity--of your own creation? SO: If you were the one who chose to create it at all? [music fades out] AM: Well, we talked last time about the years following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort which drew thousands of immigrants from China looking for better opportunities in the shadow of Gold Mountain. SO: And we know that the Gold Rush did not last forever -- just six years, in fact -- and not everyone who came was planning to get rich in the gold fields. AM: That’s right! But we failed to talk about this--not everyone who came during the Gold Rush came of their own volition. In 1849, California was still a territory. It had not been admitted to the United States as a free or a slave state, as they were then known. As we talked about previously, John Sutter was said to hold upwards of 600 Native Americans in an indentured labor system, if not formal slavery. SO: And John Sutter was not the only gold seeker benefitting from enslaved labor. Enslavers seeking gold were allowed to bring the people they held in slavery--mainly Black men and women--with them to California. Even after California was admitted as a free state in 1850, this practice was still allowed for some time as long as the enslaver did not settle in California. AM: Ah, there’s that settler-sojourner distinction again. [SO: Mhm] In fact, California’s admittance as a state had a major impact on the opportunities for freedom afforded to enslaved people. SO: Really? AM: When California applied for statehood, there were thirty states in the Union. 15 permitted slavery. 15 prohibited it. This was a balance which had been carefully maintained since Maine and Missouri applied for statehood in 1820. It was decided that for every state which petitioned to join the Union as a free state, another must enter as a slave state. We could spend at least an entire episode on the decisions and debates which went into the Missouri Compromise—as this deal is called--but I think that’s for another time. SO: Okay, I will just catalog that away on my list of worthwhile rabbit holes. AM: Is that a real list? SO: Yes, it is a real list. [AM laughs] I swear there’s a real research to-do list. AM: Oh, I believe you! [SO laughs] So California applied for statehood. And it applied as a state prohibiting slavery--no big deal, right? SO: This feels like a trick question. AM: It’s because it is. This was a very big deal to Congress. No other territory was quote-unquote “developed” enough to apply statehood and a 31st state entering the union as a free state threw off this carefully maintained balance. So they came to another compromise. SO: And this cannot be good. AM: It really wasn’t. In order for California to achieve statehood, the Senate passed the Fugitive Slave Act. [music break] AM: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was not the first federal law to address the rights, or lack thereof, of enslaved people seeking freedom across state lines. SO: A Fugitive Slave Act was first passed in 1793. This formally decreed that owners of enslaved people and their agents had the right to search for escapees within the borders of free states. It required that the alleged owner or their agent provide evidence that the accused runaway was their property to a judge. It also imposed a $500 fine “on any person who helped harbor or conceal escapees”. AM: And it was met with criticism and defiance by people living in states prohibiting slavery. Some individuals built complex networks of safe houses to help and shelter enslaved individuals on their journey north to freedom. Some states intentionally neglected to enforce the law, even going so far as to pass “Personal Liberty Laws” which gave accused runaways the right to a jury trial. These laws also strove to protect free Black people who were often targeted for abduction by bounty hunters and sold into slavery. SO: One famous example is Solomon Northup, a freeborn Black man from New York who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841. He was held for twelve years in slavery in Louisiana before he won back his freedom in 1853. He would then go on to immortalize his abduction and enslavement in the memoir Twelve Years A Slave, which was made into a movie in 2013 . He said: “How heavily the weight of slavery pressed upon me then. I must toil day after day, endure abuse and taunts and scoffs, sleep on the hard ground, live on the coarsest fare, and not only this, but live the slave of a blood-seeking wretch, of whom I must stand henceforth in continued fear and dread. Why had I not died in my young years-before God had given me children to love and live for? What unhappiness and suffering and sorrow it would have prevented. I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman's chain was round me, and could not be shaken off. I could only gaze wistfully towards the North and think of the thousands of miles that stretched between me and the soil of freedom, over which a black freeman may not pass.” AM: Wow. To think, one day your whole life could be erased, and a new identity forced upon you. Forced to live in a system that rewarded your captors and silenced your voice. SO: Even if you fought for freedom and found it, was there ever a moment when you could stop fearing that someone else