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Michael Luo
Executive editor, The New Yorker
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Over the past year, I’ve thought a lot about the question of “Who gets to be an American?” At The New Yorker, we’ve been consumed with covering the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. But I’ve also been speaking to groups, large and small, across the country, about a previous anti-immigrant moment in our history. In the late nineteenth century, it was Chinese arrivals, mostly on the West Coast, who were met with racist fearmongering, exclusionary laws, and the creation of a vast government bureaucracy to keep them out. My book, “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America,” which was published last year, chronicles this period.
Norman Wong, a descendant of Wong Kim Ark, poses for a portrait in front of a mural of his late ancestor. Photograph by Carlos Barria / Reuters
Historians think a lot about contingency—the way specific events are connected in a causal chain. Nothing is foreordained; a single change can mean a different outcome, or a cascade of them, that shifts the course of history. One of these hinge moments was the Supreme Court’s 6–2 ruling, in 1898, that Wong Kim Ark, a cook who was born in San Francisco, was indeed an American citizen, under a clause in the Fourteenth Amendment that states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Tens of millions of people in this country today owe their American stories to this decision. Yet there’s also an individual, human-scale intimacy to the way history unfolds. The Court’s ruling meant that Wong Kim Ark was able to help three sons, all born in China, enter the United States as American citizens as well. The youngest, Yook Jim, was just a child when he arrived in San Francisco in 1926.
Several months ago, I had breakfast in Manhattan with Norman Wong, who is Yook Jim’s son, which makes Norman the grandson of Wong Kim Ark. (The family now theorizes that Yook Jim might actually have been Wong Kim Ark’s grandson, which would make Norman a great-grandson.) Norman is seventy-six years old and lives in the Bay Area, where he used to work in carpentry and maintained apartment buildings. He and his wife, Maureen, have two daughters and three grandchildren. For most of his life, he had no idea of his connection to American history. In the late nineteen-nineties, during a visit with his elderly father and stepmother, who lived near Sacramento, they told him that a Chinese newspaper had published an article about Wong Kim Ark and his descendants. At the time, they seemed to have had only a limited grasp of the case’s significance, but Norman—and his sister, Sandra, who also became interested in their family history—would come to realize that they embodied something of transformational importance.
In January of last year, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that sought to eliminate birthright citizenship for children without at least one parent who is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Ever since, Norman has become an unlikely, late-in-life activist, delivering speeches, doing media interviews, and lending his voice to the fight to preserve the legal bedrock of birthright citizenship. Today, he addressed an audience from the steps of the Supreme Court, as the Justices inside weighed the constitutionality of Trump’s order. (Trump himself was in the public gallery, becoming the first President to attend oral arguments at the Court.)
Last night, I reached Norman by phone, as he prepared for the momentous day ahead. He described Wong Kim Ark as an ordinary person who decided to take a stand. There was “nothing special about him,” Norman said. “Except that he was not willing to have his citizenship taken away.” The rest is history.
For more: Ruth Marcus writes about today’s oral arguments, which seemed inclined against Trump’s executive order.
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