The National Archives at Seattle keeps 50,000 records from the Chinese Exclusion Act era that banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. Volunteers working on the documents find stories of resilience and some find details of their family’s past.
A group of volunteers has been gathering each week at the Seattle archives to index thousands of documents from the Chinese Exclusion Act years. Volunteers say they never know what kind of drama the files will reveal. It may be an intrusive questioning of a woman about her pregnancy, or a letter from a husband to the detention center authorities, asking to transfer money to his wife.
“No, they're not happy, but at least the story is there,” said genealogist and historian Trish Hackett Nicola. She has been volunteering with the National Archives project for more than 20 years, sharing some of the stories on the project’s blog.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States and prevented those already in the country from becoming naturalized citizens. It was repealed in 1943. The National Archives at Seattle holds more than 50,000 files spanning over 60 years, documenting Chinese people entering or leaving the country.
“Immigration did interrogations, which obviously changed over the course of the exclusion period,” said Valerie Szwaya, director of archival operations at the National Archives at Seattle. “And they got substantially more detailed as the time period for exclusion went on.”
Volunteer Rhonda Farrar was motivated to join the project to resolve mysteries in her own family’s past. As she works with the files, she discovers that sometimes the questions are intrusive, she said, and sometimes they are mundane.
“They’ll ask you how many mirrors you have in the house back home in China, where you sleep, and where do you keep your rice,” Farrar said.
Sometimes, they are about family.
Farrar’s father, Edwin Law, died when she was a teenager. She found a file on him as she was working on a file from the last years of the Act. The file misspelled his name as “Low Yow Edwin.” He was interrogated at the beginning of World War II as he left the U.S. to serve as a fighter-pilot mechanic in China’s military. Finding his file came as a surprise.
“My job that day was just to go through the file and input the name that I saw on the header into the computer,” she said. “This file was sitting on the very end of this box. I thought, ‘That looks kind of close to my dad's name.’ I opened it up and there was a picture of him, at age 23, staring me in the face. I physically started shaking, I had tears, it was just unbelievable. It really helped to bring everything together for me.”
Lily Eng found the files of several family members, including her great-grandfather, who went by the name of “Hop Lee.”
“We had no pictures; my grandfather never spoke about him,” Eng said. “Only after I got the immigration files, I realized that my great-grandfather had died in 1918, so my grandfather had never met him. His father had returned to America before my grandfather was born.”
Joyce Liu, who joined the project as a volunteer a year ago, said the stories revealed through the files made her appreciate the resilience of the earlier generation of Chinese people who came to America.
“I look at the tidbits of their lives, and it looks tough,” she said. “An arrival form of a mom who came back with her son from China that says that her son died on board of the ship … I was shocked. I mean, the mom must be devastated. It also dawned on me, how long was that voyage from the southern China to Seattle?”
Liu sees the Chinese people who arrived in America during the Chinese Exclusion Act period as pioneers.
“The history can really help us put things in perspective as a Chinese American here, and I just hope that history doesn't repeat itself,” she said.
