I remember standing at the Angel Island Immigration Center in the San Francisco Bay, listening to poems that had been etched into the walls of the station in my mother tongue and being moved to tears. The heaviness of the history of the detention center weighed on me. The migrants at Angel Island, who were predominantly Chinese, were often detained for weeks and subject to intense scrutiny and interrogation around their identity and authorization to enter the United States. Rising anti-Chinese sentiment and exclusion laws led to the increasing importance of identity documentation for Chinese migrants and their families. As author Fae Myenne Ng wrote in her book Bone: “In this country, paper is more precious than blood.”1 I posit that identity documentation is a core part of what Simone Browne calls racializing surveillance through the case study of Chinese exclusion laws and immigration practices from 1882 to 1943 and yet also served as a site of sousveillance for Chinese communities.
Browne defines racializing surveillance as “when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries along racial lines, thereby reifying race, and where the outcome of this is often discriminatory and violent treatment.”2 With the enactment of the Chinese Restriction Act (1882), the Chinese Exclusion Act (1888), and the Geary Act (1892), the United States federal government began demanding documentary evidence that Chinese migrants had the right to enter the country, generating a frenzy of administrative document keeping in an attempt to delineate between “alien” and “citizen.”3 Thus, the massive boon in identity documentation for tracking the births, marriages, and deaths as well as the movements of the Chinese community were clear acts of surveillance by the government in an attempt to control migration along explicitly racial lines. Moreover, even in the presence of documentation, migrants were subjected to notoriously intense interrogations, ranging from details about family to the layout of their village of origin.
However, this racializing surveillance was not without resistance. Dark sousveillance, as defined by Browne, is “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight.”4Mindful that this definition was conceived in the specific context of Blackness and slavery, I propose that Chinese migrants engaged in different but resonant form of resistance and sousveillance in light of racist immigration restrictions and everyday state violence. In order to migrate, many of the Chinese migrants obtained fake documentation to enter the United States, becoming part of a community of “paper sons” and “paper daughters.” That is, “the unauthorized Chinese who wished to appear legal donned “a choice of masks,” assuming the identity of a returning laborer, exempted merchant, minor child of a merchant, or unmarried child of a citizen.”5This often meant extensively studying and memorizing the details of their new life – their paper name, their paper mother’s name, etc. – but even more prominently, served as a the birth of a dual identity through the act of deception.
Paper sons and daughters became a source of collective identity and community. While living in threat of violence and deportation, those who were positioned in such precarity developed a strong sense of community and kinship to help navigate their life in the United States. Often, community members would know both a given person’s “real” name or identity as well as the one listed on their documents, but this proved to be tricky in navigating the world outside of the Chinese community. Constant negotiation of risks were being calculated carefully. Moreover, these identities remained mostly stable and shouldered for lifetimes, reshaping and redefining what family meant in Chinese American communities.6Lives of paper families were intertwined intimately; the circumstances created webs of community based on interdependence and mutual aid.
As I think back to my trip to Angel Island, I continue to be moved by the resilience of my ancestors and elders throughout history. I draw on their stories of community and mutual aid as inspiration of how we can create deeply interdependent and interwoven communities of care today, especially in the rise of surveillance across different facets of our lives. As organizer and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs once said, “We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other.”7
1 Fae Myenne Ng, Bone (Hachette Books, 2015).↩
2 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015), 8.↩
3 Beth Lew-Williams, “Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented,” Modern American History 4, no. 2 (July 2021): 109–30, https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2021.9.↩
4 Browne, Dark Matters, 21.↩
5 Lew-Williams, “Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented.”↩
6 Lew-Williams, “Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented.”↩
7 Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011).↩
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