could steal your personhood and claim you as property? AM: Not while slavery was legal in any one state...and certainly not after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In a speech to the National Free Soil Convention in Pittsburgh in 1852, Frederick Douglass, the renowned Black orator, writer, and social reformer, addressed this law, saying, “...No where has God ordained that this beautiful land shall be cursed with bondage by enslaving men. Slavery has no rightful existence anywhere. The slaveholders not only forfeit their right to liberty, but to life itself. The earth is God's, and it ought to be covered with righteousness, and not slavery. We expect this great National Convention to lay down some such principle as this. What we want is not a temporary organization, for a temporary want, but a firm, fixed, immovable, liberty party. Had the old liberty party continued true to its principles, we never should have seen such a hell born enactment as the Fugitive Slave Law.” SO: I think we could easily and deservedly spend every episode on this subject and I’d like to come back to it when I’ve learned more. AM: I agree. SO: Right now, there is something else that Frederick Douglass said that resonates with a topic we’ve begun diving into: Chinese immigration -- which, as you know, is a topic that also raises questions about erasing and creating identities in a different way. [AM: hm] In his essay from 1881, The Color Line, Douglass examines the roots of prejudice in America. And he points this out: "Our Californian brothers, of Hibernian descent, hate the Chinaman, and kill him, and when asked why they do so, their answer is that a Chinaman is so industrious he will do all the work, and can live by wages upon which other people would starve. When the same people and others are asked why they hate the colored people, the answer is that they are indolent and wasteful, and cannot take care of themselves." [music break] SO: Today, there are around 172,000 people of Chinese descent living in San Francisco. They make up over 20% of the city’s total population and the single largest minority group accounted for in the census. About 6,000 live in a neighborhood we’ll be visiting a lot more -- that is, Chinatown. AM: Chinatown is just 24 square blocks, roughly half a mile long and a quarter mile wide. But so much history lives within it. As you mentioned last episode, San Francisco grew out of the settlement called Yerba Buena. Yerba Buena, in turn, grew around a plaza that’s now the location of Portsmouth Square -- this was where the American flag was raised for the first time in California. And remember Samuel Brannan from last episode? SO: Sure. He announced the discovery of gold to everyone in San Francisco. AM: That’s where he did it. SO: Riiight. Oh, and, hey, remember, last episode, we also talked about how San Francisco’s shoreline evolved because and after the Gold Rush? AM: You mean, do I remember there are whole ships buried beneath my feet? [SO: mhm] That a good part of the Embarcadero and downtown is landfill? [SO: mhm] Who can forget that the shoreline used to go right up to Columbus Avenue and the Transamerica Pyramid? SO: Okay, okay. You remember! AM: Mhm! SO: I guess someone was paying attention. AM: You betcha. SO: Well, that’s part of why Portsmouth Square is now the heart of Chinatown. The area was so near the water, it was the point of arrival for Chinese coming over looking for gold or jobs. In fact, instead of a residential community, Chinatown was first a “provision station” for workers going elsewhere. With Portsmouth Square still the center of the young city, many Chinese set up mining-support businesses around it -- general supply stores, laundries, restaurants, pharmacies, even a theater. The area became known as “Little Canton” and then “Chinatown” in 1853. AM: And in the next decade, the community would grow even more -- with the help of another kind of waterfront business. Between 1860 and 1874, over 112,000 Chinese immigrated to the United States, paying over $5.5 million in fare to steamship transportation companies. Transpacific steamship services began on January 1, 1867, when the Pacific Mail Steamship Company launched the Colorado, offering monthly trips. Shipping companies and labor brokers also contributed to the uptick by spreading word of the various economic opportunities available abroad. SO: So, there’s an exhibit in our park’s visitor center that goes into Pacific steamship travel. [AM: hmm] But since we can’t explore that right now, let’s play back part of our interview with Richard Everett, the former curator of exhibits at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. He goes further into the link between shipping companies and Chinese immigration. *** AM: Tell us about the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. RE: The Pacific Mail Steamship Company got its start during the Gold Rush on a government contract. It had a sweetheart deal with the government that needed to get mail to San Francisco and so they received a well-funded contract to provide transportation from the East Coast to the West…Subsequent to that, newer iron ships and so on, beginning with some of the wooden ones, went to Asia with paddlewheels. What an image you