I’ve been away for a long time because I’ve been under contract working on a book for Calkins Creek. It’s a family story about an ancestor of mine from Shanghai, China. She came to America as a little girl and lived in upstate New York. She was homesick and her father arranged for an artist to paint an enormous pagoda on the family barn.
I’ve discovered my ‘family story’ is actually one that resonates with the immigration debate today. Nina, my ancestor, came here just a few years before the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This is the only law that prohibited immigraition based solely on nationality. It was not repealed until 1943! Nina was OK because she was the daughter of an American and therefore American herself. But you have to wonder how she felt coming to a country where the dominant refrain was “Chinese Go Home.”
Here’s the barn and Nina!
