Foundation (SFNLAF). A variety of cases were assigned to me, but most pertained to landlord-tenant disputes or consumer issues. The work was so rewarding and stimulating that I continued to clerk there until I graduated in 1974. Clearly, law school would have been a miserable time but for my concurrent work at SFNLAF that provided context and meaning for my training as a lawyer. By bar exam time, SFNLAF was unequivocally the place I wanted to work. Since the only opening was in immigration, I grabbed it and soon found myself immersed in a workload of over a hundred open cases.
In retrospect, becoming an immigration lawyer made sense for me. As it turns out, practicing any kind of law in or near Chinatown in the mid-1970s would have meant working with immigrants, given the changing demographics of the community. Although the 1970 census counted more U.S.-born than foreign-born Chinese Americans, by 1980 the reverse was true. But as the son of an immigrant, with many immigrant relatives, and growing up in a town with numerous immigrant residents, becoming an immigration lawyer has meant something special, as it would for anyone with a similar background.
Stories from my own family’s immigration history provide plenty of fuel for my interest in the field. My father was born in Oong On Lei Village in Canton Province, China in 1893, and entered the United States on a false claim to U.S. citizenship. He admitted that he was born in China in 1893. But his father, who had been a cook during the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad, claimed that his birth certificate was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and that he had traveled to China around the time that my father was conceived. Therefore, my father entered as the son of a U.S. citizen. My mother was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1901, and was therefore a U.S. citizen at birth. When she was three, she accompanied her mother, a native of China, to China so that her mother could care for her own ailing mother. My parents met in 1920 through a marriage broker who escorted my father to my mother’s village, Ngan Voo. My mother was not one of the women in the village looking for a husband, but my father spotted her at a distance and insisted on meeting her. My mother eventually immigrated as the spouse of a U.S. citizen. Although she was a citizen at birth, she could not reenter as a citizen for two reasons. First, she did not have her birth records to prove her place of birth. And second, technically she had lost her citizenship by marrying a foreign national at a time when the law stripped women of U.S. citizenship for marrying foreign men. Of course my father was making a false claim to citizenship, so their situation presented a messy picture to say the least.
Before my mother could reenter the United States in 1926 as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, she had to pass inspection at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Between 1910 and 1940, about fifty thousand Chinese were confined—often for months and years at a time—in Angel Island’s bleak wooden barracks, where inspectors would conduct grueling interrogations. In a sense, my mother was lucky because her detention on Angel Island lasted only a week. Months earlier, she had received coaching instructions from my father (who had returned to the United States soon after their marriage) on how to answer certain questions. This was typical of the Chinese immigrants of the time. The strict exclusion laws forced distortions of family trees and histories if immigration was to succeed. The schemes devised to thwart the racist immigration laws were ingenious. For both the successful and unsuccessful, however, it was agonizing to be compelled to lie and cheat in order to reunite with family members.
The directions to my mother were more unusual than most because she had been born in the United States. She was to assert birth in China and marriage to my father, the son of a purported U.S. native. A claim to U.S. citizenship by my mother would likely result in serious delay; records in Scranton would have to be obtained and a call for my mother’s alienated brothers on the eastern seaboard to come testify would have been probable. So when my mother was called in for interrogation a week after arriving at Angel Island, she was questioned for about thirty minutes and was deemed admissible as the spouse of a citizen.
Growing up in Superior, I also had a sense of the gender imbalance that plagued the Chinese American community for decades after the enactment of the Chinese exclusion laws. I grew up in a small house attached to my mother’s small grocery store. The store and house were on the poorest street in Pinal County, a rural part of south-central Arizona. The store consisted of three small aisles of food, a small butcher area, and an area with dry goods—shoes, fabric, hurricane lamps, and the like. The small second floor of the back storeroom contained six narrow rooms with little headroom that we used for storage. As a child, I learned that during the 1920s and 1930s these rooms were actually used as sleeping quarters by men who came from China without their wives to work for my father. They cooked and ate in one of the slightly larger rooms of the musty, dank second floor.
Two of the men who worked for my father were an uncle and a cousin whom I grew up knowing. They were Geen Hong Go (Uncle Art) and Cherng Goo Cherng (Uncle Charlie). Having entered the United States with false papers, they were always introduced to the townspeople as my father’s brothers. Although both had lived in the United States since the 1920s or 1930s, their wives and children did not join them until the early 1960s. Uncle Charlie’s wife (Cherng Goo) was my father’s sister. But because of my family’s disordered history, she immigrated as my father’s sister-in-law.
The memory of my aunt Cherng Goo’s arrival is a stark reminder of the effects of years of exclusion. As a kid, I wanted to be a basketball star. So when my parents told me that my aunt had been a champion basketball player in her youth, I was beside myself with excitement. I practiced diligently for weeks in anticipation of our first encounter, expecting a great shooting and dribbling display from her upon her arrival. But by the time her metaphorical boat came in, she was an elderly woman whose basketball-playing days had long since passed. We had all been victimized by the exclusion laws.
My immigration memories span a continuum from my family to my clients. A distant older cousin fled to Mexico after being indicted for selling false green cards. My mother underwent intensive preparation to testify at an immigration hearing on behalf of another relative. Years later, when I practiced in Chinatown, I met hundreds of clients who had similar stories of false papers and family histories to gain entry into the United States during the exclusionary era. Throughout my life, and especially after I became a lawyer, I have often marveled at the ingenious schemes my ancestors and other Chinese devised to thwart the immigration policymaker “ghosts,” as they were called. For decades, the authorities were determined to exclude the “Yellow Peril,” yet many Chinese were able to overcome the racist laws by inventing families, occupations, backgrounds, and birth certificates destroyed in earthquakes.
Over the years, the questions related to immigration directed to my parents’ generation did not rekindle fond memories. The historical prejudices codified against my uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers resulted in pain. They were forced to lie and to cheat because of the oppressive racial biases of others. Thus, my veneration for their creative schemes inevitably turns to anger after the sobering realization that, despite the anecdotal successes of many in evading discriminatory immigration policies, my ancestors unnecessarily bore tremendous hardships.
Most of my Chinese cases have pertained to visa matters. But over the years I have represented several hundred clients—of myriad nationalities—in deportation proceedings. In the late 1970s, part of my function as a legal services attorney was to provide public defender-type representation to aliens who had been arrested by the INS in the San Francisco region. I visited the detention branch on a daily basis to interview detainees, and cooperated with the Immigration Court when they needed an attorney to provide representation. Nationals of Canada, Nigeria, the Philippines, Iran, Ireland, Great Britain, and other parts of Europe were often in the detention area. In fact, every month or so I would encounter young European tourists in their twenties who turned themselves in for deportation because they had run out of spending money. I recall a Caucasian man who was born in China to Portuguese parents, who was being deported to Portugal even though he had never lived there. And there was a Greek client who immigrated at the age of three, but was being deported at the age of twenty-seven for possession of marijuana. In the 1980s, I represented many Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States, including one Nicaraguan whose case became a precedent-setting