know -- paddlewheels across the Pacific. They would get over there and, pretty soon, they were carrying immigrants to San Francisco also in search of Gold Mountain and business. SO: So, why were they bringing mail all the way across the Pacific? (AM: Right? ) What am I missing here? RE: I thought of that Sabrina. There wouldn’t be much mail, would there be? But there would be mail… I mean, the bigger money to be made would have been on passengers and cargo - cargo is king (AM: Laughter ) (SO: Where have I heard that before? ) cargo was and still is king -- just kidding. There would have been a mail contract so there had to be some mail, but I think the mail contract got them established and then they branched into the Pacific, their bread-and-butter being the cargo and people. We recently discovered there were two other companies involved in the 1870s: the China Transpacific Steamship Company--and that was British-owned--and also the Occidental & Oriental Steamship Company. But in these ways, and on these shipping companies, Chinese came to California via San Francisco in great numbers. *** SO: The Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s docks, located by today’s Pier 40, thus became a landing point for arrivals from Asia. It was the precursor of the immigration station at Angel Island, which we can see from our park, just behind Alcatraz. AM: Let’s listen to Richard give some more background: RE: The Chinese Detention Shed came about as a kind of appropriation of a section of the building there on Pier 40--not today’s location of Pier 40 but about a 100 yards north of today’s Pier 40. They would land the Chinese directly off the ships that would pull up there directly into that area. The detention shed was used to detain the Chinese for medical reasons to make sure there was no spreading disease among the passengers so they would be released at some point afterwards, but the detentions in this building were known to be horribly wrong. There were many newspaper articles about it and in general this became such an embarrassing, horrible, un-American kind of detention and the conditions so deplorable and so well-publicized that Angel Island was a response to this and the growing numbers of immigrants. [music break] AM: We’ve just been given an idea of how the Chinese came over. But what kind of world were they coming into? SO: Before we talk about what kind of world they were going into, I think we should talk a little more about the world they were coming from. AM: That’s a good point! In our previous episode, we mentioned the First Opium War as a major factor in driving Chinese to seek other opportunities in America.The First Opium War was a conflict between Great Britain and China which lasted from 1839 to 1842. It formally ended on August 29, 1842, with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking or Nanjing. The terms of the treaty forced China to cede the territory of Hong Kong, establish a fair and reasonable tariff, open five treaty ports for British merchants to trade, and pay an indemnity to Great Britain. SO: It also opened China to more unequal treaties with foreign powers. The United States signed the Treaty of Wanghia with China less than a year later on July 3, 1844. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, China--under the Qing dynasty--would also enter into unequal treaties with France, Germany, Russia, and Japan. AM: The punishing terms of these treaties contributed to economic depression and unrest among the Chinese people. From 1850 to 1864, forces led by the self-proclaimed prophet, Hong Xiuquan, revolted against the Qing dynasty in what is known today as the Taiping Rebellion. SO : This religious and political upheaval was said to ravage seventeen provinces, result in the deaths of approximately 20 million people, and permanently alter the Qing dynasty – though it would remain in power until the early 1900s. AM : There’s obviously so much more to be said about the Taiping Rebellion and China’s relationship with other quote-unquote Western nations, but let’s head back to the one they traveled to by sailing east. SO: Sounds good! Let’s begin with work -- one of the reasons why immigrants come here in the first place. Now, it’s fairly well-known that San Francisco has a history of incredibly strong and effective labor movements. AM: Yeah! In November 1849, carpenters in San Francisco held the first recorded strike in California history, striking for higher wages to combat the grossly inflated prices of food and shelter in the booming city. After one week on strike, they received a dollar a day increase, which was followed by another dollar increase within the month. SO: And in 1853, California passed “the first progressive labor protective law” which limited the legal work day to 10 hours! Since the Gold Rush, labor unions have helped protect their members and shape labor and employment regulations. They fought the mentality that success in Gold Rush California could only be found through the perseverance of the individual and they offered solace and support to the workers they accepted. AM: At the same time, we know that these unions were not perfect and they were subject to the prejudices of their leaders. [SO: mhm] One notable...or should I say