In the fall of 1916, my grandmother, Wong Shee Fong, boarded the S.S. Tenyo Maru and set sail for America to rejoin her husband, having lived apart from him for over five years. Traveling alone in her early 20s, she was eager to leave behind a fractured and struggling China, a country left in the hands of competing warlords after the failed monarchy of self-proclaimed emperor Yuan Shikai. Furthermore, she was fleeing the tyranny of a harsh and heavy-handed mother-in-law. Despite the pain of having to leave her young son behind, she looked to the hope of reunion with her spouse and the chance for a better life in Jiu Jin Shan, or the Old Gold Mountain that was San Francisco. Indeed, the Gold Mountain had bettered the life of a few, particularly the successful speculators in the early stages of the rush. For most, however, the promises of wealth did not deliver, and the Chinese were among the first to be scapegoated and economically marginalized.
Harassment and forced segregation were accompanied by laws, such as the Foreign Miner’s Tax, designed to force “coolies” out of the mineral fields and local ordinances that prohibited Chinese cultural practices like the use of shoulder-slung “yeo-ho” poles. More importantly, a series of laws were passed to make Chinese immigration as difficult as possible, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which declared all but certain classes of Chinese (i.e., economically beneficial merchants and students) barred from the country, the original “illegal aliens” of federal regulatory code.
Thus, the America that Wong Shee experienced upon arrival was a hot, crowded, and locked barracks, for she found herself booked into the nation’s first major immigration detention facility, located on Angel Island just off the coast of San Francisco. Unlike the European immigrants who typically passed through Ellis Island within a few hours, my grandmother remained in detention for nearly six months, enduring multiple interrogations, health inspections, and the long wait for reference checks in a system where one is deported unless proven eligible. The painstaking process is exemplified in this small excerpt from one of my grandmother’s interrogation transcripts:
Q: “You stated before that there were eight houses in your village, and four rows. Now, with the paper clips you have used, you have arranged the village in six rows. Which is correct?”
A: “The first three rows there is only one house in each row. No second house.”
Q: Do you mean there are really six rows instead of four?”
A: Yes.
Q: “Why do you have your village different from the way you told us it was arranged when we had the other interpreter?”
A. “I did not arrange them. The other interpreter arranged them himself. I did not know what he meant…”
And so on. Aside from the stressful gauntlet of interrogations, Wong Shee also had to combat prolonged disease in a jail with unsanitary conditions and inadequate medical care. One disease in particular was trachoma, a serious eye infection that had just been classified as a basis for deportation. However, with time running out, the immigration authorities received a letter, accompanied by a check, which read: “Sir, I respectfully request that hospital treatment be granted in the case of Wong Shee. … A deposit of $300 is hereby made to cover such treatment.” This letter was signed and delivered by Ms. Donaldina Cameron, a Christian minister of the Presbyterian Chinese Mission in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
In this gracious appeal for mercy on behalf of my grandmother, she was not alone. Along with Ms. Cameron were Ms. Ethel Higgins, Mr. J. H. Laughlin, and other saints from the Presbyterian Mission who, for months, advocated for my grandmother’s release from the island. Documents drawn from the National Archives bear witness to the voluminous correspondence between the church and the U.S. immigration authorities, an amazing labor of love that blessed the lives of my ancestors—and so many others.
I have often referred to my grandmother’s story as a “tale of two tables:” the interrogation table and the table of the Eucharist. At the interrogation table sat, on one side, the immigration officer charged with the task of keeping “illegals” out of the country. What happened at that table meant the difference between starting a new life in the U.S. or being deported back home. Ms. Cameron and her colleagues, on the other hand, gathered around a very different table, one which celebrated communion with God and one another. In other words, the Eucharistic table joined, rather than separated, people. At the Lord’s supper, all are deemed equal, no one is made superior to any other. All are equally needy, equally loved by God. All are welcomed.
When Jesus told His disciples to “do this in remembrance of me (Luke 22:19),” he in essence was commanding them to practice that which would cultivate within them a theological imagination for what life in the human community was possible through the redemptive work of His death and resurrection. Partaking in Christ’s sufferings reduces—and elevates—everyone alike in incomprehensible splendor, making one body with many parts. All are made one, regardless of one’s race, ethnicity, land or origin, or socio-economic status. Or immigration status.
There are myriad ways in which the anti-immigrant rhetoric of our nation’s political leaders, and that of the many Christians who back them, is condemnable: the vilification (“they’re poisoning the blood of our country”), the scapegoating (“You have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes”), or the slanderous fabrications (“They’re eating the pets of those who live there”). These egregious pronouncements aside, perhaps the greatest condemnation must be aimed at the heresy of anti-immigrant vitriol: its diametric opposition to the Lord of the Eucharist.
History, as the saying goes, repeats itself. The current tsunami of anti-immigrantism is not new. We’ve been here before. But, as it was for my grandmother and the thousands of immigrants before and after her, the hateful and fear-driven machinations of the empire pose a grave threat. What is needed is the kind of theological imagination—e.g., a Eucharistic vision—that activated and sustained the team of Presbyterians who rallied around my incarcerated grandmother on Angel Island. My family and I are indebted, for had it not been for them, we would not be here.
Today, we find ourselves as a nation in a profoundly similar crisis. Immigrants of all stripes are in the proverbial crosshairs. Therefore, let us not grow weary in gathering, grappling with Christ’s claims, and discerning together what it means to be faithful to the gospel in such a time as this—for the sake of our brothers and sisters with whom we are in communion.