Posted on 11/27/2005 8:53:52 AM PST by SmithL
ANGEL ISLAND - Her friends call her Judy.
Her students call her Professor Yung. Judith Yung appears on her birth certificate.
But to Mom and Dad and her Chinese school teacher, she was always Bick Fong.
Her original family name, Tom, not Yung, was a secret closely guarded from outsiders for a generation.
"Within the community and within families people knew what your real names were," Yung said. "I thought it was normal because everyone else was like that."
Rebuffed by the Chinese Exclusion Act, nearly an entire generation of Chinese immigrants to the Bay Area came in under assumed or "paper" names and identities, said Yung, a professor emeritus of Asian-American studies at UC Santa Cruz. Many families, like Yung's, kept those names as their American families grew and prospered.
Their stories will be preserved at the immigration station on the northeast coast of Angel Island, in part due to a $15 million grant from the federal government that Congress unanimously authorized this month. The Angel Island Immigration Station Restoration & Preservation Act to save the West Coast version of New York's Ellis Island awaits the president's signature.
Between 1910 and 1940, up to 80 percent of the approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrants who entered the United States through Angel Island used false names, Yung estimates. In all, the station processed up to a million immigrants who arrived on the Pacific Coast.
The Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation has worked for 35 years to preserve the site and the tales of despair that many immigrants felt being detained there. It also has helped record the history of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the elaborate schemes that immigrants from China used to enter America illegally.
"We hope people who don't have a family connection can also relate to these stories," said Erika Gee, director of education for the foundation.
Two of Gee's grandparents bought papers claiming they were members of Chinese-American families in order to bypass the Exclusion Act. The act barred almost all Chinese immigration until its repeal in 1943. It was the first immigration legislation to target a particular national group.
When Gee took the job with the foundation in 2002, she did not know that her grandfather had been held at Angel Island. He never spoke about it.
But she knew he wasn't really a Gee.
"I suspected something funny was going on," Gee said. "My dad has cousins and I have second cousins with different names."
Gee's grandfather Moon Fong pretended to be a member of the Gee family to gain entry. During questioning about his life in China, the immigration officials asked where he got his gold teeth.
"Grandpa's gold teeth almost got him deported from the United States," Gee said, recounting a bit of family lore that she found confirmed in the National Archives in San Bruno when she looked up her grandfather's records.
The suspicious border guards asked a real Gee, Moon Fong's purported brother, about the gold teeth. He could not answer the question, but corroborated enough of Moon Fong's story to grant him entry.
Not all Chinese immigrants had to pretend to get past Angel Island. But they were still suspects, subjected to invasive examinations and medical testing and held for weeks, or in a few cases, years.
Albert Wong came to the United States in 1934 and was detained in the station's long wooden barracks for about five weeks. He was coming as a third-generation American to meet his grandfather, who had been in the United States since the 1860s, and his father, a San Jose restaurateur.
"Don't let them buffalo you," Wong's father had told him, warning him about the detailed interrogations. "Just tell the truth."
Wong, 84, whose Chinese name is Kai Chong, lives on Grant Street in San Francisco's Chinatown. He met another boy on the ship from China whom he knew as Maurice Young. They bumped into each other in grade school and later in the Army and eventually became friends.
"It wasn't until a few years ago that I saw his (real) name," Wong said.
Maurice Young had been a paper son.
"Some of them still got their fake names," Wong said, adding that many families kept their true names secret, even when the government offered an amnesty, because revealing their true names could affect many relatives.
"That's why that guy Young never said anything about his family," Wong said.
Judy Yung's father and many others refused to participate in the amnesty, offered during the McCarthy era when some Chinese citizens came under suspicion as communist sympathizers.
"He never trusted the immigration authorities or the government," she said.
He died in 1987 and is buried in Colma as Yung Hin Sen. But the Chinese characters on his grave stone memorialize Tom Yip Jing, his original name.
Many of the immigrants who were detained and aggressively questioned on Angel Island never talked about their experiences out of shame or embarrassment.
"The story here is not a shining story in U.S. immigration policy," said Roy McNamee, acting superintendent of Angel Island, a state park. McNamee is overseeing the restoration of the barracks, with rows and rows of Chinese poetry carved into the wood walls, and the immigration station grounds. He hopes the site will be reopen to the public in 2007.
The state is paying for current work at the station. The federal money, when appropriated, will help restore a hospital to be used as a museum and genealogy center and a power plant that will be a visitors' center.
Albert Wong is glad that the story of what happened to Chinese immigrants is finally being preserved.
He adapted quickly to American life when he finally arrived in San Jose. He played basketball. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor and became a navigator. He experienced discrimination when refused a job flying with an airline, but made a career in civil service as a general purchaser for San Francisco.
Now he is the main character in a children's book about Angel Island and hopes the proceeds will help build a monument at the immigration station.
"Up until this last 10 years, nobody talked about it," Wong said.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.