In this account of his tribulations and triumphs in Gold Mountain (the Chinese immigrant's euphemism for the United States), Tung Pok Chin writes, "It is commonly said among us Chinese here in the United States that before World War II about 99 percent of all Chinese immigrants were paper sons."
This was the term used by those who had purchased documents that enabled them to begin new lives under false identities. They constructed names, parents, marital status, all depending on the trail of paper that created their immigrant identities. They consequently led "paper lives," hidden away in the "the shadows of exclusion" that K. Scott Wong speaks of in his introduction.
The exclusion was very real. From 1882 to 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act was in force; it was the first American immigration legislation to bar a particular group of people because of their race. And even when it was finally lifted, the annual quota was set at only a little over 100 a year, and the paper people inside were still subject to varying degrees of harassment.