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Chinese Women Entering New England: Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, Boston, 1911- 1925

Author(s): Shauna Lo

Source: The New England Quarterly , Sep., 2008, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Sep., 2008), pp. 383-409

Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20474653

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Chinese Women Entering New England: Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, Boston,

1911-1925

SHAUNA LO

IN June 1911, Lee Lou, an eighteen-year old woman from southern China, arrived in Montreal to marry Ling Walley,

a merchant who had been living in New York City. Although Lee's route is not known, she probably traveled by ship from Hong Kong to Vancouver and there boarded a train bound for Montreal. She had not previously met her husband, as was typical for traditional Chinese marriages. The couple planned to settle in New York, but before they did so, Lee would have to be approved for admission to the United States, not an easy task given the strict laws regulating Chinese immigration. Ling and Lee believed, however, that possessing a Canadian mar riage certificate would facilitate her entry. They were correct. Although Lee and her new husband were subjected to inten sive interrogation when they appeared at the U.S. immigration office in Boston, they encountered no serious problems, and the young bride was admitted that day.' Lee and Ling's strategy was one of many that prospec

tive Chinese immigrants coming to New England pursued during the six decades in which the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943) was in effect. The first U.S. law to control the

1 National Archives, Northeast Region, Waltham, Mass., Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, Chinese exclusion acts case files, Lee Lou, file no. 2500/219. The translations of Chinese names and places in the case files are inconsistent and unreliable. Officials also often confused surnames (which by Chinese custom are listed first) and given names. I have retained the spellings of people and places as officially recorded in the case files.

The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXI, no. 3 (September 2008). ? 2008 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved.

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384 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

immigration of a group based on race, the restrictive legislation determined the characteristics of the Chinese American com munity for more than half a century. Most research on Chinese Americans has focused on the men who settled in the West, but much is to be learned from a small group of Chinese women who were processed at the Boston District Immigration Office in the first quarter of the twentieth century and who hoped to take up residence in the Northeast. The tedious process they underwent, often including lengthy interrogations, is doc umented in the regional office's case files. Women, a small mi nority of the Chinese living in America during the Chinese Ex clusion Act period, were uniquely affected by immigration laws. The risks they took as they ventured half way around the world to form or to reunite families or to seek educational opportu nity were often rewarded with success but occasionally ended in tragedy. The evidence shows that despite facing immense legal, social, and geographical barriers, Chinese women and men be came adept transnational migrants who negotiated complex im migration policies to reach their destinations in the Northeast.

Chinese Exclusion Laws and Demographic Patterns In the mid-nineteenth century, as commerce boomed in the

United States, thousands of Chinese migrated to California to fill a labor void in the sparsely settled West and to escape po litical upheaval and natural disasters in southern China. The immigrants worked in the railroad, fishing, agriculture, and lumber industries, and they performed services such as cook ing and cleaning.2 But white organized labor, which feared competition for jobs, soon developed a hostility for the Chi nese, which was manifested in numerous local ordinances dis criminating against Chinese as well as violent riots protesting their presence. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the

2Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 25.

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 385

U.S. and sustained an existing prohibition on the naturalization of Chinese. A series of additional exclusion laws were subse quently enacted. Not until 1943 was the act repealed, at which time Chinese were given permission to naturalize.3 Although the exclusion laws severely curtailed Chinese

immigration, over 85,000 Chinese men and women were admitted to the U.S. during the period in which they were in force.4 Some immigrants gained entry as members of classes the Exclusion Act exempted. Directed toward elite individuals or those engaged in trade, exemptions were extended to gov ernment officials, teachers, students, and merchants.5 Many more immigrants, however, made their way into the country by other methods. They found and slipped through loopholes, manipulated laws, and challenged decisions in the courts.6 Still others purchased false papers or paid to be smuggled across the border. Over time, the Chinese developed innovative legal and extralegal strategies for getting into the country.7 The 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, for example, presented Chinese with an extraordinary opportunity to claim citizenship. Because virtually all Chinese birth records were destroyed in

3Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, United States Statutes at Large 22, 58 and Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of December 17, 1943, United States Statutes at Large, 57, 600-601.

4This number refers to unique immigrant admissions (see table 2 in Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco [Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 1995], p. 294). The total number of Chinese admissions, which would include repeated entries as well as U.S.-born citizen returns, is over 300,000 (see Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclu sion Era, 1882-1943 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003], p. 111).

5The most used exempt category was merchant, which small business owners and their employees could claim. The definitions of the categories changed over time. The most important concern on the part of U.S. immigration officials was that a Chinese was not engaging in manual labor (see Lee, At America's Gates, p. 90).

6 Because the exclusion laws were clearly discriminatory, the government was re peatedly confronted with legal challenges. Judges presiding over those cases frequently ruled in favor of Chinese defendants. See Qingsong Zhang, "Dragon in the Land of the Eagle: The Exclusion of Chinese from U.S. Citizenship, 1848-1943" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1994), and Lucy Salyer, '"Laws Harsh as Tigers,'" in Entry Denied, p. 58.

