A Chinese American Historian By Chance: A Granddaughter's Tribute to Her Grandfather Who Came to U.S. at Age16

4/9/19

A Granddaughter's Tribute to Her Grandfather Who Came to U.S. at Age16

When she was a senior at Colgate University in 2009, Jessica Chow, created a
touching 4-part video about her grandfather who emigrated to the U.S. in 1934 at age 16 as a paper son. Finding America in China, her account of his life story first working in a laundry near New York Chinatown and later fighting for the U.S. in WWII is detailed and could easily apply to the life stories of hundreds of other Chinese immigrants of the same era. Jessica's video included many images of official immigration documents as well as personal photographs, which make her films more informative and engaging.

Chow also presents an interesting discussion about the Chinese soldiers serving in the 14th Air Service Group, which supported the famed Flying Tigers. Although they were "ethnically" Chinese, whether they had emigrated from China or were born in the U.S., as soldiers they were "Americans" fighting to help China. She concluded that most of them had stronger identities as "American," despite the extreme racial prejudices Chinese suffered in the U.S. prior to WWII, because of their military service for the U.S.