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Lee Puey You

Kathryn S Gardiner | Published on 12/11/2024

Forgotten Foremothers

Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women’s right


Newly hired park ranger Alexander Weiss walked the grounds of the Angel Island State Park in May 1970. He came across the old detention center building that had been shut down a good 30 years earlier. The public were not permitted here, and the electricity had been turned off decades ago. 

 

Flashlight shining the way, Alexander’s footsteps cracked over broken glass. The rotting wooden floors creaked beneath his weight. Then, he cast his flashlight beam on the walls.

 

“First I saw the deeply carved stuff and said wow!” Alexander told Erika Lee and Judy Yung, authors of Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America. “But then I looked around and shined my flashlight up and I could see that the entire walls were covered with calligraphy... People had carved this stuff on every square inch of wall space, not just in this one room but all over.”

 

Alexander knew what he’d seen was important, even if, as the authors point out, he couldn’t read the words he saw everywhere. But his supervisor considered it “graffiti.” The aging building was due to be torn down as part of a revitalization project in the park and he saw no reason to delay that plan. What was carved into the walls of the detention center just didn’t matter.

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Angel Island Immigration Station in 1910. Photo courtesy Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. 



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Lee Puey You was born in the Guangdong Province of China around 1916. For her story, we have largely a single source in writer and historian Judy Yung, and as you’ll see, the details of the story unfolded with time. That, too, is part of Lee Puey You’s story. 

 

But before we hear from her, we must understand the circumstances that demanded Lee Puey You’s careful words.

 

The Opium Wars battered China throughout the mid-1800s, leading to widespread poverty, famine, and dwindling opportunities to remedy a hard life. Meanwhile, on the coast of the United States, people discovered gold in the hills. With obvious prosperity flowing overseas, hundreds of thousands of Chinese men and women made the journey to California for the Gold Rush of 1848. The Transcontinental Railroad went into construction in 1863 and in this enterprise Chinese immigrants found another path for money and stability. At its height, a full 90 percent of the workforce building the railroads were Chinese. Money earned usually went to family back in China, hoping to alleviate the difficult circumstances left behind.

 

The expanding Chinese population and their apparent success was met with legislative and physical violence. The Los Angeles Massacre of 1871, for example, saw 500 white and Latino Americans assaulting the small Chinese population of the city. The immigration of Chinese women was narrowed by the Page Act of 1875; then, in 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of all Chinese laborers. The passage of this act was following by a “driving out” period, marked by several incidents of white laborers robbing and murdering Chinese workers with little to no response from law enforcement. The Chinese, after all, were not supposed to be here anymore.

 

In his article Island of Immortals, Him Mark Lai noted, “the Chinese were given the dubious honor of being the first racial group whose entry to the country was thus limited.” Yet conditions in China were so terrible for so many that, “despite the known unfriendly environment for the Chinese in the United States, they were willing to risk rejection under the exclusion laws in order to enter this country and improve their economic lot.” 

 

With tighter immigration laws comes greater red tape and bureaucracy. Papers need to be checked, arrivals monitored, people interviewed. This lead to the building of an immigration station on Angel Island, a small dollop of land 1.2 square miles (3.1 kilometers) in diameter in San Francisco Bay, just north of the smaller Alcatraz Island. It began operation in 1910. Angel Island Immigration Station, Him Mark contended, “was built primarily to facilitate administration of the Chinese exclusion laws. To Chinese arrivals it was a half-open door at best, a prominent symbol of a racist immigration policy.”

 

When park ranger Alexander Weiss saw other old buildings on Angel Island set on fire in 1970, he reached out to his biology professor George Araki, whose mother had arrived through Angel Island. It was the work of first- and second-generation immigrants from China to pressure the government to preserve the buildings within the United States’ National Register of Historic Places, a goal they achieved in 1971.

 

In their book, Erika and Judy asserted that, during its operation, “over 178,000 Chinese men and women were admitted into the country as new immigrants, returning residents, and U.S. citizens. The majority came through San Francisco and Angel Island, and approximately 100,000 Chinese were detained there.” One of those was Lee Puey You.


“In 1975, we were lucky to find Lee Puey You through a mutual friend of her daughter Daisy Gin,” Judy wrote in her 2004 article “‘A Bowful of Tears’ Revisited: The Full Story of Lee Puey You’s Immigration Experience at Angel Island.” She and Him Mark, both second-generation Chinese-Americans who had been born in San Francisco, made it their life’s work to chronicle the stories and secrets of Angel Island.

