Between 1848 and 1852, more than twenty thousand Chinese immigrants were made their way to San Francisco in search of gold. The vast majority of men – rural farmers from the Qanjdong Province, located on the southeastern coast of China, near Hong Kong. They continued to leave for the United States throughout the nineteenth century, when they initially worked in gold mines, then practiced other forms of work, including the construction of an intercontinental rail. They became known as “single men”, although many of them were only single by name. They were rarely able to send their wives to request their wives, and they often lacked the necessary means to return to their homes, and they created ethnic pockets, or “celibacy societies”, a number of them developed into the oldest Chinese neighborhoods in California.
In 1875, the Beige Chinese Law prevented the entry of the United States, which led to the expansion of the gender gap to that. (This number began to shrink after the war bridal law was issued in 1946, which allowed the old -Chinese American warriors to bring their wives and children as exceptions other than the shares system). The Big Law drew the almost complete ban on Chinese immigration to the United States seven years later. with Exclusion Law of 1882– The first federal law in the country to restrict a group based on race. These laws have maintained a gender imbalance between Chinese immigrants for more than a century, and their subsequent effects still exist to this day. legacy Chinese exclusion It lies in the absence of – lost generations or broken breeds – for families that could have been present without that. It is impossible to calculate the full consequences of these laws. We cannot know the number of single men who eventually gave birth to children, especially after the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and the subsequent fire that destroyed the records of local births. But the absence of the archive, of course, does not mean the absence of history.
With the intensification of exclusion laws in the late nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants adopted increasingly advanced strategies to circumvent these laws. One of the ingenious methods included forged identity papers claiming that these immigrants were the children of American citizens of Chinese origin, and thus qualified to obtain citizenship. The men who migrated in this way were known as “the children of paper” – the children of writing, not blood. Some papers were passed by Chinese American citizens to their family members in China. Many of them were purchased through brokers who bought identity leaves and resell them at a much higher price. Given the secret nature of this process, the true number of fictitious children who arrived during the exclusion will never be known. It is estimated that by the mid -twentieth century, at least a quarter of the Chinese in the United States had entered the country using false papers.
One of these people was the father of the writer Fi Min Naj. When he was a teenager, Engy’s father, China, left the name of Engy Jim Yum. He arrived in the island of Angel in San Francisco as you Thin Toy, in 1940, during his last year as a migrant detention center. Like many who came to the island before him, Engy’s father waited for more than a month until he was interrogated by an official, and he was prevented from entering the country in his first attempt, when his answers were considered in the immigration interview incorrect. He was held on the island until his sister was able to appoint a lawyer for immigration affairs.
Eng tells the story of her father’s crossing in her memoirs, “Orphan Bachelor“It is a title derived from the term her father gave to the Chinese men who came to the United States during the era of exclusion. His phrase highlights the feeling of the growing unity of these characters, which was actually abandoned twice, as she separated from their families in China and was unable to start Her private families in the United States.
Upon his arrival at San Francisco, Engy’s father lived “the life of the bachelor’s degree, where he lived in a room in Wiferley Place, eating breakfast in the cousin, and selling things.” Chinese Times She wrote: “In the field, I worked in the first few years in restaurants in the Chinese district.” Despite living among the single men, he saved him from their fate thanks to the mother of Eng. Informed “”, England was born, their first four children, eight years later.
Engy writes about his upbringing among these singles, who spend their days moving around crowded housing in the Chinese district. Many live their entire lives in the United States without any close, unmarried family, and only to death. “While my sister and I met them, they were defeated men without grandchildren, as compassionate, like the Shang Dynasty,” Engy recalls. Her father taught Anng to call every single orphan title “grandfather”. He often described the exclusion as a wonderful legislation, because it is “bloody”. “America did not have to kill any Chinese; Its law has confirmed that no one will be born. Eng’s book at the same time is an investigation into the hereafter life to exclude her family and an attempt to commemorate the missing generations of Chinese Americans – children who have never been born – on paper.
One of the challenges facing the American -Chinese history novel is that little has been documented and that existing records are often unreliable. Anng’s father is conservative about the story of his migration. Inge derives details about his crossing from his official records and his random archive, which was left to sort after his death in 2015. She learned that the older sister of her father bought his identity papers from “a man who holds American citizenship selling an opening for money.” A son of paper that corresponds to my father’s age »for four thousand dollars (equivalent to approximately ninety thousand dollars today). A “training book” was sent to him in China that contains the answers that his father’s paper gave in his interview with immigration when he entered the United States. Engy’s father studied “the genealogy of his paper family” and “the map of his paper village”. The training book was called “The Book of Lies”. “By memorizing the back of the heart, he becomes the son of another man,” he says. “He saved these lies in his memory until I think it is his own truth.”
