His great-grandfather enshrined birthright citizenship. Norman Wong is trying to save it.
SAN FRANCISCO – Wong Kim Ark got his landmark Supreme Court victory enshrining birthright citizenship 127 years before Norman Wong arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in late April on a quest to protect his great-grandfather’s legacy.
Wong, 75, clutched a piece of paper before a campus forum on immigration – a short speech he had revised four times – but he carried no photos or family heirlooms. For most of his life, he had not heard of Wong Kim Ark, a poor cook born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in 1870.
But since President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January to end automatic citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors, Norman Wong has been thrust into a life of unexpected local celebrity and political activism. He is held up by supporters as a living testament to the man whose fight for American citizenship – with its presumed guarantees of civil rights, free speech and due process – had been lost through the years.
“It was a piece of history, but it was not relevant history, to be truthful, at the time,” Wong said in an interview, referring to the discovery of his family ties. He pegs the moment to the late 1990s, when reporters contacted his father ahead of a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the 1898 Supreme Court decision.
Now, “I’ve picked up the mantle,” he said. “People want me for some kind of symbolism. Fine. I’m trying to get up to speed.”
He has been in demand, appearing at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles and with San Francisco officials to unveil a plaque honoring Wong Kim Ark at his birthplace. And his family’s story is expected to take center stage again this week.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the legal battle over Trump’s executive order. His administration contends that several lower court judges exceeded their jurisdiction by issuing nationwide injunctions that prevent the government from implementing the order while lawsuits challenging it on constitutional grounds are litigated.
If the justices rule in Trump’s favor, his administration could attempt to deny citizenship to children in some states, legal experts said.
“Trump and his MAGA allies are doing everything they can to pursue a blatantly unconstitutional policy,” said San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, whose office joined a lawsuit against Trump’s order from a coalition of Democratic-led states. “The idea that this is something that would not be blocked by this court is very troubling.”
It is on this point that Norman Wong offers what scholarly legal briefs cannot : personal testimony of how the struggle for citizenship can impact a single family.
In a small classroom on the UC-Berkeley campus, he made a soft-spoken plea to about 20 people and another 80 watching online, providing a brief overview of his great-grandfather’s plight during a period of national xenophobia that prompted Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese workers and making Chinese immigrants ineligible for U.S. citizenship.
In 1895, Wong Kim Ark returned from a visit to his family’s ancestral village in Taishan, in China’s Guangdong province, and was barred from re-entering the United States. His three-year legal battle culminated in the Supreme Court’s ruling that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment – which protects those born on U.S. soil who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the government – affirmed his status as an American by birth.
The Trump administration has argued that undocumented immigrants and foreigners on temporary visas are not fully under the nation’s legal jurisdiction and, therefore, their children should not be awarded automatic citizenship, a view most legal scholars reject.
Trump’s order, Norman Wong told his audience, “is an attack on birthright citizenship. We cannot let this happen. What kind of nation are we to be, with stateless children born to no country? To this, I say, ‘No.’ We, as Americans, need to embrace each other and cherish each new life born in the USA.”
An ongoing lesson
By some measures, Norman Wong is not a natural public face for the effort to defend birthright citizenship.
Though he was active in student protests while attending UC-Berkeley in the late 1960s – marching in the Third World Liberation Front movement that resulted in the creation of ethnic studies programs – he dropped out of school before graduating and made a living in carpentry and building maintenance.
His hair has gone gray, but he maintains a strong handshake. With a chuckle, he bemoans the newfound attention that has upended his quiet life with his wife, Maureen Moon Wong, at their home in Brentwood, an hour east of San Francisco, where he tends an overgrown garden plot.
“What I admire about Norman is that he knows there is only so much we can do given how old we are,” said Maureen Wong, 76, a naturalized citizen who emigrated from China in 1957. She was given her American name by an immigration officer, who was of Irish descent, after she told him she wanted the same initial as her mother, May. “But he’s willing to do what he can for the cause.”
By that measure, Wong is an ideal spokesman. His family story places him squarely within the frame of the nation’s long history of viewing Asian Americans as threats and something less than fully American.
His father, Wong Yook Jim, is listed in immigration records as the youngest of Wong Kim Ark’s four sons – all of whom were born in China and faced scrutiny from U.S. immigration officials. The oldest son was denied entry after authorities said he failed to prove he was related to Wong Kim Ark.
Another claiming to be Wong Kim Ark’s son made it into the United States but decades later confessed to being a “paper son,” a tactic used by some Chinese immigrants to falsely claim relationships with U.S. citizens to overcome the barriers of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Some historians have speculated that Wong Yook Jim – who was 11 when he arrived at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay in 1926 – was, in fact, Wong Kim Ark’s grandson. (Five years later, Wong Kim Ark went back to China and never returned to the United States.)
Norman Wong said his father, who became known as James Y. Wong and worked on a cruise ship, never spoke of his family history and might not have known the details. But in the 1970s, while Norman and Maureen were preparing for a trip to Canada, James Wong told them his own father was living in Vancouver.
They stopped in that city but came up empty in their search for him. But that is why Norman refers to Wong Kim Ark, who immigration records suggest was his grandfather, as his great-grandfather.