 

“I remember she welcomed our questions,” Judy said of Lee Puey You, nearly 60 years old in 1975, “and thoughtfully answered them one by one until we ran out.” 

 

At age 23, in 1939, Lee Puey You left China for the United States, pretending to be the daughter of a United States citizen. Considering the narrow paths for entry, such “false children,” also called “paper sons,” were not uncommon. All were subjected to intense interrogations that could last two or three days.

 

“Over the years, one of the persistent complaints of the Chinese were questions of minute details which apparently had no relevance to the objectives of the board” that could grant them entry, Him Mark wrote in “Island of the Immortals.” “Some questions would have been difficult for anyone to answer even under normal circumstances: … How many steps were there at the front door of a person’s house? Who lived in the third house in the second row of houses in the village? Of what material was the flooring in the bedroom of a person’s house? What was the location of the kitchen rice bin?” These sessions were conducted by English-speaking border agents interviewing immigrants who spoke only Cantonese with a single interpreter, like Tye Leung Schulze, to assist. Wrong answers could result in more days languishing on Angel Island, or deportation back to China.



Lee Puey You in 1939 at age 23, the year her detention at Angel Island began. Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region






A comic that appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1882, following the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Public domain.

“People said that coming to America was like going to heaven, but it was so difficult,” Lee Puey You said in 1975. “You had to memorize all the coaching information—background on your grandparents, your home and neighbors, the distance between places, you know, how many ancestral halls, temples, everything. It was just like in school. You had this vast amount of information to learn. How many brothers and sisters does your father have? What are the names of your uncles? What were their occupations? When did they return to China? Have you ever seen them? When did your grandparents die? Where were they born? Lots of questions and answers going back three generations.”

 

“I didn’t want to come to America, but I was forced by circumstances to come,” Lee Puey You told Judy. “My mother had arranged a marriage for me.” She was to marry a much older man living in San Francisco. “I had to be a filial daughter. The situation forced me to sacrifice everything to come to America.”

 

Arriving travelers were separated by race (the station also processed arrivals from Japan, Russia, Korea, New Zealand, etc.), then by sex, and put into “communal rooms provided with rows of single bunks arranged in two or three tiers. Furnishings were spartan in nature, and privacy was minimal,” Him Mark described. They were strip searched, an experience many found humiliating and threatening as they were attended by white people and only a single interpreter. Mail, either sent or received, was searched for secret messages intended to help sons and daughters with the questioning process. Once a week detainees were permitted to access their luggage for personal effects. Comfort items such as soap and toilet paper were received only after petition by an advocacy group. Though adequate in quantity, food was of terrible quality. In 1916, the average meal cost the State merely 8 cents per person, leaving detainees with meals that were barely edible.



(It should be noted that leaders in San Francisco’s nearby Chinatown worked continuously to improve conditions or rescue those stranded in the immigration station, as did the detainees themselves through various acts of resistance and attempts at legal solutions. Indeed, the creation of the Angel Island station itself was the result of objections to a previous inhumane ‘wharf-shed’ crammed with numbers as high as 500 people. Few, if any, of the Chinese were passive in this fraught situation—they simply didn’t succeed in improving it in most cases.)

 

While the men could number in the hundreds, there were usually between 30 and 60 women in the Chinese barracks at each time. “They would wake us up and take us to the dining room for breakfast,” Lee Puey You said. “After we ate, they took us back and locked the doors. That’s all. Just like in jail. Followed us out and followed us back, then locked the doors. They treated us like criminals. ... We had a bed to sleep in and the bathrooms were adequate, but it was so noisy with so many people—fifty or sixty women at one time and a few young children besides. Sometimes the people next to you talked or people would cry in the middle of the night so you couldn’t sleep. It was very noisy. ... Often, those who had been there awhile cried when they saw others leave. So you started to cry. It was very sad.” 

 

Lee Puey You recalled her interrogation lasting three days. She failed to provide the answers her questioner wanted, but “relatives later told me that they would appeal my case to the higher courts in Washington, D.C. They told me to be patient.” That appeal failed once in the U.S. District Court, then in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, then went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Still, Lee Puey You was told to wait on Angel Island and be patient. 