notorious?...leader is none other than Denis Kearney. SO: Oh, yes. Let’s talk about him. AM : Mhm, Denis Kearney was born in Ireland in 1847 and immigrated to San Francisco in 1868. He worked in hauling things by cart through the streets of San Francisco. He started a family, and in 1877, he became active in the labor movement. He was elected the secretary of a newly formed workingman’s association, which was established out of solidarity with the nation-wide railroad strike and aimed to respond to the high rate of unemployment. SO : To this day, Denis Kearney is infamous for his incendiary, provocative orations. He railed against wealthy business owners for not supporting the working white man. He also railed against Chinese immigrants for, in his eyes, stealing what little work was available. Each of his speeches was said to begin and end with the cry, “THE CHINESE MUST GO.” [music break] SO: For decades, this cry would echo in the laws which governed immigration and citizenship for Asian Americans. AM: In 1875, the Page Act was passed by Congress. This law prohibited the importation of, quote, “unfree laborers” and women brought for “immoral purposes”. It did not expressly prohibit Chinese immigrants, but given the rampant anti-Chinese sentiment at the time, it was enacted. And given that it was enforced primarily in cases involving Chinese people, we can easily connect this law with an early effort to limit the immigration of Chinese people, without jeopardizing a lucrative trade relationship with the Chinese government. SO: It wouldn’t be much longer before a law was passed which did expressly prohibit the immigration of Chinese people. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law. It provided a ten-year moratorium on Chinese skilled and unskilled labor immigration and was the first federal law to bar, to quote, “the entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities”, end quote. Non-laborers who sought entry to the U.S. had to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were qualified to immigrate. AM: And if a Chinese person who had already entered the United States left for any reason--like to visit family in China--the law required that they obtain certifications to re-enter, which was not easy to do. SO: AND the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 also refused state AND federal courts the right to grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens, though these same courts could still deport them. AM: But it was only designed to last 10 years. What happened in 1892? SO: Congress extended it under the legislation of the Geary Act, which was authored by California Democratic senator, Thomas Geary. The Geary Act not only extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for 10 years, it further restricted the rights of Chinese residents--requiring them to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Any Chinese resident found without a certificate or--this is going to be important later--falsifying a certificate faced, among other things, detention and deportation. AM: The Geary Act was made permanent in 1902 and it would govern Chinese immigration until December 17, 1943, when it was formally repealed. [music break] SO: So, Denis Kearney’s rallying cry was “The Chinese Must Go”, and Thomas Geary wrote the extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act… I hope the city streets Kearny and Geary aren’t named after them? Because that would be absurd. Kearny Street goes right along the edge of Chinatown, and it was once the location of Manilatown. AM: I’d wondered that too! But the names are spelled slightly differently. Kearny Street is named after either Stephen or Philip Kearny, both generals in the Mexican-American War. [SO: Okay] Geary Boulevard is named after John Geary, the city’s first mayor after California became a state. SO: Hooray, I guess? AM: I don’t know SO: Well, if I may say so, maybe it would’ve been fitting if Kearny Street was named after Denis Kearney. It’d be like cosmic comeuppance. The Chinese did not go. Their children and their children’s children’s children are still here. AM: Well, you can’t make that narrative fit this time, Sabrina. SO: Don’t you paraphrase our podcast against me! AM: Hey, like our supervisor always says -- be thoughtful about historiography! [SO laughs] Now, other streets in San Francisco are named after people whose legacies we’ve reviewed on the podcast. Fremont Street downtown is named after John C. Fremont, namer of the Golden Gate Strait and holder of an infamous military record. Sutter Street is named after John Sutter, who owned the property gold was discovered on and who enslaved indigenous peoples. Brannan Street is named after Samuel Brannan. There are even more street names we can look at again, and ask: What really lives on in the names we keep or don’t keep? SO: That’s a really good point, given the ongoing movement to rename streets and other sites that honor individuals who are not so honorable after all. That’s complicated and separate from the discussion we’re having now -- but for what it’s worth, there is one street in the city that got renamed because of its link to racist history. Phelan Avenue became Frida Kahlo Way in 2018. AM: That’s right! That was