The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [83]
Not all white Americans were callously anti-Chinese, and it must be noted that there were some who were seriously troubled by what was being done in their name. In 1916, when Washington could no longer ignore rumors of corruption at Angel Island, the federal government appointed John Densmore, a labor attorney, to head a special investigation. Densmore discovered a smuggling ring and system of graft within the Immigration Service that had been thriving since as early as 1896. “This business had been going on for a number of years and had mounted to colossal proportions in the number of Chinese illegally admitted and official records destroyed, and the amount of graft money involved in these transactions runs into hundreds of thousands,” one report of the investigation asserted in 1917.
The graft business was a lucrative enterprise, with payoffs around the globe. Some American immigration authorities garnered as much as $100,000 a year by charging $1,400 to admit each illegal alien. The participants included not only high-ranking U.S. government officials but attorneys, notaries public, photographers, and Chinese merchants. The system entailed theft of documents, sale of biographical information, destruction or mutilation of data, creation of new records, substitution of photographs, and counterfeiting of official seals and stamps. So extensive was this Immigration Service racket that it even encompassed a special paper-son tutor school in Hong Kong, where prospective Chinese émigrés were coached on how to answer questions upon their arrival in San Francisco.
The Densmore investigation resulted in numerous arrests, as well as the discharge of some forty people from the Immigration Service. Transcripts of telephone conversations, secretly taped in 1917 by investigators, exposed the inner workings of collusion between Chinese smugglers and white officials. Here is a verbatim excerpt from one such transcript, of a phone call from a Chinese man to an official named McCall:
May 27 10:20 p.m. Chink called McCall.
McCALL: Hello.
CHINK: This Mr. McCall?
McCALL: Yes.
CHINK: This Yee Jim. How about Louie Ming?
McCALL: The testimony is all wrong; I am afraid he will be rejected.
CHINK: I will wait two days and then I send a different witness, I will send a good one this time.
McCALL: All right.
CHINK: You think then I have chance?
McCALL: I am afraid I can’t.
CHINK: I will give you double price if you do.
McCall: I will see what I can do.
CHINK: I send good witness over.
McCALL: You had better see the attorney before you do that.
Under such a system, Chinese nationals who refused to pay off corrupt officials often faced trouble getting into the United States. According to an immigrant named Chen Ke, his troubles began when he refused to bribe the interpreter of the Boston customs office. In retaliation, the interpreter told the authorities that Chen Ke possessed fake documents and had him deported to China. Chen Ke later smuggled himself back into America, incurring a debt of $6,500, which took him twenty years to repay.
Such experiences left the Chinese American community with a profound sense of shame, terror, and insecurity. “Whenever my mother would mention it, she’d say ‘Angel Island, shhh,’ ” recalled Paul Chow, a retired engineer who later led an effort to restore the immigration facility as a historical landmark. “I thought it was all one word ‘Angelislandshhh.’ ” He later understood the reason for his family’s embarrassment regarding the detention center: back in 1922, his father had bribed an immigration official to get into the country.
CHAPTER TEN
Work and Survival in the Early Twentieth Century
Through the decades immediately following the passage of the Exclusion Act, the Chinese in America continued to live suspended in a state of cultural