7 For an extensive discussion on methods of immigration during the exclusion era, see Lee, At America's Gates.

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386 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

that catastrophe, officials had no way to disprove an individual's assertion that he was a citizen. And if a man was able to establish that he was a U.S. citizen, his children were eligible, as derivative citizens, to enter the country as well. In addition, the man might agree-for a fee-to bring over what are known as "paper" sons and daughters, that is, individuals who were not his actual offspring but his sons and daughters on paper only. During the exclusion period, the majority of Chinese entered the U.S. by such roundabout and illicit means.8

Because the vast majority of Chinese settled in California, the histories of Chinese Americans in other regions of the coun try, like New England, have been largely ignored. Some of New England's earliest Chinese residents arrived in the United States via the China trade, which had been operating out of Salem, Massachusetts, and other New England ports since the late eighteenth century, and for years, the Chinese who lived in or visited the region formed a diverse array of merchants, sailors, officials, and students.9 In 1870, however, a cohort of Chinese laborers were recruited to work as strikebreakers in a North Adams, Massachusetts, shoe factory. When their con tract came to an end, many of the men left for Boston, where they found jobs constructing the Pearl Street Telephone Ex change and settled in the South Cove area, near what would become Boston's Chinatown.10 After the transcontinental rail road was completed, opportunities in the West declined and anti-Chinese violence escalated. Pursuing new options, a num ber of Chinese migrated eastward. Immigration directly from China increased to the East Coast as well, and the composi tion of the Chinese population in the Boston area and in New England more generally became more like that of the West

8 Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, igio-ig40 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), p. 20.

9Doris C. J. Chu, with research assistance by Glenn Braverman, Chinese in Mas sachusetts: Their Experiences and Contributions (Boston: Chinese Culture Institute, 1987), pp. 34-43.

10Loh-Sze Leung, "Toisan to Boston: A Unique Model of Transnationalism" (un published paper, August 1996), p. 12.

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 387

Coast, with male laborers and small business merchants from Guangdong Province predominating.

Although New England's Chinese population remained small until after World War II, when immigration policies were reformed, during the years between 1900 and 1930, Massachusetts' Chinese population, numbering about two to three thousand individuals, ranked fourth or fifth among all states in the nation. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, contrary to what one might assume, less than half of the commonwealth's Chinese lived in Boston's Chinatown."1 Because mainstream society offered them few resources, New England's Chinese residents turned to associations and businesses in Chinatown to address a variety of their social, economic, and cultural needs. In Boston, and in cities across the nation, employment opportunities for Chinese were extremely limited. Excluded until the mid-twentieth century from many professional positions and often prohibited from joining unions in which membership was required to enter a trade, Chinese were concentrated in low-level jobs.12 According to the 1940 U.S. Census, two-thirds of Boston's

Chinese worked as "Service and Kindred Workers." Of the fifth classified as "Proprietors and Managers," a large number were undoubtedly employed in small Chinese-owned laundries, restaurants, and shops. The 1931 Chinese Directory of New England lists 110 restaurants and over 500 laundries in Massachusetts alone. Other New England states, particu larly Connecticut and Rhode Island, also had a number of Chinese-owned laundries during this period.13 Because many Chinese settling in the East entered the laundry or restaurant business from the outset, either working for themselves or for

11 U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Ab stract of the U.S. igo6 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907); U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 1931 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931), and The Chinatown Coalition, The Chinatown Community Assessment Report (Boston: Chinatown Coalition, 1994), p. 2.

12Xiao-huang Yin, "The Population Pattern and Occupational Structure of Boston's Chinese Community in 1940," Maryland Historian 20, no. 1 (1989): 65.

13i93i Chinese Directory of New England (Boston: Hop Yuen Co., 1931).

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388 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

other Chinese, they did not directly compete for jobs with native-born whites. Thus, although the migrants' presence in the area caused alarm, the widespread anti-Chinese violence that occurred in the West did not break out in New England. Most important, New England's Chinese population was signifi cantly smaller than California's. In addition, some researchers have suggested that its diversity, with a mix of intellectuals, Christians, and members of the upper class-including schol ars, diplomats, and wealthy merchants-created a favorable impression with the general public in New England.'4

In the commonwealth, as in the rest of the country, the male to female ratio among Chinese was dramatically skewed. For example, in 1900 only 28 of the 2,968 Massachusetts Chi nese enumerated in the U.S. Census were women; by the 1930 U.S. Census, the gender ratio had evened somewhat, with 443 women to 2,530 men.15 Of course, this extreme gender imbal ance inhibited Chinese Americans' ability to form families and to develop their communities. As Sucheng Chan, Judy Yung, and Huping Ling have observed, the low numbers of Chinese women entering the U.S. in the late nineteenth century can be attributed to both cultural and legal factors. Social norms in China dictated that women serve their families, bear children, and look after the home; rarely did women have the freedom to travel. Chinese men usually emigrated to the U.S. alone, intending to return home after earning some money. Even if men did settle in the U.S., they often found that they could not afford to bring their families over.'6

14See Margaret Holmes, "East of the Golden Mountain: The Chinese in Mas sachusetts," in History: Graduate Studies in Immigration Seminars, vol. 3, ed. Adele L. Younis (Salem, Mass.: Salem State College, 1979), p. 14. Of course, violence was prevalent in some areas of the frontier West because law enforcement was all but nonexistent.

