'Paper sons,' hidden pasts

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Lisa See, author of “Shangai Girls,” shares a short story of how a young Chinese boy, and his father, was being treated differently by his grandfather compared to the rest of their family.  It turns out, the young boy’s father was a paper son and those he thought were his relatives weren’t actually related to him at all. See said that when she was in her early 30's, she also found out that some of her uncles weren’t really her uncles. She says that while some families are more open about being paper sons, some are very secretive about it. 

See’s great grandfather, a a legitimate Chinese merchant, said that many paid him to be listed as his [paper] partners, aka fake merchants, in the paperwork he was required to show the government every 6 months. 

After discussing the definition, process, origin of paper sons, which we learned in class,  Lee said the paper son legacy still continued after the overturn of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The US government had “confession program” starting 1975, where they asked Chinese paper sons to confess what they were in order to receive legitimate citizenships, thus exposing their friends, neighbors, business associates and even family members along the way. The rate of getting a citizenship would be higher if one said who he/she “suspected”  was a communist.

Lastly, See says that being a paper son affected families’ daily lives it affects as well, and even “elementary school mothers” would get humiliated by being paper sons/daughters or by their children being paper sons/daughters.  Several half Chinese people, like See’s other uncle, told their children not to tell people they were part Chinese because until 1948, it was against the law in California for people who were even 1 quarter chinese to own property or even be married to a white person. 


Opinion: It is crazy to see the type of discrimination that these Chinese families faced, and I did not realize how hard it was for them in their daily lives as well.  Going to Angel Island last year devastated me as I saw the writing of several Chinese men and women encarved on the walls, which showed how much they suffered in these cramped, unsanitary immigration stations. I can only imagome being a paper son and finding out that the people I grew up with were not really my family members. 

Read more: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/02/opinion/oe-see2

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