Part of a series of articles titled Home and Homelands Exhibition: Politics.
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Immigration Interview of Ou Shee Eng
Article written by Elana Lim, granddaughter, and Nicole Martin, PhD
On November 9, 1920, Ou Shee Eng and her husband stepped onto the S.S. Empress of Japan in Hong Kong, starting their three week journey to the United States.1 When they disembarked in Seattle, immigration officials immediately separated them. It was standard policy to forcibly separate women and men into different barracks at immigration detention centers so that they could not communicate with each other.2 Only twenty-years old and in a strange country, Ou Shee likely felt frightened and anxious.
Personal collection of Ou Shee and Art Wing Eng’s family photo album
Chinese Exclusion Policy
Though Ou Shee could read Chinese – rare for a woman of her time – she was nonetheless designated “illiterate” and detained for twenty-five days under the Page Act. Passed in 1875, the Page Act required that “inspecting officers” interrogate and search “any subject of China, Japan, or any Oriental country.” Women were especially targeted from an exaggerated fear that they were false wives or “prostitutes” immigrating for “lewd and immoral purposes.”3 The law drastically reduced female emigration from China, a policy that contributed to stereotypes about Chinese immigrants having no homes or families. Anti-Chinese politicians and reformers used these incorrect beliefs about a lack of Chinese home life to argue that Chinese immigrants were incapable of assimilating into American society and were taking up valuable space better served by white homes and families.4 Alongside the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers, the Page Act ushered in a seven-decade “exclusion era” in the U.S.5-
Ou Shee Eng Immigration Interview
Excerpt of Ou Shee Eng Immigration Interview, Seattle, Washington, 1920.
- Credit / Author:
- Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience
Interrogation at the Border
After arriving at the detention center, Ou Shee was diagnosed with “uncinariasis” (hookworm) and denied immediate entry. She was treated and retested over the next twenty-one days before facing a grueling interrogation.6 What mattered most in this interrogation was not accuracy, since this could not be measured, but consistency. Interrogators expected detainees to repeatedly produce minute details about their homes and families. For women, this was especially challenging since they were questioned about their husband’s family and village instead of their own.7In Ou Shee’s interview, the immigration inspector first describes her face in intimate detail. Then, through a Toisanese-speaking translator, he launches into a series of relentless questions meant to test her character and the validity of her marriage against her husband’s word: How long had she known her husband? When did his previous wife die? Why did they not have a “white man’s ceremony”? And how much did her husband pay Ou Shee’s mother for her?
With each question, the interrogator attempted to ensnare Ou Shee in a lie that would be used to claim she was morally unfit to make America her home.8
Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, National Archives and Records Administration
Creating a Home in Apartment #507
Ou Shee reunited with her husband on December 24, 1920. Over the next several decades, she faced ongoing legal and social disadvantages, including the inability to naturalize as a citizen.9 Despite these trials, she created a thriving home in the ground floor Apartment #507 of the East Kong Yick building in Seattle, now the Wing Luke Museum. The building became the core of Seattle’s Chinatown in 1910, paid for with the funds of over 170 Chinese men. Only sixty years before, the U.S. government had taken this land from Indigenous peoples, including the Suquamish and Duwamish, and given it to white settlers to create homesteads.10Between 1921-41, Ou Shee gave birth to fifteen children. Five of her children died young and two were given up for adoption, a reflection of poor health care access and economic resources for her immigrant community. In the face of such overwhelming child loss and the death of her husband in 1952, Ou Shee persevered. She turned her home into a lively and loving space, even raising two of her twenty-one grandchildren in apartment #507.11
Many days a week, she welcomed a trail of Chinese matriarchs, women who shopped in Chinatown for groceries and arrived to drink tea or coffee or play mahjong before catching the bus home to Beacon Hill or Rainier Valley. Many were widows of husbands ten, twenty, or thirty years older than them.
The women brought knitting and sometimes letters from China, which Ou Shee read aloud, deciphering characters inked on blue airmail paper. Decades later, Ou Shee’s granddaughter can still hear the women speaking in musical tones, octaves of chatter and laughter, and throaty bass growls.Ou Shee’s table, while lacking the walls, gates, and watchtowers of Chinese villages, felt like home.
Ou Shee lived in #507 for six decades, until her death in 1981. Despite her immigration detainment and the long-term consequences of the exclusion era, Ou Shee and the women around her table lived lives of courage and strength. Their legacies survive among their daughters and granddaughters who built a homeland in America for the Chinese immigrant community.
1 In Immigration records, Ou Shee Eng’s name is also spelled "Au" or "Ow.”
2 For more on separating families and by gender at the border in this period, see Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially 29, 58, 88, 286, 293.
3 “An Act supplementary to the acts in relation to immigration,” (The Page Act, PDF) chap. 141, 18 Stat. 477 (March 3, 1875).
4 Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 156-57.
5 For more on the Chinese Exclusion Act and the "exclusionary era," see Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) | National Archives.
6 (Ng) Ou Shee, National Case Record 200704044303. Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, R.S.; Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787 – 2004, National Archives at Lee Summit, Missouri.
7 Lee and Yung, Angel Island, 80, 85-88. For the ritual aspect of immigration interrogations, see Adam McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” American Historical Review 108, no.2 (April 2003): 377-403; Annelise Heinz, Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 146-54.
8 (Ng) Ou Shee, National Case Record 200704044303.
9 Chinese immigrants were denied the right to naturalize until 1943. For more on the legal and social consequences of Chinese Exclusion, particularly the role of violence, see Beth Lew Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Racial Violence and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
10 Marie Rose Wong, Building Tradition (Chin Music Press, Seattle, Washington. 2018), 27-28; Jefferson Warren, The World of Chief Seattle (Native Voices Book Publishing Co. Summertown, Tennessee, 2001), 13, 79.
11 All personal and genealogical details of Ou Shee’s life come courtesy of her granddaughter Elana Lim.
Last updated: June 11, 2024