^Statistical Abstract of the U.S. igo6, and Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 1931. Nationally the numbers of Chinese women over the period were as follows for selected years: 1900, 9 women admitted to 4,522 total in country; 1910, 172 women admitted to 4,675 total in country; 1920, 429 admitted to 7,748 total in country; and 1930, 249 admitted to 15,152 total in country (see table 1, "Chinese Population in the U.S. by Sex, 1860-1990," in Yung, Unbound Feet, p. 293.

l6Sucheng Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870?1943," in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-ig43, ed. Chan (Philadelphia:

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 389

In the legal realm, Chinese exclusion laws also worked to suppress female Chinese immigration. Although exclusion laws did not specifically restrict Chinese women's entry into the United States, as Sucheng Chan and Lucy Salyer have noted, few of them qualified as members of one of the act's exempt categories.17 Most women claimed eligibility, instead, based on their relationships to Chinese men or by nativity. Chan has identified several main categories of Chinese females who sought entry as dependents during the exclusion period: wives of Chinese merchants; wives and daughters of U.S. citizens of Chinese descent; wives of laborers; and U.S.-born women.'8 A few merchants' daughters also applied for entry. Most women sought to immigrate for the purpose of reunifying their families or of joining men who wanted to marry them and establish families in the United States.'9

Female Chinese Immigrants and the Boston District Immigration Office

Although barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States received widespread support from American citizens and federal legislators, it is doubtful that anyone anticipated just how problematic it would be to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act. The act consumed hundreds of thousands of dollars and man-hours and established an unwieldy, complex bureaucracy. Historians and social scientists are the secondary beneficiaries of that process, for the case files generated by

Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 94-97; Judy Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documen tary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 16-41; Huping Ling, Surviving on Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 25-28. Violence was also a factor in persuading Chinese men against bringing their families to the U.S.

17Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women," p. 109, and Salyer, "'Laws Harsh as Tigers,'" p. 61. Not until the 1920s did Chinese women begin entering the U.S. as students (see table 1.1 in Ling, Surviving on Gold Mountain, p. 26).

l8Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women," pp. 110-23. Chan discusses federal court rulings during the exclusion period that affected the chances of women in each category of gaining admission to the U.S. Most laborers' wives were barred from entry.

19Ling, Surviving on Gold Mountain, p. 22.

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390 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

the act's enforcement offer a wealth of information about the policies and practices of the U.S. government and the responses of the immigrants struggling to surmount them. Case files contain transcripts of interviews conducted with

those Chinese applying for entry into the United States as well as with their relatives and with witnesses. These files can be an inch or two thick, with dozens of typewritten pages of testi mony. In addition, many files contain lists of related individu als and their case file numbers, demonstrating that inspectors tracked family networks, as well as copies of correspondence to and from the Bureau of Immigration in Washington, D.C., lawyers, and other relevant parties. Not all case files involve in dividuals seeking initial admission; many were opened for per sons seeking return certificates, documents that would facilitate their bearers' entry back into the country after they made a trip abroad. Even if he or she had been born in the United States, a person of Chinese descent had to submit to an interrogation before being granted a return certificate, without which he or she might be investigated as a non-native upon returning to the U.S. The case files reflect the enormity of the government's ef fort to monitor the movements of Chinese across its borders, which reveals the level of anxiety their presence inspired. Vir tually all Chinese who came to the U.S. during the exclusion period had a case file opened on them.

I have selected a sample of files from the years 1911-25 that addresses the cases of women and girls attempting to enter the U.S. Northeast.20 These women were processed at the Boston District Office of the Bureau of Immigration, the adminis trative headquarters for the New England region, and their

20I chose to focus on the years 1911-25 primarily for practical reasons (earlier records were destroyed in a fire, and records within the last seventy-two years are subject to confidentiality laws), but there were also key national events that occurred during this period that significantly affected Chinese immigration. For example, in 1910 the Angel Island Immigration station opened, and anti-Chinese sentiment was at a peak. I also wanted to compare cases before and after 1924 to see if the immigration act of that year affected Chinese women's immigration. I reviewed all the files from 1911 and 1925 and a sample of files from 1915 and 1920 and identified those involving females.

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 391

case files are now stored at the National Archives and Records Administration, Northeast Region, at Waltham, Massachusetts. Of particular interest to me were the women's histories, their routes to Boston, the bases of their claims for admission to the U.S., the immigration processing procedures, and the results of their attempts to enter the country. In addition, if the women were coming to join husbands or fathers, as most were, I attempted to collect information about the men as well. The information available in the case files is limited. Because immi gration officers were focused on the bureaucratic task at hand judging the eligibility of an individual for admission-they had little interest in recording particulars about the women's lives or histories that were not immediately relevant. Moreover, an applicant's answers to the questions posed to her cannot be taken at face value because she may have been modifying cer tain facts or even have assumed a false identity to improve her chances of gaining admission. Even given these caveats, much valuable material can be gathered from the case files, especially concerning the effects of immigration policies on individuals. Of the 942 Boston office case files I examined for the period

1911-25, 35 (3.7%) concern a woman, sometimes accompanied by children. Forty-one women and girls, ranging in age from a few months to forty-nine years, are addressed in the 35 files. Twenty-eight were seeking admission, and 13 were applying for return certificates. Of the 28 applicants seeking admission, 25 were ultimately admitted (one file remained incomplete), although 4 were denied at least once before winning their cases on appeal.21

The largest group of applicants was comprised of wives of merchants, of which there were eleven (see table 1). Because of U.S. treaty obligations with China, merchants generally enjoyed preferential treatment, including rights to freedom of movement and family reunification.22 The applicants for

21There were approximately 7,000 case files generated by the Boston office for the period 1911-25.

22Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America, p. 61.

