thebegats:Celeste Ng, author of the intimate, prickly, and elegantly coiled Everything I Neve
thebegats: Celeste Ng, author of the intimate, prickly, and elegantly coiled Everything I Never Told You, is my latest Family Tree guest. We discuss secrets in families, growing up different in small towns, and the genealogical family poem lost when her great-grandfather immigrated from China as a “paper son.” Like most people of Chinese descent in the U.S., some of my ancestors immigrated as “paper sons”—i.e., under assumed names—as a way around the Chinese Exclusion Act. From 1882 to 1943, when the act was repealed, all Chinese immigrants were barred from the United States. The law was based almost entirely on racism against the Chinese, as other racial groups were not banned; in fact, it’s the only law in U.S. history to deny entry based on a specific nationality. The only Chinese who were allowed to enter the country were those who were already U.S. citizens or the children of citizens. So, those seeking to immigrate would claim to be the sons of Chinese men already in the United States, and would take on new names and new identities. The result is that many families, including mine, lost a lot of family history when they came to America. My paternal great-grandfather came to the U.S. in the early 20th century as a paper son. He returned to China a few times, to marry and then to visit his wife, who remained in China. But he stayed in the U.S. for the rest of his life, working at a boarding school in Iowa (which helped inspire Lloyd Academy, the school in my novel) and later serving in the army during World War I. Meanwhile, my grandmother—and later my father—grew up in China not knowing him. They didn’t come to the U.S. until decades later, when my father immigrated legally as a student and became naturalized, and was then able to bring his parents and siblings over as well. In the 1960s, the U.S. government offered amnesty to paper sons, and my great-grandfather, like many other “paper sons,” gave a full affidavit and was granted citizenship. He’s buried in the Chinese cemetery in Sacramento, California, where I visited his grave many times as a child. But I didn’t know the details of this story, nor did my father, until I wrote to the INS for a copy of his file when I was in college. So, like many Chinese immigrants, my family did have to hide things (at least for a time), and I don’t know much about my ancestry on that side before my great-grandfather. Traditionally, each Chinese family has a poem that records its lineage: each generation takes the next character of the poem and uses it in the names of everyone in that generation. If you know the poem, you can tell who’s in your family and which generation they’re from. But we don’t know our family poem anymore; it got left behind somewhere along the way. In rural China, I think records were always somewhat spotty, and when the Communists came to power, a lot of records were destroyed. I’m not sure if we’ll ever find out much more, and that’s both a huge loss and a space for imagination. -- source link