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Paper Son
By Tung Pok Chin with Winifred C. Chin |
Publisher's Webpage for this Book
ORDER -- Item #3372, Price $22.95
"For scholars and students, Paper Son is valuable because it documents a life during an era that is perhaps the least studies in Chinese American History, the 1930s through the mid-1970s….Chin's account not only reveals the details and strategy of how he conducted his 'paper life'; it also puts human flesh to our skeletal knowledge of how papers sons lived their day-to-day lives during the Great Depression, World War II, and the McCarthy Era…. Chin's memoir relates this information in a manner that is immediately accessible, warm, reflective, human, and insightful. No doubt his writing style reveals a great deal about his personality, but it also reminds us that much of our history of the exclusion era is faceless."
Book Description from Back Cover
In this remarkable memoir, Tung Pok Chin casts light on the largely hidden experience of those Chinese who immigrated to this country with false documents during the Exclusion era. Although scholars have pieced together their history, first-person accounts are rare and fragmented; many of the so-called "Paper Sons" lived out their lives in silent fear of discovery. Chin's story speaks for the many Chinese who worked in urban laundries and restaurants, but it also introduces an unusually articulate man's perspective on becoming a Chinese American.
Comments from Back Cover
"What a stunning book! Mr. Tung Pok Chin was a self-taught poet philosopher steeped in the Laundries and restaurants of Boston and New York City during the nightmarish years of the Chinese exclusion and McCarthy red-baiting. He writes with a penetrating insight that transports the reader into the working lives of isolated men trying their best to survive a hostile racist world while somehow saving pennies to support their loved ones still in Guangdong. This is far more than the story of one man: he is writing the truth of generations of paper sons and paper daughters."
—Professor John Kuo Wei Tchen,
New York University, and co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in the Americas
—K. Scott Wong, from the Introduction
Background on Winifred Chin
Winifred Chin is a Visiting Scholar with the Asian/Pacific American Studies and Research Institute at New York University.
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Copyright © 2006 by AACP, Inc.
Most recent revision January 6, 2006