Ou Shee Eng: Interrogated at the Border in 1920, Then Six Decades Making a Home in Seattle's Chinatown

On November 9, 1920, Ou Shee Eng — her name also appears in immigration records as "Au" or "Ow" — boarded the S.S. Empress of Japan in Hong Kong with her husband for the three-week crossing to the United States. When they arrived in Seattle, officials separated them at once: it was standard practice to hold men and women in separate barracks at immigration detention centers, so they could not talk to each other. She was twenty, alone in a strange country.

The exclusion laws

Ou Shee could read Chinese, which was rare for a woman of her time. Officials nonetheless recorded her as "illiterate" and held her for twenty-five days under the Page Act.

Together, the two laws opened a seven-decade "exclusion era." The Page Act sharply cut the number of women emigrating from China, which fed a stereotype that Chinese immigrants had no homes or families — and anti-Chinese politicians and reformers used that false picture to argue that Chinese immigrants could never assimilate and were taking up room better given to white families.

The interrogation

On arrival, Ou Shee was diagnosed with hookworm ("uncinariasis") and refused immediate entry. Over the next twenty-one days she was treated and retested — and then faced a grueling interrogation.

What counted in these interviews was not accuracy, which officials had no way to check, but consistency. Detainees were expected to repeat tiny details about home and family again and again. For women it was especially hard, because they were questioned about their husband's family and village rather than their own.

The official record opens with a close description of her face and body, then, through a Toisanese interpreter, presses her on the marriage:

[Stenographer] In the matter of the application of Au Shee entered on SS Princess Adelaide, November 30, 1920, for admission to the United States as the wife of Ng Ark Wing, merchant, Seattle.
>
[Chairman] Description of Applicant: Age 20; height 5'1"; occupation housewife, accompanying husband Ng Ark Wing, 719 King Street, Seattle Washington. Marks: Double pierce both ears; brown spot right temple; large scar across forehead to left center; two brown spots right jaw. ....
>
[Chairman] How much did this man pay your mother for you?
>
[Ou Shee] I don't know.
>
[Chairman] How does it come that your husband, being quite Americanized, did not have the white man's ceremony performed?
>
[Ou Shee] I don't know, because my mother wanted me to be married the old way.
>
[Chairman] What is your object in coming to the United States?
>
[Ou Shee] Coming to live with my husband and keep house for him.
>
[Chairman] I move the case be deferred pending the examination of other witnesses.

The inspector also asked how long she had known her husband and when his first wife had died. Each question, the article's authors argue, was an attempt to catch her in a lie that could be used to declare her morally unfit to live in America.

Apartment #507

Ou Shee was reunited with her husband on December 24, 1920. For decades afterward she lived with the legal and social disadvantages of exclusion — Chinese immigrants could not become naturalized citizens until 1943.

Ou Shee's 1940 Alien Registration Form — a record of the continuing discrimination and government surveillance faced by a Chinese immigrant barred from citizenship. Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, National Archives and Records Administration

She made her home in Apartment #507, on the ground floor of the East Kong Yick building in Seattle — today the Wing Luke Museum. Built with money from more than 170 Chinese men, the building became the heart of Seattle's Chinatown in 1910, on land the U.S. government had taken from Indigenous peoples, including the Suquamish and Duwamish, only sixty years earlier and given to white settlers for homesteads.

Between 1921 and 1941, Ou Shee gave birth to fifteen children. Five died young and two were given up for adoption — a sign of how little health care and money her community had. Her husband died in 1952. Through it all she kept her home lively and loving, and raised two of her twenty-one grandchildren there.

The women around her table

Many days a week, Chinese matriarchs came by after shopping for groceries in Chinatown, to drink tea or coffee or play mahjong before catching the bus home to Beacon Hill or Rainier Valley. Many were widows of men ten, twenty or thirty years older than they were. They brought their knitting, and sometimes letters from China written on blue airmail paper, which Ou Shee read aloud. Her table had none of the walls, gates and watchtowers of a Chinese village, but it felt like home. Her granddaughter still remembers the sound of their voices — musical, full of chatter, laughter and deep, throaty growls.

Ou Shee lived in #507 for six decades, until her death in 1981. Despite detention and the long reach of exclusion, she and the women at her table lived lives of courage and strength, and their legacy lives on in the daughters and granddaughters who built a home for the Chinese immigrant community in America.

Sources

Based on "Immigration Interview of Ou Shee Eng," by Elana Lim, Ou Shee's granddaughter, and Nicole Martin, PhD, part of the Home and Homelands exhibition, National Park Service, Wing Luke Museum Affiliated Area, supported by a grant from the National Park Foundation. The 1920 interview transcript is quoted as the article gives it (excerpt credited to the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience), with the notes on who was interpreting shortened; family details come from Elana Lim. Rewritten in hubnx's own words.