to disassociate it from James D. Phelan. He was the former mayor and state senator who supported Chinese and Japanese exclusion. He even campaigned with the slogan “Keep California White.” We haven’t talked much about him yet, but we sure will in a future episode. SO: An interesting thing in that story, though, is that the avenue wasn’t named for James D. Phelan himself. It was for his father, a tycoon also named James. AM: Really? SO: Yeah. But sponsors of the name change said it wouldn’t have been called that if the son wasn’t the mayor. [AM: mmm] His term ended in 1902; records suggest Phelan Avenue dates back to 1906. It could be older, but, as you know, the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 devastated San Francisco. City records became really hard to find. AM: And that brings us to the fathers and sons I really want to talk about. AM: You just said something about how the Chinese did not go -- that their children’s children are still here. Remember, last time, I asked you: How easy was it for Chinese families to be reunited in California? SO: Um -- I’m counting my fingers for each anti-Chinese act -- I think we’ve recounted it was made hard. AM: But you also mentioned cosmic comeuppance. [SO: mhm] The irony to all those exclusion laws is that they didn’t stop people from coming into the country. As we said, the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed only people with certain jobs to immigrate. By 1924, amendments excluded all Chinese nationals as well as citizens of other Asian nations. If you had family or opportunity here, there were only a few ways you could hope to stay for long – like citizenship. SO: Yes. Beyond what changing laws allowed, there were essentially two pathways to citizenship. Both were through birth. You should either be born in a U.S. territory, regardless of the political status or condition of your parents. This was called the law of the soil. Or, you should be born to U.S. citizens. Specifically, your father had to be a citizen. If yours was considered an illegitimate birth, your mother had to be one. This was called the right of blood. AM: And as always, there were restrictions within restrictions: For example, the law of the soil was not applied to children of enslaved people before the Civil War. The very first Naturalization Act, in 1790, restricted citizenship to, quote, any alien, being a free white person, end-quote, who had been residing in the United States for two years. But it didn’t explicitly exclude, quote, non-white persons born on American soil, end-quote, from acquiring citizenship. SO: So many legal mazes. [AM: so many] But for all these, the Chinese still found a way to make it into the United States. Using falsified papers, many claimed they were children of American-born or naturalized people of Chinese descent. And so, the so-called paper children were born. [music break] AM: We had the opportunity to interview the genealogist Grant Din, whose grandfather and granduncle came to America as paper sons -- for, most often, paper children were sons, though of course daughters came over too, as well as wives. Like many others at that time, they were detained at the immigration station on Angel Island. This replaced the Pacific Mail detention shed Richard Everett was telling us about. SO: Grant worked with Richard to identify the location of that shed, and now he coordinates the website Immigrant Voices for the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Here’s one excerpt from our interview. *** AM: Could you describe what “paper sons” or “paper daughters” are and how this practice came to be? GD: Sure -- so the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 said that the Chinese laborers could not come into this country, but if you were a merchant, traveler, student, diplomat -- people who weren't going to stay -- you could come to this country. And so there were some exceptions where people who were sons and daughters of those who were legally here could come to this country. GD: And those who were born here had to fight for their rights because birthright citizenship, as we know it today, did not exist. There is a man named Wong Kim Ark, who in the late 1800s was denied the ability to come back into this country, even though he was born in the U.S. The immigration authorities had said your parents were not born here. And so, therefore, you have no rights. So he took it all the way to the Supreme Court aided by San Francisco organizations, in Chinatown and won. And so in 1898, U.S. versus Wong Kim Ark, uh, set forth that the right of birthright citizenship. And so when he won that case, they made it possible for those who were born here or who, who said they were born here, to be citizens. And so some people tried to get around this even before the earthquake, where they would claim they were children of merchants or children of people who were born here. But it really accelerated after the earthquake and fire--especially the fire--destroyed all the records in San Francisco City Hall and // the Hall of Records. And so the Hall of Records put out a call to people saying, Oh, we lost all our records. We're recreating things like birth certificates and so on. So if you want to get your birth certificate, just