 

Then, in 1940, a fire broke out in the women’s barracks. Angel Island Immigration Station was soon closed down, but not the grueling immigration practices. They were simply relocated to within the city limits of San Francisco. Lee Puey You’s final appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court, and after 20 months of detention, she was deported to Hong Kong. “That was the system,” she said. “There was nothing you could do about it. That was the American law then, how could you go against it?”

 

In 1970, it was poetry that park ranger Alexander discovered on the walls of the men’s barracks. The women’s barracks burned down in 1940, erasing their walls. It was only speculation that the women wrote poetry, too. Some suggested the women may have all been illiterate. In 1975, Lee Puey You, herself an educated woman, settled that mystery. 


The Chinese detainees carved poetry into the walls at Angel Island Immigration Station. Photo credit: Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.



“Did you remember seeing any poems on the walls?” Judy asked.

 

“Yes,” Lee Puey You replied, over 30 years after those terrible times. The women didn’t carve into the wood as the men did, but they wrote poetry on the walls with their ink brushes.

 

“Did you write any yourself?”

 

“Not on the wall,” Lee Puey You said, “but I did write poetry to console myself. I would write and cry at the same time. You know, sitting at Angel Island I must have cried a bowlful of tears.”

 

The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 as the United States entered World War II with China as an ally against Japan and Germany (perhaps it’s notable that Japanese internment began in 1942). In 1947, Lee Puey You was able to enter the United States and marry the man she’d been promised to nearly a decade earlier. That marriage, which resulted in one daughter, ended in divorce. She remarried to Fred Gin in 1953 and had a second daughter. 

 

This is the story Judy learned in 1975.



In 1984, filmmaker Felicia Lowe turned to Judy for assistance with her film about Angel Island, Carved In Silence. Judy had the opportunity to sit down once again with Lee Puey You, now in her late 60s. In her introduction to the transcript, Judy wrote, “My job was to sit right below the camera and ask open-ended questions that would evoke memories of Angel Island and encourage Lee Puey You to speak expressively but succinctly to camera.” Judy was older, too, now and a more experienced interviewer. She asked more questions about Lee Puey You’s upbringing and her history.

 

“My mother wanted me to come to America so that later on, I could bring my brothers and sisters over to America,” Lee Puey You told Judy and Felicia. “At the time the Japanese were bombing my village [during the Second Sino-Japanese War; often considered part of World War II]. That was another reason I fled my country.” 

 

“I went to school and studied history,” she said. “My father always said it was a pity I was born a girl and not a boy. I had a good business head and was able to help him. I became a housewife after I got married. But I encouraged my husband to buy stocks, a business, and real estate. I had no interest in just staying home and cleaning house. Even today, my goals in life are more like a man’s.”  

 

She described how her father was a “wealthy farmer,” but his land had been destroyed in a flood, bankrupting the family. A brother went to work to earn money, and Lee Puey You was to move to the United States and marry the cousin of one of her mother’s friends. “I stayed with relatives in Hong Kong for six months until I got the papers from America to come. Then I got on a big ship and was on it for 19 days. I thought it would be very easy for me to land in America. Instead, I had to go to Angel Island.”

 

Judy shared her heartbreak at being deported after such a long detention at Angel Island. “My spirit was broken,” she said. “During my trip back to China on the boat, my heart hurt so much that I finally had to put some rice, some hot rice, against my chest to ease the pain inside. ... It took me fourteen years to come back to America, fourteen long, long years.”

 

In 1975, she’d confirmed that the women wrote poetry. In 1984, she recited one of her own. Judy provided an English translation. I’m including the characters for those fluent readers who might want to take in the original nuance themselves.

 

From across the Pacific Ocean to America

I left my village and all my loved ones.

Who would have thought I would be imprisoned in this wooden barrack?

I do not know when I will ever be set free.

 

遠涉重洋到美洲

離別家鄉與親朋

誰知困在木樓中

不知何日得出頭

 

This is the only poem we have from a woman detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station, a lone representative to hold alongside the 350 poems, inscriptions, and illustrations that were saved in the men’s barracks. 

 

The life Lee Puey You created in the United States was, she said, “a lot easier than life in China. As long as you are willing to work hard, you can make a better living in America. I consider myself lucky that I did not have to work too hard in America.” She and her husband ran a grocery store where she worked fourteen hours a day every day of the week. “Now my life is quite settled. I saved enough money to buy a building so that I can live in one apartment and rent the rest of the units out. I should be able to take care of myself for the rest of my life.”

