Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America by William Gee Wong

At its heart, Sons of Chinatown is a tale of two Chinese Americans. One was born in China, arrived in the United States under a false name, and struggled against very evident limits the United States placed on the success of immigrants from Asia. A man of many names, his moniker is simplified in the book with the nickname "Pop." The other, his son, was born an American citizen in Oakland, CA. He enjoyed the advantages of being both American and the longed-for son finally arriving to a Chinese father with six daughters. His own challenges with anti-Asian bias in American society were more subtle, though no less real. William Gee Wong, aka Bill, writes the contrast between his father's life and his own with sensitivity, clarity, and introspection.

This book, at once both biography and memoir, is an opportunity for Wong to know and understand his father better. In the decades since his father died, his interest in his father's and his own "origin story" has blossomed. Undertaking the effort to research and write this book became a means for Bill Wong to connect and explore his own identity. That identity is not uncomplicated. For one thing, there is a lot of family history—and Asian American history, and U.S. history—packed just into William Gee Wong's name.

A little bit of historical context is necessary here. After the U.S. government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, Chinese laborers became barred from entering the United States. Because there had been approximately three decades of migration before Congress passed the Act, and merchants continued to come with their wives even after, there were small numbers of ethnic Chinese children born in the United States. The San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed the birth records of many of them. It was no longer possible to be sure who had been born in the United States and who had not.

That confusion became important because being born in the United States conferred automatic U.S. citizenship on anyone, including the children of immigrants otherwise subject to exclusion. In 1898, this fact was affirmed in the Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 when his parents resided there as merchants. After his parents returned to China, Wong made occasional visits to see them. When he returned to the United States after his second visit in 1895, the U.S. customs service refused him entry. He sued, claiming to be a citizen by virtue of his California birth. In a landmark decision that cemented in place the American system of birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court held that under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, Wong was indeed a citizen, and neither the Chinese Exclusion Act's limits on Chinese immigration and naturalization nor the Chinese government's own system of bloodline citizenship would alter that fact. That decision on birthright citizenship both built a valued community of Chinese Americans in the United States and fueled the fraudulent entry of thousands of Chinese migrants during Exclusion.

All of this history helps explain how Wong's father entered the United States in 1912. Wong's father—whose names include Gee Ghee Gheng, Gee Seow Hong, and Sam Gee—entered with a document that acknowledged that "Gee Seow Hong" should be admitted as a U.S. citizen, having acquired derivative citizenship from his father Gee Bing Fong's birth in California. Bing Fong was not his father, and Seow Hong was not his real name. This was a paper identity, purchased to allow Gee into the United States. That his birth name and paper name shared the same surname might have been a lucky coincidence or a function of village networks of distant relatives. Either way, it allowed him to join the Gee family associations in Oakland without any complications over his lineage.

Two decades later, when Gee brought Wong's mother and sisters to the United States, the country was in the Great Depression. Wong's father brought his China-born older sisters into the United States as derivative citizens, the paper grandchildren of Bing Fong. Gee brought his wife, Wong's mother, in as his paper identity's sister. Both mother and daughters carefully memorized the family history for the assumed identities. After enduring a short detention at Angel Island and questioning by immigration authorities, they were admitted to the United States and moved in with Gee in Oakland.

Upon arrival, they discovered that Gee eked out his living by selling lottery tickets in Chinatown. This business was both dangerous and unpredictable—the lottery was illegal, and the risk was high of both arrest by the local authorities and disputes with gamblers or other lottery sellers. Gee experienced both: he was arrested twice for his illegal operation, and he was once shot by a member of his "tong"—a Chinatown organization that could serve as a mutual aid society for members with the same surname or geographic roots or as a front for a gang that engaged in illegal activities. (It's never fully clear which Gee belonged to; perhaps it was functionally both.)

The arrests did not automatically throw Gee's immigration status in jeopardy because he was admitted as a U.S. citizen. They were still nerve-wracking, however, because being arrested for breaking one law had the potential to expose the family for breaking another. Wong's mother's immigration status was the most precarious. Because she was admitted as a daughter of a U.S. citizen and as Gee's sister, she did not want to be caught living with Gee as his wife. Her four pregnancies in the United States—Wong's three older sisters before Wong himself—would have exposed them, so they arranged a paper marriage of convenience to a Chinese immigrant with the surname Wong. William and these three sisters were therefore born as Wongs, not as Gees. The split surnames in the family would endure as a perpetual reminder of the discriminations and curtailed opportunities of the Exclusion era.

This paper name of Wong became the one under which William became a well-known journalist. His father did not participate in the Confession Program of the 1950s, in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Naturalization Service worked to root out sympathizers of Chinese communism from Chinese communities by seeking confessions of the true identities of former paper sons. Wong's mother would eventually take part in the early 1960s, resulting in her recovering her given name. William and his sisters kept Wong, though William eventually added Gee as a middle name to connect to the lineage of which his father was always so proud.