come // tell us when you were born here. And so a number of Chinese were not stupid. They said, hmmm, if I claim to be born here, I can have the rights of a citizen. *** AM: The workaround they devised was so elaborate. According to the book Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America by Erika Lee and Judy Yung, a man could even claim he had however many number of children and sell off “slots” to prospective migrants to become his paper son. SO: Elaborate and widespread. According to the same book, both detainees and officials at Angel Island said that approximately 90% of Chinese in that period had false papers. AM: If you look at what they were doing -- on paper, it was illegal. But consider this oral history excerpt, quoted in that same book. A detainee there, Mr. Chan, said: “We didn’t want to come in illegally, but we were forced to because of the immigration laws. They particularly picked on the Chinese. If we told the truth, it didn’t work. So we had to take the crooked path.” SO: Would you have risked taking this crooked path? AM: I honestly don’t know. Would you? SO: Hmn. I mean, at best, it could lead to family reunions, the opportunity to support family back home, or -- this might be sounding trite by now, but it’s true -- a chance for a better life, however way people might make that mean. AM: At worst, there was detention and deportation. Which, considering all the resources someone would have had to put into uprooting themselves... I mean, moving today is hard enough! And steamship fare was not inexpensive. We’ve learned people had to buy round-trip tickets in case authorities found out they were gaming the system and sent them back. SO: Yeah. Here’s Grant again, describing interrogations that tried to prove people were who they said they were. *** GD: Eventually, very quickly, the government got wise to this. The immigration official said, well, you know, this person doesn't look like his so-called father. They asked some questions that supposedly the father would know, and the son would know, because they lived in the same village. How many steps is it from your house to the village well? How many windows in your home? Who lives in the third house in the fourth row of your village? What kind of feet does his wife have? Because unfortunately there was still some foot-binding going on. But no one in their right mind would know anyway. No , I don't know who lives next door, you know, could I answer who lives down the street? [SO & AM laugh] And then they'd say, Oh, your uncle, when did he get married? And then for people who had claimed to be married, what kind of a feast did you have? How many tables? You know, who was there? And all kinds of things designed to trip people up. So before people would come over, they would get coaching books. And so the people would know that these are the kinds of questions that the authorities ask when they purchase an identity or when they even come as a child of their own real father, they'd still have to study for all these questions. And sometimes they quit school.They basically just spend their time studying. They sometimes study on the ship, but they'd always be told to throw the coaching book overboard when you get there just in case you get discovered. So the questioning would usually take place over a few days. There'd be a couple of immigration officials. There'd be a translator. There would be a stenographer who would take notes. And they'd rotate the translators because they didn't want any collusion between one particular immigrant and a translator who might be feeding them answers. *** SO: Anne, I’m trying to imagine myself in the shoes of those immigrants -- just the ordeal they had to go through. AM: We did learn about one ordeal that was -- well, let’s recount her story and let listeners choose how to describe it. SO: You’re talking about Soto Shee, right? AM: Yes. While in her first trimester, Soto Shee sailed from Hong Kong with her husband, and their seven-month old son. When they left Hong Kong, there was not yet a law banning the Chinese wives of U.S. citizens. But, by the time they arrived in July 1924, there was. Soto Shee was detained. After one month, she was declared an ineligible alien. Five days later, while still in detention, her young son died on Angel Island. SO: She had to stay there while her child’s body was brought to San Francisco for burial. And though she requested to be released on bond, to be with her husband -- because who wouldn’t in those circumstances? -- that request was denied. AM: Soto Shee hanged herself... which was not uncommon for detainees to do. But the matron found her, still conscious, and she recovered. Finally, she was admitted into the U.S. on bond, and eventually won the legal battle to stay here. SO: Remember the child she was pregnant with through all this? [AM: Mhm] When she was born, Soto Shee and her husband named her May Ho -- after the words meaning “America” and “good.” She herself said that her parents’ reason was that, quote, “They were starting anew in America--everything will be good for them now.” AM: Hm, Soto Shee wasn’t the only who was eventually “landed”, as it was known. From 1910 to 1924, over 76% of Chinese rejected at Angel Island appealed their cases. 