SONS OF CHINATOWN

A memoir about Chinese immigrants navigating exclusion-era politics and other struggles in America.

Journalist Wong, author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches From Asian America, first visited his father’s rural village in Guangdong province in 1994 with his extended family. His father, Sam Gee, as he was mostly known in his new home of Oakland, had been able to slip under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 via a well-rehearsed practice among Chinese seeking immigration at the time. As Wong writes, “the so-called paper son scheme” relied on U.S.-born Chinese clans to attest to immigrants’ familial relations when they came through the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco. In 1912, Gee arrived as a teenager, and it would be another two decades until he was able to bring the rest of his family over from China. While living and working in Oakland, Gee had multiple daughters before the author, the coveted son, was born in 1941. In this intimate story of a Chinese American family making a life in Oakland, Wong unearths poignant, previously unknown details about Gee and his early years hustling to sell lottery tickets during the Depression; being shot four times by his “paper brother” in 1940 and surviving; and the shady financial backing for his ultimately successful Oakland restaurant, Great China, which thrived until he died in 1961 and served as “our family’s universe” for nearly two decades. The author also chronicles his own life, including his career as a journalist, his stint in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, and his marriage to a white woman. By the end of this ultimately uplifting narrative, Wong displays a deeper understanding of his sometimes obdurate, yet determined, perseverant parents. Pair this one with Ava Chin’s Mott Street.

A forthright account of a family’s success in building a strong, positive Chinese American identity.