Blogging from Shanghai

Dear Friends,

I’m in Shanghai, China for the next three weeks giving a series of lectures at East China University of Political Science and Law. Each time I travel to China, I cannot help but think about my parents who both passed away many years ago. My father immigrated to the United States in 1915, with a claim to U.S. citizenship. He stayed for awhile in San Francisco, but finally settled in Arizona. My mother’s parents immigrated in the late 1800s settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where my mother was born in 1901. But my mother was taken to China in 1904, not returning to the U.S. until after she married my father in 1921. Both sides of my family avoided the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; my father with his claim to U.S. citizenship, and my maternal grandparents as merchants (the exclusion law targeted laborers). When my father came in in 1915, he was held in detention for three months in Angel Island detention facility (in San Francisco Bay) until he proved his claim. My mother was held in the same facility for a week in 1925. My family’s origins are from southern China, like most early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. So Shanghai, with an interesting, facinating history that I’m learning about, is quite different from the rural roots of my family.

More to come, as I report from Shanghai.

bh