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was codified in the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law, which strictly limited any further immigration from China and excluded Chinese already in the country from citizenship, was a landmark piece of legislation: the first broad restriction on immigration to the United States. Coming as it did at the end of a century of extraordinary growth and industrialization, and on the heels of a war that had questioned but ultimately solidified the concept of a coherent, unitary, sovereign America, the act created, in a very real sense, the concept of illegal immigration. In 1887, one Chinese laborer who had lived in San Francisco for the past twelve years sailed to China to visit his parents. When he returned the following year, he was denied reentry at the port of San Francisco. He challenged his exclusion, and the controversy made it as far as the Supreme Court. In the famous “Chinese Exclusion Case,” the Court described the Chinese as “strangers in the land, residing apart by themselves, and adhering to the customs and usages of their own country.” The ruling established Congress’s plenary power over immigration and upheld its right to pass legislation that excludes noncitizens. In 1891 the United States appointed the first superintendent of immigration to process arriving immigrants. Ellis Island was established the following year.
    The sudden reversal—from recruiting laborers in the 1850s to forcibly excluding them three decades later—was not the last instance when the Chinese in America would be the victims of larger circumstance, at the mercy of the capricious ebb and flow of this country’s economic needs. The Chinese who remained here were obliged, for their own survival, to withdraw from direct economic competition, retreatinginto two undertakings, the restaurant business and the laundry business, where they might be regarded as less of an economic threat. By 1920 fully half of the Chinese in America were engaged in one of these two occupations. The exclusion lasted six decades, halting further legal immigration and largely freezing the United States’ Chinese population in place. But when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought Chinese support against the common enemy, and the ban on Chinese immigration suddenly seemed a bit awkward. Roosevelt wrote to Congress, asking lawmakers to “correct a historic mistake.” They repealed the exclusion act in December 1943.
    But the war had scarcely ended when the Communists took over in China and closed its borders, so the de facto consequences of the exclusion endured long after the law itself was repealed. In the 1950s, Beijing introduced a household registration system that tied the various entitlements of the welfare state to individually registered family residences. The policy was designed in part to prevent tens of millions of rural Chinese from flooding major cities in search of food and work. In practice it meant that if an individual wanted to relocate within China, he needed permission from Party officials both in the place he was leaving and in the place he was heading to. If you moved without permission, you lost your allotment of grain and the other benefits that the welfare state provided. The policy effectively rooted rural Chinese citizens to the land, preventing them from leaving the village of their birth. It became very difficult even to relocate to the neighboring province, much less to leave China altogether.
    S ister Ping was born on January 9, 1949, ten months before Mao established the People’s Republic of China. She grew up in a village in northern Fujian Province called Shengmei, or Prospering Beauty, a hardscrabble settlement of farmers and fishermen by the banks of the Min River, where chickens roamed a network of dirt lanes that turned muddy during the monsoon months of August and September, and ricefarmers worked their modest paddies with water buffalo. She was one of five children born to a farmer from Shengmei, Cheng