 

She was even able to bring the rest of her family across the ocean. “Twenty years later, my mother, my brother, his wife and their four children, my sister and her husband and children rode a ship and came to America. It cost me thousands of dollars, but my mother’s hopes have finally been fulfilled!” Everyone was employed and the children had all finished college, Lee Puey You reported. “Everyone is happy and my responsibility to them is finally over.”

 

This is the story Judy heard in 1984.

 

In the year 2000, Judy reexamined Lee Puey You’s story. She’d dedicated her life to the stories of Angel Island Immigration Station and wanted to confirm and clarify discrepancies she’d since learned. But by this time, Lee Puey You had died, so Judy turned to her two adult daughters. “Based on the immigration files that Daisy and Debbie found at the National Archives,” Judy reported, “we learned that in 1955 someone blew the whistle and reported [Lee Puey You’s] illegal entry to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.”

 

This INS report provided our third glimpse into Lee Puey You’s life. Judy stated, “She was ordered to appear before the INS to show cause as to why she should not be deported. The stakes were just as high as they had been for her at Angel Island in 1939, but this time she had the benefit of an attorney to represent her interest, as well as the support of her second husband, Fred Gin.” Lee Puey You spoke with the interviewer through an interpreter. 

 

Judy noted in 2004’s “‘A Bowlful of Tears’ Revisited’ that about halfway through the interview, Lee Puey You said, “I wish to volunteer the whole facts in the case,” and then seemed to do just that. 

 

“When I was about 13 years old my father died and he did not leave us anything and my family was very poor,” she said. A poor family, not the family of a “wealthy farmer.” In 1984, she shared her sorrow at returning to China. In the 1955 INS interview, she admitted to contemplating suicide on the boat during her return trip. “When I arrived back in Hong Kong, I sold rice on the street... I was having a hard time because it was during the war.”


She was stuck, and unable to move forward with a life in Hong Kong. Her mother reminded her that they’d already used the money they’d received from the older man in the United States who wanted to marry her. After the war, that distant betrothed traveled to China. “We invited some friends for dinner,” Lee Puey You said, “then my mother told me it was considered as my marriage ceremony.” 

 

In the 1975 and 1984 interviews, Lee Puey You had told Judy that the marriage was fine and that her first husband was mostly kind. In 1955, she shared a different story. Her new husband told his plan to get her to the United States: She would get a marriage license with a different man, a U.S. citizen, and that man  would escort her to California. Then, once in the United States, she would go to live with her husband. With no other options, Lee Puey You agreed. 

 

Her U.S. escort, however, demanded they live as husband and wife in Hong Kong before they departed, with all that entailed. “I objected to that, but he forced me into that,” Judy said. Then, when she finally arrived in the United States, she found her husband was already married. She was not to be a wife, but a concubine. “I objected to it, but there was nothing I could do because I was now here in the United States. I did not know of anyone to go to for aid, so I stayed with him. During all those times I was living there, I was treated very badly by his wife. She treated me as a slave girl.”

 

After her husband—who was never really her husband on paper, though he was the father of her first daughter—died, “his wife forced me to continue to work for her. … He did not leave money or anything for my daughter and myself.” When she met widower Fred Gin in 1953, she “found he was a person of good character. I went with him about six months before we got married,” after she secured a divorced from her original “escort” from China, to whom she’d been legally married.


Lee Puey You with husband Fred Gin in 1953. Photo courtesy Debbie Gin. 



In an echo of her interrogations at Angel Island Immigration Station, the INS interviewer asked personal and invasive questions: Did she have sex with that man after the dinner that turned into her wedding? Did she immediately have sex with him when she entered the United States? When did she last have sex with him? 

 

Different from her first questioning, however, her attorney could emphasize her life now, her relationship with Fred, and provide windows through which she might be viewed as a person. 

 

“What would happen if you were separated from Fred and the rest of your family?” her attorney asked her.

 

She answered, “I would have a hard time, because I have no one else to go to if I should be separated from my family.”

 

“Would Fred go with you in the event you should be deported?”

 

“I will not allow him to go with me even if willing,” she replied, “because I don’t want him to sacrifice his life for me.” Her daughters, too, she would leave behind in the United States “because the living conditions here in the United States are better.”

 

“I found happiness after I married Fred Gin,” she said, in a final plea to be allowed to stay. “Prior to that time, the wrongdoing was not due to my fault.”

 

After this interview, the INS officer ordered that Lee Puey You should be deported. Her visa had been procured by fraud, he ruled, and she’d “lived in an adulterous relationship.”

