Blogging from Shanghai, part 7

Walking in Zhongshan Park on Sunday afternoon was glorious. Great activity surrounded the park–entertainers, kite flyers, children on rides, couples strolling. Clusters of folks exercising (Tai Chi, etc.) especially in the mornings are evident. Seems like most of the elderly who are exercising are women–great flexibility and stamina; really beautiful.

Chinese immigrant women were one of the first targets of U.S. immigration laws historically. In 1875, the Page Law targeted Chinese women who were purportedly entering for immoral purposes. But it really was a way of restricting the entry of women, thereby foreclosing conventional family formation with the Chinese male laborers who were already in the U.S.

My mother’s parents immigrated from China in the late 1800s and landed in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where my mother was born in 1901. My guess is that my grandparents either entered prior to 1882 or were able to avoid the Chinese exclusion act by being classified as merchants. I know my grandfather worked in a laundry. My mother traveled to China in 1905 with my grandmother, and my mother did not return to the U.S. until 1925 after she married my father (who had entered as the son of a U.S. citizen, as I noted in an earlier blog). My mother passed away in 1989 in San Francisco, after she retired. One of my fondest memories is when my brother and I took her to Scranton in 1976, just to give her a sense of the part of the country where she was born. We went to the old city hall, where a friendly clerk pulled a dusty old book off of a shelf, and located my mother’s original birth certificate. My mother broke down in tears. Not until that moment, she admitted, was she actually positive that she had been born in the U.S., the country that gave her family and her children some grand opportunities.

bh