Born: 1900 (circa), China
Died: 1981
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
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. 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. Only twenty-years old and in a strange country, Ou Shee likely felt frightened and anxious.
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.” 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. 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.
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. 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.
In 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.
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. 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.
Between 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.
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.
Ou Shee’s table, while lacking the walls, gates, and watchtowers of Chinese villages, felt like home.
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 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.