 

Lee Puey You hired another attorney for her appeal. “First, the attorney argued that she was ‘not innately a bad person of criminal tendencies...but a mere pawn—indeed a slave—of men who deserve severe condemnation,’” Judy described. He also argued that, because the “fraud” marriage in Hong Kong had been consummated, it was a legal marriage, so her immigration as a bride was legal, too. 

 

This argument proved more successful. According to Judy, “the Board of Immigration Appeals sustained Lee Puey You’s appeal and terminated the deportation proceedings on March 25, 1956. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1959, which paved the way for her to send for her family from China.”

 

Our three glimpses into Lee Puey You’s life reveal what Judy called “the complexities and ordeal of immigration for Chinese women at Angel Island.” The paths through which Chinese men could legally enter the country were aggressively limited—and women could only enter by adhering themselves to one of those few, permitted men. She “could come to the United States only by posing as a dependent member of the exempted classes. As such, she was subjected to a double test.” She first had to prove she was the daughter of the man she claimed was her father, then to prove the legitimacy of a marriage, while also proving “her moral character by answering humiliating questions about her sexual life. In these ways, race, class, and gender dynamics made the immigration process more difficult for Chinese women like Lee Puey You than for any other group of immigrants during the exclusion period.”

 

Many of the discrepancies in Lee Puey You’s stories reveal the unwinnable battle into which many immigrants are thrown. Is she a liar? Technically. Would her honesty have been respected or believed by authorities at any of the significant junctures of her life? We know the answer to that.

 

“Lee Puey You was not a passive victim but an active agent in making her own history,” Judy said. Her journey took “good judgement and self-control...patience and tenacity...strength of character... When threatened with deportation again, she persisted in fighting to the extent of telling and reliving the sordid details of her horrendous past. That required courage and forbearance on her part.”

 

In the footnotes of “‘A Bowlful of Tears’ Revisited,” Judy shared an email message from Lee Puey You’s daughter Daisy about her mother’s final years, giving us another glimpse of this woman’s personality and strength. “She underwent a mastectomy in 1985 and would insist on taking the bus to her chemotherapy session on her own,” Daisy wrote, “only to take a taxi afterward to play mah jongg in some Chinatown alley!” Though the doctors gave her only six months to live, she defied them all. Lee Puey You died in San Francisco in 1996. 

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In the introduction to their book, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America, authors Judy Yung and Erika Lee shares their childhood stories of first learning about Angel Island. Despite being born and raised in San Francisco, neither knew about the immigration station that existed on the lovely island out in the bay. Both would learn their own parents had been detained there once.

 

“Like my father, the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants who came during the exclusion period (1882-1943) were ‘paper sons’ of merchants or U.S. citizens. They took this ‘crooked path’ because that was the only way they could come,” Judy said. “The price they paid was heavy. Many were forced to live a life of deceit and duplicity, under constant fear of detection and deportation, until the day they died. It was a well-kept secret, as was the harsh treatment accorded them at the immigration station. No wonder that they never wanted to tell their children about this damned place—Angel Island.”

 

“I didn’t discover the poems,” said young park ranger Alexander Weiss, who stumbled upon the writing on the walls in the detention center. “They had been there for years and other people knew they were there.” Alexander, however, got the ball rolling and in 1997 first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants succeeded in getting the Angel Island Immigration Station designated a National Historic Landmark. 

 

“We needed to save the immigration station to remind us of the tough times some immigrants had coming to this country. They were treated shabbily, but they actually made this country a better place,” Alexander said. “We don’t have exclusion laws anymore, but we could have them in an instant tomorrow. It could easily happen to some other group of people. That’s why we need memorials like concentration camps and Angel Island so that we will learn from our past and not repeat the same mistakes.”

 

Sources:

‘A Bowlful of Tears’ Revisited: The Full Story of Lee Puey You’s Immigration Experience at Angel Island by Judy Yung

Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America by Erika Lee and Judy Yung (Also available at Ball State Libraries)

Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation

Place: Indefinite Detention and Forms of Resistance in Angel Island Poetry by Jonathan Hsy

Island of Immortals: Chinese Immigrants and the Angel Island Immigration Station by H.M. Lai

The Cambridge Illustrated History of China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey

National Archives: Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Wikipedia: California Gold Rush, Page Act of 1875, Chinese Exclusion Act

Immigration History: Page Act of 1875

 




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