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392 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

TABLE 1 Chinese Female Applicants for Admission and Return Certificates,

by Type, out of a Sample of 35 Records, Boston Immigration Office Records, 1911-25

Applicants for Admission No. admitted, No. denied, then

first try admitted No. denied

Merchant's wife 10 1 U.S. citizen's wife 5 1 1 Merchant's daughter 2 1 U.S. citizen's daughter 3 Student 1 Servant 1 Traveler 1 Total 21 4 2

Applicants for Return Certificates

No. granted No. denied U.S.-born 8 Student 2 U.S. citizen's wife 1 1 U.S. citizen's daughter 1 Total 11 2

admission also included seven wives of U.S. citizens, three daughters of merchants, three daughters of U.S. citizens, one student, and one traveler. Only the student and traveler were admitted with their own documents. The two women who were ultimately denied admission were a servant brought from Asia with an affluent American family and a U.S.-born man's wife whose situation will be described in more detail below.23 All but two of the twenty-eight females were seeking entry to the U.S. for the first time. Of the thirteen females in the category of those applying for return certificates, eight were children born in the U.S., two were students, two were wives of U.S. citizens, and one was the daughter of a U.S. citizen. All

23National Archives, On Ah Yin, file no. 2500/6242; Winnie Cheng Moy, file no. 2500/6368.

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 393

the children born in the U.S. were granted return certificates, while two of the other five accepted return permits.24

As with the majority of Chinese immigrants before World War II, a good number of the women in the study (at least 85%) traced their heritage to Guangdong Province and, more specifically, to Taishan County (75%).25 There were a few ex ceptions to this trend: Chi-Liang Kwei was a student from Hubei Province in Central China, and Winnie Cheng Moy was from Macao. Also, two women came to the U.S. by way of Britain or a British territory: Reilda Marie Choy Kee was a student from Trinidad, and Winnie Purcell was a biracial trav eler from England.26 Most of the women were illiterate, and many could not write their own names, instead signing their testimonies simply with a "+" or an "X." The majority of the women traveling from China came to

New England by way of Canada, having first landed in Van couver and then ridden a train across the continent to Montreal. From Montreal, they either took a ship around Nova Scotia or a train down to Boston. Although U.S. immigration policies on Chinese Canadian border crossings have not been examined in depth, they clearly changed over time. In 1911, all the women were routed from Montreal to Halifax and then to Boston by ship, but by 1920, women were making the trip between Boston and Montreal via the Boston and Maine Railroad. By 1925, pathways to Boston had multiplied. Some immigrants were still routed around Nova Scotia, but some arrived straightaway from Asia aboard a ship passing through the Panama Canal, which had opened in 1914. Still other women landed in Seattle and apparently were permitted to cross the United States by train to Boston.

24Return permits for aliens, as specified in the 1924 Immigration Act, carried certain limitations, including expiration after one year. Some of the women in the study chose not to leave the country because they could not secure a return certificate.

25The specific origins of five women are unclear. The chances are high, however, that they too came from Guangdong or Taishan.

26National Archives, Chi-Ling Kwei, file no. 2500/6316; Winnie Cheng Moy, file no. 2500/6368; Reilda Maria Choy Kee, file no. 2500/2316; Winnie Purcell, file no. 2500/241.

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394 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Some women in the sample were interrogated in Vancouver or Seattle before traveling east, but most were processed at the immigration station located at 287 Marginal Street, in East Boston, which opened in 1920. Before the station was built, the federal government rented space on Long Wharf.27 Hearings were conducted within a couple of days, and decisions were delivered anywhere from less than a day to thirty-eight days, a waiting period considerably shorter than those experienced by immigrants processed at Angel Island in San Francisco, the facility processing the greatest number of Chinese immigrants. There, backlogs could cause delays of several weeks for hear ings and, while cases were being investigated, from months to years for decisions.28 From their entry at Boston, the women were destined for a variety of locations across the Northeast, including Portland, Maine; Providence, Rhode Island; Newark, New Jersey; New York City; and Baltimore, Maryland. Several of those remaining in the area expected to live in Chinatown, but a significant number planned to travel to smaller cities and towns in the region, including Wobum, Mansfield, and Cam bridge. This finding suggests that the Chinese population was quite dispersed, likely because so many Chinese were engaged in the laundry and restaurant businesses and individuals set up shop in areas where they would experience as little competition as possible.29

The interrogations conducted in Boston appear similar to those performed at Angel Island, where an applicant was gen erally asked anywhere "from two to three hundred questions, to over a thousand," and transcripts ran from "twenty to eighty typewritten pages."30 Interviews could be quite lengthy as im

migration inspectors sought to uncover discrepancies that might

27National Archives, Waltham, Mass., photocopied memo, p. 11.

28For more about Angel Island, see Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island. 29The occupational range of the men that the women and girls were coming to

live with was extremely narrow. If the man was not a merchant or working in a store owned by a Chinese merchant, then his occupation was, without exception, restaurant worker or laundryman, a fact that demonstrates the dearth of employment opportunities available to Chinese men.

30Yung, Unbound Feet, p. 66.

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 395

signal fraudulent claims. If officials identified problems with a case, they could order that an individual be detained; some Chi nese, especially those entering in San Francisco, spent months or even years in detention.31 Generally, in the case of the women entering Boston, the woman, the husband or father, and one or more witnesses were questioned. Children over the age of about five were also interrogated or asked to identify pho tographs. Applicants were consistently referred to as "alleged wife" and "alleged son," which indicates that suspicion was the guiding force in the interrogation process. Even individuals who held U.S. birth certificates were called "alleged citizens."

