Paper Son
Harold Leong, 1909–1997
born Yuen Wing-sun in Taishan, Guangdong

The exclusion years · His two names · The grocery · Ching Ming · Angel Island · The Family

My grandfather came to San Francisco in 1921, twelve years old, alone, with a book of answers he had memorized and another family's name. He lived seventy-six more years in this country, ran a grocery store in Sacramento for thirty-three of them, raised four children, and kept one secret, very quietly, without ever quite hiding it. He died two Octobers ago, at eighty-eight.

My name is Gail Clinkscales. I'm a pharmacist in Sacramento, and I'm the oldest child of his youngest daughter. I made this page because my cousins and I have been trying to write down what we know before the people who know more are gone, and because when I went looking for something like it two years ago I found almost nothing. If your grandfather was a paper son too, I hope you'll write to me.

The exclusion years

From 1882 until 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the laws that followed it shut most Chinese people out of the United States. Laborers could not come at all. A few kinds of people could: merchants, students, teachers, diplomats, and the children of American citizens.

That last door is where the paper sons came in. In 1906 the San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed the city's birth records. After that, a Chinese man in California who said he had been born in San Francisco could not easily be proved wrong, and many said so. As a citizen, he could visit China, and when he came back he could report the children born to him there, each of whom would have a right to come to America as a citizen's child. Sometimes the children were real. Sometimes a man reported more sons than he had, and later sold the extra places, the "slots," to families in his district who wanted to send a boy across. The boy who bought a slot took the name of the family on the papers. He was a son on paper only. A paper son.

The government knew this went on, and tried to catch it by questioning. Each boy studied a coaching book, pages of questions and answers about the paper family and their village: how many houses were in each row, which way the front door faced, where the rice was kept, the names of the neighbors, how many steps led up to the ancestral hall. His answers had to match what his paper father and paper brothers had already told the inspectors, sometimes years before. Most boys memorized the book on the ship and threw it over the side before landing.

His two names

He was born Yuen Wing-sun in 1909, in a village of about forty houses in the Taishan district of Guangdong, the third of five children. His family farmed rice and were poor even by the village's standards. His mother's brother had gone to California years before and ran a store in the Delta, and it was that uncle who found the slot: a Leong in San Francisco who had reported four sons in China and had only two.

So in the summer of 1921 my grandfather became Leong Gim-fook, third son of that man, and studied the Leong village instead of his own. He crossed the Pacific on a steamship from Hong Kong and was taken off at the immigration station on Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, where he was held for twenty-three days while the inspectors questioned him through an interpreter. My uncle has a photocopy of the transcript. It runs eleven pages. They asked him about the paper family's pig, the paper grandmother's bound feet, and which side of the village the well was on. He answered every question the way the book said.

He picked the name Harold in his twenties, at a church English class in the Delta, because the teacher said it was a good strong name. For the rest of his life his papers said Leong, his store said Leong, the Army said Leong, and his children and grandchildren are Leongs. But every one of us knows we are Yuens, because he made sure we did.

In the late 1950s the government offered paper sons a way to confess and straighten out their records. Some did. A confession meant giving up the names of everyone else on the same papers, and Grandpa would not do that to the Leongs, who had done nothing to him but help. He kept the paper name and told his own children the truth at the kitchen table, one at a time, when each turned sixteen. My mother says she cried, and he patted her hand and said a name is a coat. You wear the one that keeps you warm.

The Delta, the Army, and the grocery

From 1921 to 1942 he worked in his uncle's store in Tule Landing, a river town of pear orchards and asparagus fields, selling rice and tea and overalls and work gloves to the farmhands, the Chinese and Filipino and Mexican and Italian crews alike. He swept, he stocked, he drove the delivery truck on the levee roads, and he learned English from the customers and the church class.

In 1942 he was drafted, at thirty-three. He served as an Army cook with a quartermaster company in France and Germany and came home with a taste for French bread and very little to say about the rest. After the war a new law let veterans bring wives from overseas, and in 1947 he went back to Taishan for the first time in twenty-six years and came home married. My grandmother Hazel followed him on the boat the next year. She is seventy-seven now, and she is the reason this page has any dates on it at all.

In 1948 they opened Leong's Market, a corner grocery on the south side of Sacramento, and lived in the rooms behind it. It was open seven days a week from seven in the morning to nine at night for thirty-three years. The neighborhood was every color, and so were the customers, and Grandpa ran a tab for half of them in a green ledger that he wrote in Chinese, so nobody else could read who owed what. He kept an abacus beside the cash register and could beat the register with it, and did, to prove it to me.

I was nine when he closed the store in 1981. I remember the bell on the door, the cold case that hummed, the candy jars at a child's eye level, the smell of dried shrimp and cardboard in the back room, and sitting on a tall stool next to him counting pennies into rolls. He paid me in Bazooka. When I graduated from pharmacy school he said a drugstore was a grocery with better prices, and that I should get my own register.

Ching Ming

Every spring, in early April at Ching Ming, the grave-sweeping festival, our family goes to the cemetery. When I was small we went for Grandpa's parents, who are buried in China, so we bowed toward the west and he told us their names. Since 1998 we go for him.

Grandma brings roast pork, a whole steamed chicken, oranges, a bowl of rice, and little cups of tea and rice wine. We pull the weeds and sweep the stone. We light incense and burn paper money in a coffee can, and each of us bows three times, oldest to youngest, which makes my little cousins the last and the most solemn. Then we take the food home and eat it together, because the dead have had what they need of it, and the living are hungry.

His stone says LEONG, HAROLD in English, and down the side, in Chinese, Grandma had the carver put his village and the name Yuen. It is the only place the two names have ever been written together.

Angel Island, 1998

Last summer my mother and I took the ferry from Tiburon to Angel Island, which is a state park now, with hiking trails and picnic tables and deer. The immigration station is around the island at a cove on the north side. Most of it burned in 1940, the year it closed, but the wooden barracks where the men were held is still standing, and it's a museum now.

The bunks are stacked three high, close enough that you have to turn sideways to walk between them. And the walls are covered in writing. The men who waited there, weeks and sometimes months, carved poems into the wood, or brushed them on in ink, in Chinese. In 1970, when the building was going to be torn down, a park ranger noticed the characters, and people fought to save it. Many of the poems had been puttied over and painted years before, which turned out to have protected them.

I can't read Chinese well enough to read them. My mother can read some. She stood at the wall a long time. The guide told us they are about the crossing, the fog and the water, about waiting and being shut in, about missing mothers and wives, about anger at being treated like criminals, and about hope. Some are signed with a village. None, so far as anybody knows, are signed Yuen or Leong. Grandpa was twelve, and maybe too young to carve, or too scared, or maybe he was in a different building. I'll never know.

I stood in that room and thought about a boy saying another family's answers over and over in the dark, and then I went outside and sat on the grass and looked at the water for a while, and my mother sat next to me. That was the whole day. It was enough.

Next: The Family · the Leongs who know they were Yuens

visitors since Ching Ming, April 1999

Gail Clinkscales · [email protected]
Last updated September 5, 1999