39% of those appeals were successful. [music break] SO: It’s humbling to learn of even just one story… and there are so many, because while we know there are thousands of immigrants, nobody can really say how many paper children there were. Or how many different ways they did what they did to come here. AM: Grant Din himself, and more specifically, his grandparents, are proof of that. SO: Yeah! Let’s listen to him tell his family’s story. *** GD: First of all, our family's name is Din. But I was told from a rather young age that our family's real name was Gong. So I always wondered how does that happen? And it's even more convoluted story than the typical family. I had a grandfather named Gong Bow Gwun. And so he lived in a part of China called Fay Yuen which is north of what's now the Guangzhou airport. His family sent him to the U.S. when he was 17. He bought, or he or his family bought a paper name for a man named Ow Luen. And so when he came to this country in 1912, he had to pretend he was the son of a man named Ow. His papers said he was a single man, 'cause he was only 17. Later on, his brother came over and I think that was 1919 or so. And he bought papers, to say that his name was Doon Ho. But for whatever reasons, he bought papers of a married man. When it came to time to use the slot for his wife, my grandfather's wife came over instead. I don't know the reasons, but she came over and said she was my grandfather's brother's wife. Her name was Lock Shee. And for a while, they all lived in the same household, but my grandfather had a different address than his wife just in case immigration authorities would come check on him. My grandfather's brother ended up passing away. That meant my grandfather started using his brother's name because then he'd be legally married to his own wife. Because on the paper, it said that it was Doon Ho who was married to Lock Shee. And so he started going by Doon Ho, which was somehow along the way had been transformed into Hew Din, with Din as the last name. Whatever the reasons he ended up going by Hew Din, which is why all his kids and grandkids and so on are named Din. When, you know, you meet a Chinese person, they'll say, "Din?" [laughs] And I would say our family name is really Gong. And in many, many, many Chinese families, it's like, “What? Is that your real name or is that your paper name?” [AM/SO laugh] And you know, it's a whole crazy kind of thing. *** AM: So, Sabrina, the next time someone asks... “What’s in a name?” SO: Well, I don’t actually know how many people that aren’t named Juliet ask that question.[AM laughs] But be it a street name or a family name -- I think we’re learning that so much of a legacy can be wrapped up in it. AM: As you said earlier, there are so many possible stories. A paper son could have come over here only on the pretext of being someone’s relative -- but they could have actually been someone’s child or spouse or sibling, trying to reunite. SO: And even if a paper child didn’t have blood relatives on this side of the journey, they could still form a new family. They could still arrive and find a community. AM: Yes. Going back to the Chinese community in San Francisco, it’s worth noting that immigrants weren’t without some institutionalized support, but it didn’t come from the state, the city, or labor unions. It came in the form of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which was more commonly known as the Six Companies. SO: The Six Companies were founded in the tradition of huiguan , which were a series of guildhalls established by regional organizations during the Qing Dynasty. These were places where merchants and officials from the same locale or the same dialect groups could obtain food, shelter, and assistance while away from home. AM: They were instrumental in building familiarity and solidarity among the members of a province or a certain region. And they played an important function in the growth of trade and commerce. It became customary for Chinese who moved overseas to set up huiguan in the cities they settled into. SO: Of course, you have to wonder. For those paper children, did you join the guildhall of your village or of your paper village? [music break] AM: Who are you, on paper? And how much can a piece of paper really say about who you are? SO: That might depend on who wrote on the paper. What’s written on it. AM: And why it was written in the first place. SO: Thinking about new and borrowed identities has brought to mind so many more questions. AM: Like, is the taking on of the new identity a chance for rebirth? SO : I think it depends on whether it was voluntary or forced. AM: Did the majority of people who utilized the paper child system do so of their own volition? SO: What of the people who were given new identities, but not necessarily new opportunities? AM: And, Sabrina, I think we have our next episode. [exit music] SO: You can read more first-hand family accounts about paper children and other immigrant stories on the website of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Go to mmigrant-dash-voices-dot-AIISF-dot-org.

Episode music: “Our Fingers Cold”, “Snowcrop”, “Slate Tracker” and “A Rush of Clear Water” by Blue Dot Sessions. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC.