Rego: U.S. immigrants took 'paper names' to skirt anti-Chinese exclusion laws

When Chinese immigrants were not allowed in this country, many of them used other names to get around the law. Some of them are getting their original names back.   - - Donna Poisl

By Nilda Rego, Contra Costa Times Correspondent

When Bock Guey Yee turned 18, he left Guangdong province in China for the United States and lost his name. He didn't get it back for almost 60 years.

"His official name for immigration and all legal purposes was the 'paper name' he used to get into the country," says son Jordan Yee, of Fremont, "His paper surname on all his legal documents was Mr. Lam G. Tuck. When my dad was in his late 70s, we had his name officially changed by the court back to his real name."

The use of a paper name was a way to get around the anti-Chinese exclusion laws first passed in the 1870s. By the time the senior Yee came to the States in 1930, the laws had been on the books for more than 50 years.

"Conditions in southern China would have been pretty bad. In that period China was experiencing the civil war. ... My father said it was remittances from America that kept him going and afforded him to go to school. Despite this the U.S. still offered economic opportunities. And in the context of my family, his father and his grandfather had established a family tradition of going to the U.S. for economic opportunity."
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