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Reviewed by:
  • Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion
  • K. Scott Wong
Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion. By Estelle T. Lau (Durham, Duke University Press, 2006) 214 pp. $74.95 cloth $21.95 paper

This book joins a small but steadily growing body of scholarship that investigates how Chinese immigration to the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century created a situation in which the American legal structures became increasingly rigid in order to exclude as many aspiring Chinese immigrants as possible, and in turn, [End Page 138] how the Chinese responded by developing strategies to circumvent these restrictions. As Lau chronicles throughout her study, Chinese resistance to these hostile laws led to both an increasing anti-Chinese sentiment among immigration administrators and the alienation of Chinese Americans from American society.

Lau frames her analysis around the assertion, "It was through the relationship created within the interaction between the Chinese and the INS that the manner and organization of Chinese family and community were constructed" (4). She bases her study on a number of secondary sources, landmark legal cases involving citizenship and immigration, a sample of immigration files housed in the National Archives and Records Administration at various federal repositories (especially from San Bruno, Calif.), and a small number of interviews with people who endured the hardships that the exclusion laws caused. Appropriately, she devotes considerable space to the creation of the "paper son" system whereby Chinese immigrants took advantage of the law granting citizenship and immigration rights to the children of American citizens, regardless of their nativity. Chinese immigrants and their compatriots in China created a system to produce fictive kin and a "paper trail" that enabled immigrants to enter the country as offspring of a sponsoring "paper father." Utilizing her sources effectively, Lau outlines the process of inventing these "paper families" and the consequences that many such families later faced when they could not reveal their real names or even their real family members.

At times, however, this book can be frustrating to use; some of the faults may lie with the publisher rather than the author. In a number of cases, Lau makes an assertion without any documentation to substantiate her claim—for example, "It is estimated that nearly 25 percent of Chinese in the United States in 1950 had illegally entered using this subterfuge [the 'paper son' system]" (5). Moreover, the endnotes do not provide full citations, requiring a check of both notes and bibliography to determine the full bibliographical information of sources cited.

Despite these shortcomings and the book's covering of ground already well-traversed by a number of other historians of Chinese America, this slim volume offers a cogent summary of the impact that Chinese immigration had on the development of the American immigration apparatus and of the ways in which Chinese immigrants coped with these and other restrictions on their American lives.1 [End Page 139]

K. Scott Wong
Williams College

Footnotes

1. For earlier histories that effectively cover similar ground, see Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, 1995); Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (North Carolina, 2003).

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