Like their male counterparts, women were asked numer ous detailed questions about family members, their houses, villages, and neighbors in China, and the locations of various landmarks. Early in the period, they were also asked whether they had "bound" or "natural" feet, often an indicator of class status. Women whose feet had been bound tended to come from wealthier families and were not expected to work to sup port the family; women whose feet had not been bound were generally from a lower-class family, and immigration officers considered them less desirable for admission. Many lines of inquiry were prompted by immigration officials' tacit suspicion that wives and daughters were actually prostitutes. In fact, the 1906 Compilation of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws reported that "most if not all 'wives"' were really women who would be sold into prostitution.32 This presumption affected the overall treatment of Chinese women seeking to immigrate.

Immigration officers also spent a good deal of time question ing married women about their spouses and weddings. Some inquiries were clearly intended for the purposes of verification, for example: When did you first meet the groom? When was the wedding? How many feasts were held and where? At times,

31 Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, p. 22.

32U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Natu ralization, Compilation of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the Chinese-Exclusion Laws (Washington: GPO, 1906). In 1911, the newly formed Chinese republic outlawed footbinding, and so by 1925, the question about feet had more or less dropped away.

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396 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

however, Chinese marriage customs aroused distrust. With ar ranged marriages, the prevailing Chinese custom, the bride and groom rarely met before their marriage day, and for Chinese men living overseas, the practice was all but universal. The case of Wong Hing provides an illustration. She traveled from China to Vancouver, where she married a Chinese man who was a resident of Baltimore. The husband's brother chose his wife for him; the couple knew each other only by photographs before they met in the United States. Expressing disbelief that the couple had not previously encountered one another, in terrogators questioned them relentlessly. The inspectors may have been wary that Wong Hing was trying to dodge immigra tion restrictions and might actually be a prostitute, but it also appeared that they disdained Chinese marriage customs.33 As one might imagine, discrepancies in applicants' answers

were quite common. A daughter might have forgotten or never have known how many children a neighbor's son had. Or, a woman's calculation of the distance to the nearest village well may simply have been a poor estimate. It was the immigration inspector's prerogative to evaluate the legitimacy of a claim. If he decided that a testimony contained significant incongruities or that a statement could not be convincingly substantiated, he had the authority to deny an applicant entry to the United States.

Selected Case Studiesfrom the Boston District Immigration Office Case Files

Examining a few case studies from the Boston District Immi gration Office files will allow us to move beyond statistics and generalizations to understand the impact of immigration laws on individual Chinese women as well as the strategies they developed to surmount the limitations imposed on them.

Wong Shee, wife of a merchant.34 -In December 191O, Lem Wah, a merchant living in New York City, traveled to Boston

33National Archives, Wong Hing, file no. 2500/76.

34National Archives, Wong Shee, file no. 2500/46. Note that Shee is not a name but a title that traditionally followed a woman's maiden surname and indicated that she

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 397

to meet his wife and daughter, Wong Shee and Lem Haw, who would arrive there the next day aboard a ship from Mon treal via Halifax (see fig. 1). During her immigration interview,

Wong stated that she was twenty-six years old, had natural feet, and was from the Bok Seuk village in China's Sunning district.35 Her husband's second wife (the first had died), she had married him about seven years earlier in China. Wong, who was illiter ate, signed the transcript of her testimony, which was several pages long and contained many questions about her relatives and her village, with an "X." Lem Haw, Lem Wah's sixteen year-old daughter from his first marriage, was also questioned. Testifying as well was Lem Fong, a partner in Lem Wah's grocery store. Apparently, the various interviews differed on several points, for the commissioner of immigration, denying

FIG. i.-Wong Shee and Lem Haw.

was married. Likewise, Wah following a married man's surname indicated that he was married.

35 Sunning is the Taishanese pronunciation of Xinning, the former name of Taishan.

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398 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

admission to both Wong and Lem Haw, expressed doubt that they were actually related to Lem Wah. Confronted with his wife and daughter's predicament, Lem

Wah hired a lawyer and filed an appeal with the Bureau of Immigration in Washington, D.C. As the appeal wound its way through bureaucratic channels, his wife and daugh ter were detained at Commercial Wharf in Boston, while the New York City office communicated to Washington informa tion about Lem Wah's prior migration. After about a month, the commissioner-general of immigration in Washington, D.C., gave notice that the original decision would stand. Ten days later, Wong and her stepdaughter were deported back to China. Retracing their route through Canada, Wong and Lem Haw

found, however, that the Canadian government would permit them to disembark in Montreal, and they did so. In February 1911, Lem Wah traveled to Montreal and (re)married his wife.

Wong, accompanied by her husband, returned to Boston, once more seeking admission to the United States-but this time she held a marriage certificate. Wong's interview was brief, but Lem Wah was interrogated

at great length about several prior trips to China and Canada, about his first wife, and about his previous testimonies. Because he could not remember some dates and ages, his testimony was called into question. Again, Wong's application was denied: immigration officers reported that they could not find proof that Lem Wah's first wife had died and so believed he might be a polygamist. With new evidence in hand showing that Lem

Wah's first wife had left New York for China a number of years earlier, Lem Wah's lawyer filed an appeal. Apparently it was successful, for in March 1911 Wong was admitted to the United States. Three months after having first arrived in Boston, she left on a train bound for New York City. Lem Wah's daughter, however, was still in Montreal. As

recorded in the case file, Ng Bing Chung, a merchant from New York City, claimed status as a merchant and stated his in tention to proceed to Montreal, marry Lem Haw, and bring her back to the United States. But that November, when he applied for a return certificate, Ng was denied on the grounds that he had not shown adequate proof that he was indeed a merchant

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 399

nor, as he declared, that his first wife had died in China. Immi gration officials noted their concern that Ng was marrying Lem Haw simply to give her the means to enter the United States, a tactic that, they stated, violated the intent of the Chinese Exclusion Act. In less than a year, however, by means that are not entirely clear, Ng received his certificate and married Lem Haw in Montreal; in January 1912 she applied for admission to the U.S. at Boston. Like her stepmother, she was denied a second time, but on appeal, the decision was reversed. This complicated and fascinating series of failures and even

tual successes illustrates several important points about Chinese immigration. In some instances, it was easier to gain admission to Canada than to the U.S.-at least for a merchant's fam ily during this time period. The experience of Lem Wah and his family reveals that immigration officials were adamant that Chinese men's professional status be well documented, given the benefits that membership in an exempt category conferred.

