The “Figurative Border”

Chung Yuen Bow

One of the unique challenges that came with curating the exhibit Living and Learning: Chinese Immigration, Restriction & Community in Brooklyn, 1850 to Present, was attempting to show how immigration law pervaded everyday life for the Chinese community in Brooklyn. As the scholar Robert Chang has argued, historically, immigrants groups that the government has subjected to restrictive legislation, “carry a figurative border” with them.

For these immigrants, their admission into the United States – even when pursued in a legal manner – is never complete. In the same way that officials scrutinized immigrants’ racial, health, and sexual status at the border, such scrutiny could also reemerge at any moment. In this manner, “legal” and “illegal” function not only as technical categories used to define an immigrant’s status at the border, but as cultural concepts that governed their daily lives.

Letter from Harlem Hospital

Although I did not get to incorporate his story into the exhibit itself, Chung Yuen Bow offers an interesting case in point. Admitted to the United States in 1935 from China, Chung Yuen Bow was able to enter as the son of an American citizen. Nonetheless, in 1938, after receiving care for bacterial endocarditis at a hospital in Harlem, the hospital’s Director of Public Assistance inquired with immigration officials to see whether Chung was eligible for deportation as an immigrant receiving public benefits. With Chung it is possible to see the border – and the repercussions for being placed on the wrong side of it – quite literally following him to the hospital.

Images courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration - New York.