Her father’s novels formed an Ing sphere. She learns her craft by highlighting her father’s selective stories about immigration. “When I was a child, I believed his stories.” “As a writer, write his lies.” When her father took his paper, “Learn the lies to become a lie.” “Those lies have made my father decent, and these lies will make me become a writer, suitable for me. I knew at the time that I would write these facts to make his life real,” Engy continues.
Since a lot of her father’s life and the life of men like him has been lost in history, Ang uses storytelling techniques to re -imagine his past. It moves between truth and imagination, adorning, exaggerating, and often falls into a fake heroic tone. The structure of the notes is strange in a strange way, as Eng jumps back and forth in time, expanding or pressing her childhood events, and repeatedly returns to the same initial scenes. “This book has no simple timetable.” “I left our cracks because what cannot be known or forgiven is part of our history.”
In destroying the division between truth and lies, the “Orphan Bachelor” remains loyal to the traditions of American -Asian literature dating back to Maxine Hong Kingston.Women fightingFrom 1976. Kingston book, a fundamental mixture of popular tales, legend and biography, is a large imagination but was initially received as clear notes – exactly the type of stereotypes that Kingston tried to avoid.
In an article published at the Literary Center in 2023, Engy wrote that she fears her first book, a novelist entitled “bone“It will be read as a CV. The novel, which relied on her personal experience, is in the Chinese district of San Francisco, and tells the story of a Chinese American immigrant family working in a clothing store. Engy is particularly concerned that her parents and society in the Chinese district may They read a lot about the character of Una, the Chinese daughter who died suicide.
It turns out that Ing’s fears are unfounded. The movie “Great”, which was published in 1993, reached the finals of the Best Film Award penFokenner Award for novel, and soon became a central text of the Sharia of the emerging American Asian literature. Although the novel “The Eagles of Orphans” was published three decades after the publication of the novel “Al -Azm”, notes are similar in many respects the introduction to the novel – an attempt to give the context of the previous Ang works and the American -Chinese history itself.
The exclusion law was canceled in 1943, although the number of Chinese immigrants allowed to enter the country under the quota system remained very low. In the fifties and sixties of the last century, the United States enacted the Chinese confessions program, which is seeking to obtain the so -called Chinese population confessions who migrated through illegal means. Eng describes herself as a “child of confession” because she was born in 1956, the same year in which President Dwight Eisenhower established the program. (She also calls this name to her brother Tim, who was born in 1966, when he was officially dismantled). The recognition has been framing as an amnesty initiative, but it also exposes those who have confessed to the risk of deportation more. The disclosure process included the presentation of the names of real and paper families, and all of them to scrutinize the state. About fourteen thousand people have advanced during the contract where the program was implemented, which led to the involvement of thousands of others. As a result, many not only lost their nationality, but also lost their ability to transfer it to their family members.
Engy’s father entered the recognition program in his last year at the request of her mother. She was hoping to bring her mother from China and she saw in confessing a way to establish a “clear paper path” for her entry into the United States. But the cost carried by the Eng’s father was exorbitant: he lost his nationality immediately and was not naturalized under the law. His real name until 2001, fourteen years before his death. Even after he surrendered his paper name, he refused to abandon him in practice, so his American and Chinese name wrote on every surface that he can.
Acknowledgment has led to more rupture in the Eng family. Her father struggled to forgive her mother, the sacrifice she asked for. During the repercussions, Eng and her sister regained their father’s original name. However, her brothers continued to use the paper name for their father, probably as a kind of loyalty to their mother. Just years later they started repairing the rift.
Inch writes that she inherited a “secret Jin” in the family, a tendency to isolation that she returns to her older grandfather, who left behind two sons in China heading to the United States, where he found work in abandoned gold mines and as a farm. A worker before he finally made his way to the Chinese district of San Francisco. By the time he met his granddaughter, Engage’s mother, in 1953, Ingum, “Ang, is an orphan single for more than sixty years.” He died in 1963 for reasons that are still mysterious to the Eng family.
When she was a girl, Engy was impressed by Mai Oi, the evil hero in Luis Zhu’s novel in 1961,Eat a bowl of tea“To embrace sexual abundance – a kind of revenge for a fun -free life for many of the isolated immigrants. But Eng itself stands beside the isolated.” It was an orphan Bachelor’s atoms that have never been born always chasing me. She wrote: “Sons and girls who could not have them, I chose to give birth to them.” “The exclusion has killed my descendants, and to enter the imaginary immortality community.” Instead, her legacy came through writing. Eighty years after the cancellation of the exclusion law, Engy continues to analyze the consequences and contradictions of his demands: Living as a family man in China and a single abroad; And say the truth by memorizing the book of lies; To be a livelihood for those who were never supposed to generate their offspring; To commemorate what was designed to forget. Perhaps those whose past has been erased must first learn the rules of ratified lies – the art of imagination – before they can write the bones of truth. ♦