When an immigrant found his or her way around the stringent exclusion laws, word quickly spread in the Chinese commu nity, and others copied the maneuver. Because Wong had suc ceeded in entering the United States after securing a Canadian marriage license, Lem Haw felt empowered to try the same approach. Clearly other women had discovered this strategy as well. In 1911, four women in my sample who were planning to immigrate to the United States first met their fiances/husbands

in Canada to marry or remarry them before applying for ad mission to the states. This tactic was not found in later years and, indeed, probably was not feasible by the 120os, when the U.S. pressured Canada into complying with its immigration laws and Canada had, moreover, passed a Chinese exclusion act of its own. Finally, as in the case of Wong and Lem Haw, persistence, such as filing repeated appeals, could produce the desired reward.

Lew Shee, wife of a U.S. citizen.36 -Lew Shee and her ten year-old daughter, Wong Oi Gem, arrived in Boston in Decem ber 1920 (see fig. 2). At the time, and for the next few years,

36National Archives, Lew Shee, file no. 2500/2325.

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400 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Fic;. 2.-Lew Slhee and( WVoiig Oi Gemi.

the num-ber of Chinese wom-en adm-itted at Bostoni increased, and their cases seem- to have been hiandled in a simiilar fashion.

Lew and Wong had landed on Canada's West Coast (probably Vancouver, although this could not be confirmed), ridden the Canadian Pacific Railroad to Montreal, and takeni the Boston and Maine Railroad to Boston. Applying for entry as the wvife of a U.S. citizen, Lew testified that she was thiirty years old, a housewvife, and hiad m-arried Wong Fook Quong in 1909. She and her daughter were adm-itted without any comiplications. Her husband was also interrogated, anid hiis testimiony reveals that he was a waiter at Park Restaurant, 3 Harrisoni Avenuie, in Boston's Chinatown district.

Before Lew arrived, her husband had taken the precaution of having his citizenship status preinvestigated at the Boston immi-igration office. Those files reveal that hie was alm-ost surely not native born and, because the law prohibited it, neither hiad he been naturalized. He was, however, a citizen nonethieless. In 1902 or 1903, Wong Fook Quong crossed the Canadian

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 401

border at Malone, New York, where there was no immigration station. Arrested and jailed as a laborer attempting to evade the Chinese exclusion laws, Wong brought his case to court, where he claimed that he had been born in the U.S. and, therefore, was a U.S. citizen. In U.S. vs. Wong Fook Quong, a judge found that Wong had been held unjustly and, in February 1903, discharged him. Thus was Wong's U.S. citizenship established, a condition that considerably improved his chances of bringing a family into the country.37

The strategy that Wong adopted arose in the mid-18gos and continued for about a decade. Chinese would land in Vancou ver, ride a train east to a Canadian town close to the U.S. line, walk across the border into New York or Vermont, and allow themselves to be arrested and jailed. They would then request a trial, at which they would claim to have been born in the U.S. and, by prior arrangement, often presented a wit ness who would verify their nativity. Many federal judges some of whom (as Qingsong Zhang suggests) preferred to err on the side of caution rather than risk violating the rights of a bona fide citizen and others who disapproved of the Chinese exclusion laws-discharged the defendants as U.S. citizens.38

The Bureau of Immigration quickly caught on to the border crossing ploy and described it at length in its early-twentieth century reports.39 The maneuver was considered to be an extremely serious problem since it resulted in Chinese gaining citizenship. The fact that the district courts were discharging Chinese men and giving them rights "to vote and . . . parti cipate in the political affairs of this country" was characterized as an "evil [that] cannot be overestimated." One report named Felix McGettrick, a U.S. commissioner and judge for the

37If Lew Shee's testimony is accurate, Wong must have returned to China in 1909, married her, and fathered a child. Once he received his court discharge papers, he held the rights of a U.S. citizen to leave the country and to return. Immigration inspectors checked dates of trips back home and ages of children very carefully to make sure they matched.

38Zhang, "Dragon in the Land of the Eagle," p. 365. 39U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Annual Re

port of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1903 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903), pp. 97-99.

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402 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

District of Vermont at St. Albans, as a particular target for concern. McGettrick admitted to discharging about eleven hundred Chinese between 1894 and 1897 as citizens.40 The bureau struggled for years to halt this clever stratagem for establishing U.S. citizenship. Finally, by working with the Canadian government to restrict Chinese entering the U.S. to only a few selected points along the border and by reducing the power of the courts along it to render decisions on Chinese Exclusion Act cases, the bureau was able to curtail the practice. Although none of the women in my sample entered the U.S.

in this manner, a significant number of their husbands or fathers had. These men produced discharge papers from courts in border towns such as Plattsburgh, New York, in addition to St. Albans and Malone, papers that affirmed their recipients' status as U.S. citizens. Additional information, gathered during the course of an in

vestigation ten years later, is contained in the case file for Lew. In 1926, Wong Oi Gem married Jim Lee; in due course, the couple had four children. At some point, they moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and opened a laundry. Lew and her husband had also moved, to Lowell, Massachusetts, where they too opened a laundry. Lew died there in 1934.

