Communication to the senate. The clerk washington, d. C. , august 11, 2023. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable sheldon whitehouse, a senator from the state of rhode island, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed patty murray, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under the previous order, the senate stans adjourned until 12 00 p. M. On tuesday, august 15, 2023. Lawmakers in a monthlong recess for their state work period. They will be back september 5 and you can watch live coverage here on cspan2. We take you back to our book tv programming in process during world war ii, when us entered world war ii and we needed china as an ally there was a long period were talking about so there were files on all the family members who came in and i should also say that chinese exclusion was the first major federal immigration restriction that effectively shut the borders for the very first time against any particular nationality. It halted our Legal Immigration into this country and block the pathway to citizenship for almost 60 years and it was important because it set the tone for all future immigration restrictions Going Forward so 1924 there was a band on nearly all asians from coming over and arestriction against southern europeans as well. During this period there are files on all my family members so i go from the last seven years i was going off trying to find individual files on all the family members and some people had filed in three different cities across the country so it was a bit of a detective hunt to try to locate all of these but what i realized quickly is that a lot of the files were pure fiction. They were fiction because the immigration restrictions were so stringent that they became kind of necessary for folks in order to get in to create a kind of story about their own identity. Claiming that they were somebody elses son or so and sos brother. So you know, these files, uncovering them and uncovering my grandfathers file who was a descendent of a Railroad Worker realizing it was such a fiction, the was true was at the town inwhich he was born. It led me to realize that in fact writers and historians, we are trained to see the official documents and the official history. Things that are written down on paper as having a greater importance than the family story but what i soon realized is that one when it comes to chinese exclusion its the families tostories that hold the keys to the truth and the official documents that are kind of fabulist fiction that you have to try and read against the grain for. The process of working on this book was like dealing with three different intersections of dealing with the families stories, looking at the official documents, englishlanguage newspapers of the period and my own trying to come up with my best guess of what really actually happened. What was the actual truth of my familymembers. Thats something that is difficult to do using the kinds of sources you are using. It sounds like from what i saw, the majority of the sources are english sources. Many of them are these state documented sources like ds immigration records, border crossing, residency certificates, etc. That are produced or for a certain purpose but not necessarily more about surveillance and tracking than it is about telling any kind of truth about the persons life so its difficult to use those kinds of sources. Certainly not much better than when we are dealing with 19th Century Newspapers that are quite sensationalist. That reflects the discriminatory viewpoints of the day. I will say for my chinese language sources i went back to our villages and was able to get genealogy documents. There were genealogies on three of the major families so i used those and what was great about those was that we not just nhad names, sometimes dates years of birth and years of death but sometimes i was lucky and they had narratives that came with them so narratives about different family members, narratives that i later learned inspired my family members who were here so i was able to use that. I did use some chinese hi language sources when, so in 2017 a i went to china and took my whole family with me and we lived there and thats where i did the bulk of the international research. I did, i went to the local archives there in our region and was able to Call Information for that but youre right. The majority of the actual documents themselves for this book really were englishlanguage sources, census. I used a couple of different historians and journalists were amazing accounts of things that happened in early chinatown. Including your book. It was a great source for me so thank you for that. I can officially thank you on television for doing that work so thank you. A large part of it was english language sources but there were chinese language sources as well and of course all the oral histories and numerous interviews that i did with family members as well as folks who were former residents of mott street and former residents of chinatown. As much as i love talking about the research and i cant hold it its that historian in me but you have so many interesting family stories i would love to talk about those and particularly your tracing out i think its three, is it three . You have chins, you have the wong. Yeah, youve got the three families going. I just wanted to have you talk through what it was like unraveling and trying to put together the narrative of these three different families and just say a bit about who the three families were and are. The three families im dealing with our my paternal kin side as well as my maternal side, my maternal grandmothers family. And my mothers family, her fathers family the wong family. Wwhat was so interesting about working on this project was that the cause im fit generation chineseamerican, and my family goes back to the mid19th century, any major iteration of things that impacted Chinese Americans from the mid19th century to today, i was able to write about these historic sociopolitical events that impacted the community through the lens of various family members just becausewe had been here for so long. I felt like i was really fortunate. The downside of course is that i have cast of characters to deal with. And so many people i found na completely fascinating. There was the Railroad Worker, grandson of the Railroad Worker. On the wong side ivgomy ang side and jack fu enters the country two or three years after the chinese exclusion act is infull effect. He flees the west coast during the period of very intense heightened antichinese sentiment. Lands in new york city. Finds this burgeoning chinatown thats thriving. But really came about not just because of language and cultural ties but chinatown across the country became a place of refuge for Chinese People when dealing with the weight and scrutiny of the chinese exclusion act so jack soon does this amazing Civic Engagement working with other Chinese Americans to speak out against the chinese exclusion act laws and ends up marrying a white woman, our aunt alva who you know, only a couple of years after they get married the government revoked her citizenship because of the period in time when the government believed a womans citizenship should change to reflect that of her husband so a couple of years after getting married to our uncle jack and elva who was born in new jersey who is the daughter of a Civil War Veteran comes in the eyes of the lawa chinese. Then i had other family members who came in during the period in time in which angel island had just been created. Angel island is sometimes called the ellis island of the west coast but it is in fact a Detention Center. Very different. My great grandmother when she arrived she was heavily pregnant. Had to go into this Detention Center. Shes separated from her husband and the Detention Center issegregated. So it broke my heart when i realized that the chief medical examiner of the state was an ardent eugenicists and he believed that the betterment of the race was best employed, eugenics was best employed at the border so my greatgrandmother had to endure humiliating physical examinations while she was in her third trimester. I love the description you have, the photo you have of her coming from angel island. This is not a happy womans picture. Shes got this murderous glare in her eyes and i couldnt agree more. Imagine being at close to a month in your third trimester. Youre seasick and nauseous only to enter a facility that youre not sure when youre going to get out of and only Chinese People had to deal with this the cause of the chinese exclusion laws and she was in a relatively privileged position by being the wife of a merchant who had paper. Luckily, they were not kept in detention for more than about a week and a half but still, not knowing when youre going to be let go is very difficult and there were other people whose files i found who were also pregnant were there the time we spent a lot more time on angel island. It was a very difficult time for chinese trying to come into america. How did you end up deciding on the people to focus on . By the way, your family tree was very hopeful because there were moments