Paper Sons

Opportunity in the Ashes

The 1906 earthquake and fires destroyed San Francisco’s City Hall and, along with it, all public birth records. Yet in a twist of fate, the destruction of these records actually created an opportunity for the city’s Chinese residents to claim that they were born in the United States—and, by extension, claim American citizenship. The Wong Kim Ark case had determined that all persons born on American soil were US citizens. Who could prove otherwise now?

There were cases of Chinese migrants fraudulently claiming American citizenship by birth prior to the earthquake, but in the years that followed 1906, thousands of Chinese men living in San Francisco claimed citizenship. For all the claims to have been true, it was often stated that every Chinese woman in California before 1906 would have needed to have given birth to 600 sons. While this was evidently impossible, there was now no way to easily disprove any individual claim.

The ruins of San Francisco City Hall after the 1906 earthquake. Almost all city records were destroyed.

Ellis Island of the West

Claiming US citizenship allowed a Chinese man to return to China and report that their wives had given birth to a son there — or, less often, a daughter. Any child born to a U.S. citizen abroad is automatically a U.S. citizen by descent, and so in due course these Chinese-born American could return to the US to join their fathers, escaping the restrictions of Chinese Exclusion.

Many biological children migrated to the US this way, but in an era before DNA testing, it was also easy to sell these coveted slots to relatives, friends, neighbors and strangers desperate to send their similar-aged child to America. These “Paper Sons” adopted their new surnames, immigrating to the U.S. as citizens and living with their new families as sons and brothers. As time passed, these men were able to bring in their wives and children, and sometimes even other paper sons.

In 1910, Angel Island Immigration Station opened in San Francisco. Labelled the “Ellis Island of the West”, inspectors at this new modern station developed grueling interrogation strategies which were intended to detect Paper Sons trying to enter the country as citizens. 

Every Chinese immigrant arriving in San Francisco would be taken to Angel Island immigration station. Some – who could prove their citizenship or who had been through immigration many times – were cleared to land in just a matter of hours. Others were not so lucky. New immigrant applicants would be called before a Board of Special Inquiry, composed of two immigrant inspectors, a stenographer, and a translator. Over the course of several hours or even days, applicants would be asked about details so minute—about their family history, the location of the village, the furniture in their  homes—that sometimes even a genuine applicant might not know how to answer.

Low Tim

Low Tim’s immigration papers tell the story of a 15 year old boy who was detained at Angel Island after arriving from China in September 1913. Low Jin, a San Francisco resident, claimed to be Low Tim’s father, but the Inspector in the case was not convinced, noting many discrepancies between their stories about life in their Chinese village. But then the story took an unexpected turn. Despite explicitly writing that he disbelieved Low Tim’s story, the Inspector nevertheless decided to let him pass through Angel Island and embark on a new life in San Francisco.

This outcome wasn’t uncommon. Officials at the time knew that a majority of the Chinese claiming to be citizens were lying, but only about 10-15% of those who applied at Angel Island were rejected and deported to China. The fact of fraudulent Chinese immigration was accepted even as total Exclusion was pursued as a political goal. Some descendants of Paper Sons have drawn parallels between this and the ways in which many of the 12 million undocumented migrants living in the US today are workers — construction workers, nannies, gardeners, restaurant servers, care workers — whose continued presence is not just tacitly accepted but depended upon by American communities, including those advocating for anti-immigration policies.

Detained

Paper Sons like Low Tim prepared for months in advance to answer the questions they would face at Angel Island, committing every detail to memory before throwing the coaching books they had studied on their voyage overboard to avoid detection. Their alleged U.S. family members would be called forward to corroborate answers. Any differences in the two stories would put both the Paper Son and the U.S. family at risk of deportation.

In the meantime, immigrants suffered through long waits on Angel Island for these accounts to be taken. This period could range from several weeks if the testimony was taken locally to several months to years if the applicant was rejected and appealed the decision.

Paper Family

Today, many Chinese Americans, like the narrator of Look Up,  Alex Wong, have “relatives” who aren’t related by blood, but by the paper ties of immigration documents. Especially in the immediate years after arriving, these Paper Sons and Daughters lived with the daily anxiety of having a counterfeit identity, often fearing that if their fraud should be discovered, this might implicate not only them but their entire families. Paper Sons often kept silent about their true family histories for decades, with some of their children only discovering the parents’ difficult journey to the U.S. and their lost family identities after they had passed away.

Chinese poetry carved on the wall of the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. Written by detainees while waiting out their immigration cases, many of these poems express anger and sadness at their condition. One poem (not pictured) reads, “With a hundred kinds of oppressive laws, they mistreat us Chinese. / It is still not enough after being interrogated and investigated several times; / We also have to have our chests examined while naked.” Image credit: Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation

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