The saga of the names is an important part of the first half of Sons of Chinatown. This half chronicles Wong's father as an immigrant, entrepreneur, husband, and father. The second half explores Wong's adult life, focusing particularly on his career in print journalism. The two halves of the book also have very different themes—the first centers on family and relationships. The second, with a few exceptions, chronicles Wong's career and professional development.

While preparing this review, I had the unique opportunity to pose a few of my questions to Wong himself. When I asked him about this split, Wong commented that the shift in focus was by design. He explained, "I see my book as a sort of a case study on the fact that immigration works."¹ His father, mother, and three oldest sisters endured exclusion and a period of American history not at all welcoming to migrants from Asia. As he writes in the book, "To [Pop], and perhaps to his Chinatown contemporaries, maintaining a Chinese identity was more important than adapting to an American one since America wasn't all that hospitable in his many years here" (p. 131). By contrast, Wong himself left Chinatown behind to become a successful journalist on the prevailing white society's terms, demonstrating his ability to fit in and become an assimilated American.

As a byproduct of being the youngest sibling and the long-awaited only son, this focus on Wong's professional life in the second half of the book also means that a lot of the women sort of fall out of the story. Wong claims that his father "didn't resent having daughters," but even a skim of his sister's autobiography makes clear the girls knew they were no substitute for the family's male heir.² In the second half of Sons of Chinatown, Wong's mother and sisters are settled into their own California lives while Wong seeks out adventure by joining the Peace Corps and moving to the Philippines, then returning to school in New York and his first newspaper job for the Wall Street Journal in Cleveland, OH. After a few years in Cleveland, Wong transferred to the San Francisco office to be closer to his ailing mother in Oakland.

Returning to California led Wong to become more engaged in Chinese-American life and politics, and he began to write op-eds and stories for independent publications. It was here that he found his footing as a "yellow journalist." He used that term purposely, "partially as a reclamation of a once 'racist' term," as he explained to me.³ The link back to Pulitzer and Hearst and the exaggerated claims of early twentieth-century "newspapermen" is clearly tongue in cheek, though not the best comparison for the work Wong did. That "yellow" also clearly limits the Asian American identity to those with heritage from northeast Asia. After transferring to a hometown newspaper in Oakland, Wong eventually worked his way into becoming a columnist. He took on a variety of issues—finally freed from the charge of "objectivity" when reporting the news (p. 204)—that suited his political point of view. He also engaged with major issues facing Asian Americans, or fellow "Yellow" citizens. Wong explained to me that he regretted not paying more attention to the South Asian community, though as a trailblazer in Asian American journalism, he might be forgiven for not being all things to all people.

Although a few chapters reference meeting his wife, Joyce, in Manila and later the birth of their son, his immediate family receives significantly less discussion than his professional career. This focus is intentional, Bill Wong told me. He sought to demonstrate that, "Hey, some of us have been able to assimilate, work within the white majority …." Showing the contrast between his father's struggles to make a living in an uncooperative environment and his own success just a generation later makes a clear argument for the benefits of immigration and the speed with which acclimation can happen within a family.

That is a message that is particularly salient in 2025. Reading this book in the shadow of accusations that Haitian refugees in Ohio were "eating the dogs, eating the cats" of the residents or calls for mass deportation of "illegal immigrants" for being violent, criminal, or lawless makes the lived experiences of Gee and Wong even more poignant.⁴ Gee arrived via fraud and engaged in illegal activities in the United States, ultimately resulting in his own injury by gunfire. But he also labored his way into the entrepreneurial middle class and raised a family of American citizens, including a son whose work contributed to better understanding of the Chinese and Asian experiences in Oakland and the country more broadly. Gee was not a drain on the American system but offered a net benefit. How many current and future deportees lose their chance to be the same?

One of Wong's observations to open his book provides both a solid summation of his argument about U.S. immigration and a useful point of reflection today. He noted,

… America sends wildly confusing messages to non-Americans who want to come here to escape homeland misery. One message celebrates America as a land of unbridled opportunities for immigrants and refugees to achieve the American dream. An opposing message is more honest, truthful, and real. America has been and still is fraught with ugly racism, systemic and individualized, and violent white supremacy targeting many nonwhite newcomers and long-time residents and citizens.

(p. 8)

Sons of Chinatown offers examples of both. While it's tempting to read in it a triumphalist narrative of a son who overcame the odds and reclaimed his identity, Wong's conclusions are more complex than that. He cannot help but wonder what opportunities he missed because of his race, observe what disparities exist within Asian American communities, and acknowledge the extent to which racism and white supremacy continue to dog the lives of Asian residents of the United States. This compelling book is an excellent attempt to do just that.