Chi-Liang Kwei, student.41-In June 1925, Chi-Liang Kwei appeared at the Boston immigration office. Having just com pleted her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, she wanted to visit her sister in Shanghai before returning to the U.S. to attend Johns Hopkins Medical School in the fall. But she had lost her passport and therefore needed to apply for a return permit. Kwei, who had been born in Shashi, Hubei Province, China, testified in English and gave her American name as Lil lian. She brought paperwork with her to prove that she had attended Wellesley (including a letter from the dean) and had received a scholarship to study at Johns Hopkins.

4? Compilation of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the Chinese-Exclusion Laws.

41 National Archives, Chi-Liang Kwei, file no. 2500/6316.

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 403

Kwei's case is particularly noteworthy because she was one of the approximately thirteen hundred students who had participated in the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship program, 1909-29, an initiative to bring Chinese students to the U.S. and offer them a Western education that had resulted from negotiations between the U.S. and Chinese governments after the Boxer Rebellion in China had erupted. These individuals, some of China's top students, had undergone rigorous training to prepare them for entering American colleges. The first group of nine women, many of whom majored in medicine or teaching, professions considered proper for women, traveled to the United States in 1914.42 Kwei's case illustrates that opportunities for Chinese women were changing radically around the 1920S. At twenty-five years old, she was well past the usual age at which a Chinese woman was expected to marry and represented, instead, a rising generation of career-minded Chinese women.

Even though Boxer Indemnity students were among China's elite, they frequently encountered problems with U.S. immi gration.43 In Kwei's case, she was granted a return permit after showing proof of her student status.

Winnie Cheng Moy, student/wife of a U.S. citizen. 44-Winnie Cheng Moy's case represents the dire effects that U.S. immi gration policy could have on the lives of Chinese (fig. 3). Moy was born in 1906; her birthplace is not clear, but Macao was listed as her last place of residence. In Macao, she married Samuel Moy, an American-born Chinese from a prominent Boston family, after which she accompanied him back to the United States. Leaving Hong Kong in July 1925, the Moys trav eled first class by steamship and arrived in Boston in August. Mrs. Moy attempted to enter the U.S. as a student; she could not enter as Samuel's wife.

42Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900-1927 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 8-10, 142.

43Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name, p. 88.

44National Archives, Winnie Cheng Moy, file no. 2500/6368.

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404 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

FIG. 3.-Winnie Cheng Moy with two of her children.

The year before Winnie Moy sought to immigrate to the United States, Congress passed a new immigration act that, al though not specifically directed against Chinese, dealt a serious blow to Chinese women's attempts to join their husbands and reside in the country. The 1924 act barred any "0aliens ineligi ble to citizenship" from entering the U.S., affecting virtually all would-be immigrants from Asia, who were still denied the op portunity to naturalize. The two primary categories of Chinese

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 405

women who were adversely affected were wives of merchants and wives of natives. In May 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that wives of merchants could be cleared for entry but wives of natives could not. Chinese American men born in the U.S. could no longer expect to enjoy the company of their wives in their own country.45 In 1920, approximately eighty to ninety Chinese women were admitted to the United States in Boston; in 1925 only three women were admitted and none was the wife of a Chinese American citizen.46

At her interview, Mrs. Moy produced a letter of acceptance from Boston's Burdett College, where she was planning to en roll in the secretarial program. But when she was given a read ing test consisting of passages from the Bible, she was able to pick out only such words as is, a, and, you, and him.47 Immigration officials therefore judged her to be ill prepared to attend school in the U.S. and denied her admission to the country. She was, they assumed, attempting to enter the U.S. to join her husband, not to receive an education. On 5 Septem ber, after posting a five-hundred-dollar bond, Samuel Moy did manage to get his wife temporarily admitted as a student. She was, however, required to submit regular reports of her school attendance, and she could stay in the country only as long as she was enrolled in college. Mrs. Moy remained in the U.S. for several years. She at

tended Burdett College as planned in the fall of 1925 and con tinued to enroll for the next two and a half years, although she requested time off twice when she became pregnant. As stipu lated, Burdett College sent regular reports to the immigration

45Immigration Act of May 26, 1924, United States Statutes at Large 43, 153; Mae Ngai, "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924," Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 67-92; Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women," pp. 123-26; Chang Chan et al. vs. John D. Nagle, 268 U.S. 346 (1925), and Cheung Sum Shee vs. Nagle 268 U.S. 336 (1925).

46For the year 1920, I looked at the first 100 out of 878 case files and found that 11 were for women who were admitted. At the same rate for the remaining cases, the total number of women admitted that year would be between 80 and 90.

47One of the passages is as follows: "Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him show out of a good conversation his works with meekness of

wisdom" (James 3:13, 14).

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406 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

office to notify them of her attendance. When she became pregnant a third time, she left Burdett College "indefinitely." During this period, Mr. Moy graduated from MIT and took a

job working for the federal government in Washington, D.C., as a mechanical engineer.48 In 1931, while the couple were living in Washington, they received a letter dated 9 March from the immigration office informing Mrs. Moy that she must leave the country by i April. She had apparently managed to extend her temporary immigration status until, as recorded in her case file, a "bill before Congress . . . authorizing the admission to the U.S. of the wives of American citizens where the wives were ineligible to citizenship" had been decided. The amendment was approved in June 1930, but it applied only to Chinese women who had married an American citizen before 26 May 1924, when that year's immigration restrictions took effect.49 The Moys had married after that date, in September of 1924.

The Moys, who now had three children, immediately sent letters to the commissioner of immigration in Boston request ing that an exception be made for her. The commissioner re sponded that he would look into the case and consult authorities in Washington. Mrs. Moy did not leave the country by 1 April, but she apparently despaired of her future. Early that month the Moys had returned to Boston to share with his parents the honor of hosting the daughters of a Chinese foreign min ister and a Chinese general. On 10 April, while the family was out, Mrs. Moy hanged herself in the bathroom of her husband's mother's Back Bay apartment. The suicide was widely reported, including in the Boston Herald and the Daily Record (both dated 11 April 1931). The headline of the Daily Record reads, "First Chinese Woman Suicide in Boston." The newspapers did not mention Mrs. Moy's deportation order, commenting only that she had had a "nervous and physical condition." Certainly there are success stories to be found in the history

of Chinese American immigrants during the exclusion period,

48The file indicates that Samuel Moy had previously owned a Chinese restaurant.

49Chan, Entry Denied, p. 127; An Act to Admit to the U.S. Wives of Certain American Citizens, of June 13, 1930, United States Statutes at Large 46, 581.

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 407

but hardship, fear, and disappointment were commonplace. Even in the limited number of case files I examined for this study, there is ample evidence that residence in the United States did not always produce the results immigrants hoped for. For example, Wong was admitted as an inmate at the Central Islip State Hospital shortly after she arrived in Boston. And newborn Mary Wing Gee was sent to live outside her family the day after she was born because her mother "went insane" and was subsequently sent to Foxboro State Hospital.50 These episodes, mere factual notations in the women's case files, offer frustratingly brief glimpses into the challenges they faced as they attempted to settle and raise their families in an alien country. In addition, those who entered the country illegally would worry about being discovered for many years afterwards.

Conclusions Exclusion laws were federally mandated, and so their en

forcement theoretically should have been uniform across all areas of the country. In practice, however (perhaps not sur prisingly), there appears to have been regional variation in the execution and application of the laws. Local social and political contexts as well as available resources influenced the treatment of Chinese entering at different ports. Erica Lee has found, for example, that immigration officials in San Francisco were under intense public pressure to bar as many Chinese as pos sible from entering the country. Some officials, allied as they

were with West Coast labor leaders or having themselves been politicians who helped foment anti-Chinese sentiment, readily complied. By the turn of the twentieth century, San Francisco had gained a reputation as the most difficult port of entry for immigrating Chinese.51 Armed with this knowledge, many Chi nese tried to avoid entering the U.S. at San Francisco if at all possible; instead, they would land in Vancouver, cross Canada, and attempt to enter the U.S. in the East.

50National Archives, Mary Wing Gee, case file no. 2500/6474. 51 Lee, At America's Gates, p. 51.

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408 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

In the East, many hoped, Chinese would have an easier time being admitted as immigrants. Indeed, at least one U.S. com missioner of immigration at Boston was accused of prejudice in favor of the Chinese. In 1915, Congress was holding hearings on a bill that would restrict Chinese immigration even further. To offer support for the bill, the Laundrymen's National Asso ciation of America sent several of its members to Washington, where the Boston representative testified at length that U.S. Commissioner Hayes was "pro-Chinese" and was contributing to the city's problem of illegal Chinese immigrants, many of whom, they asserted, were establishing laundries that unfairly competed with legitimate American businesses.52 The story of Chinese immigration to the U.S. before World

War II is a remarkable one, not only because of the unusu ally extreme measures taken by the U.S government to exclude Chinese but also because of the extraordinary resourcefulness and determination Chinese demonstrated in believing that they had as much right as any ethnic group to seek opportunity in the United States. The experiences of this group of immigrants reveal the racial and socioeconomic underpinnings of immigra tion policy as well as immigrants' persistence-despite legal, social, and geographic barriers-to manipulate those policies to achieve their goals. The number of Chinese females admitted to the U.S. during

the exclusion period numbered less than ten thousand,53 and only a small fraction of them entered through New England ports. Most sought status as dependents of Chinese men who had already established themselves as legitimate U.S. residents. The largest group consisted of wives of merchants, with a few girls entering as daughters of merchants or of U.S. citizens, and a handful as students. Immigration officials treated women much as they did men-including subjecting them to extensive interrogation-and if denied entry, many women, too, hired a

52U.S. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Entrance of Chinese Aliens into the United States: Hearings on H.R. 20037, 63rd Cong., 3rd sess. on H.R. 20037, 1915, p. 7.

53See table 2 in Yung, Unbound Feet, p. 294.

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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 409

lawyer, appealed their case, and reapplied, a process that often produced the desired result. Aside from the fact that Chinese destined for New England experienced an extra journey across the continent, they also commonly faced the added complica tion of crossing the Canadian border. It appears, though, that they were sometimes able to use this situation to their advan tage, at least until the 1920S, when both U.S. and Canadian immigration policies were tightened. The relatively small num ber of Chinese entering the U.S. through New England seems to have expedited their immigration process, while the lack of widespread anti-Chinese hostility in this region may have improved their chances of gaining admission.

Shauna Lo is the Assistant Director for the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a board member of the Chinese Historical Society of New England. Her research interests include Chinese American history, Asian American immigration, and comparative race and ethnic studies.

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