“It’s an ongoing lesson. We didn’t grow up knowing who this man was,” said Sandra Wong, Norman’s younger sister. She began searching for answers after her father died in 2011 and feels compelled to champion Wong Kim Ark’s story. In 2016, she participated in a documentary about the fight for citizenship under the 14th Amendment, which featured the stories of Wong Kim Ark and Dred Scott, but she is less comfortable than Norman in the public spotlight.
“What does this all mean? It comes down to something that was unjust,” she said. “Sometimes, Wong Kim Ark is called a hero, but I’ve always thought he was just doing what anyone would do – he stood up for his rights and for what he believed. Wouldn’t anyone do that?”
The Wong siblings said their efforts to learn more have been limited because they never learned Chinese. Their father did not speak the language at home because their mother, Kimiko Wong, was Japanese American.
Remarkably, Kimiko Wong, née Takeuchi, had a hidden history of her own. Though she rarely spoke of it, her family had been forced from their home in San Lorenzo, California, when she was 15 and sent to an incarceration camp for Japanese Americans in Topaz, Utah, during World War II.
A picture of the Takeuchi family in suits and dresses and clutching suitcases, taken by the documentary photojournalist Dorothea Lange, appears in “Un-American,” a 2016 book by authors Richard Cahan and Michael Williams.
Norman Wong said he and his siblings grew up “ignorant about both sides” of the family’s fight for their citizenship rights.
Even as they began to learn pieces of their parents’ stories, he said, the younger generation presumed “it was a dead issue. These were rights we did not have to fight for anymore. It wasn’t something that anybody would have to worry about, really, just a footnote in history.”
‘Wong Kim Ark is for all of us’
Wong Kim Ark was not the first Chinese American to sue the U.S. government over its exclusionary policies.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Chinese Americans filed more than 10,000 lawsuits challenging discriminatory laws and practices, according to the National Park Service. Among them were two citizenship cases that paved the way for Wong’s victory.
In 1884, Look Tin Sing won a ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit establishing his birthright citizenship after being denied re-entry to the country from a trip to China. Four years later, Hong Yin Ming, also refused re-entry, won his citizenship lawsuit in a federal court in the Northern District of California.
To San Francisco civic leader David Lei, the run of legal victories was made possible by the Chinese American community’s willingness to fight collectively – banding together and raising money to hire prominent White lawyers to represent them in court. Among those who argued on Wong Kim Ark’s behalf at the Supreme Court was J. Hubley Ashton, a former U.S. assistant attorney general.
“Wong Kim Ark was a poor cook, under 25 years old; he didn’t have money,” said Lei, 75, a de facto Chinatown historian. “Without the whole community saying, ‘No,’ this (legal victory) wouldn’t have happened.”
A day after visiting UC-Berkeley, Norman and Maureen drove to Chinatown to join Lei for a walking tour of the neighborhood.
They met at the Chinese Historical Society of America, which features an exhibit on martial artist and Hollywood star Bruce Lee, who was born in San Francisco in 1940. On the wall was a copy of a document Lee’s immigrant parents, who arrived in California a year earlier, filed on his behalf with the U.S. Labor Department establishing his birthright citizenship as the family prepared to return to Hong Kong in March 1941.
Titled “Application of Alleged American Citizen of the Chinese Race for Preinvestigation of Status,” the document was required under the Chinese Exclusion Act to facilitate re-entry to the United States.
On the tour, Lei stopped at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association on Stockton Street, a spacious meeting hall decorated with carved Chinese lacquer furniture, red lanterns, elaborately painted antique vases and a gold-framed portrait of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, who established the Republic of China after the 1911 Revolution.
It was this association, then known as the Chinese Six Companies, that brought together the disparate factions of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, starting in the 1850s, to represent the community’s interests.
Chiu, the city attorney, and other local officials gathered at the association building in January to add a measure of symbolism to their announcement that San Francisco was joining the federal lawsuit against Trump’s birthright citizenship order.
“The Chinese immigrants were organized from day one,” Lei said. In China, under the feudal system of the 1800s, “the concept was that the state would not protect you. It was not a country of laws. So your clan, and the villages around you, might need to protect you from the government.”
Leaving the association building, Lei led the group to the intersection of Grant and Sacramento streets. It was here, in a two-story structure on the Southeast corner, that Wong Kim Ark was born. (His birth year is listed as 1873 in Supreme Court records, but Wong’s testimony to immigration authorities places his birth in 1870, said Amanda Frost, an immigration law professor at the University of Virginia.)
The original building was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, replaced by what is now a three-story structure with a camera store on the ground level.
Bruce Lee posters hang beneath the awning, and an outer brick wall features a mural depicting Sun Wukong, known as the Monkey King, a figure of Chinese mythology. A painting of Madam Ah Toy, one of the first Chinese women in California who operated a brothel during the early days of the gold rush, made by local artist Christina Xu, adorns an electrical box on the sidewalk.
Soon, the plaque for Wong Kim Ark will be affixed near the street corner.
Norman Wong stopped out front and agreed to pose for a news photographer. Then Maureen handed him a cellphone with a call from another reporter requesting an interview.
Continuing down the street, Wong sheepishly referred to himself as a “prop.” But he recognized the need for his own, small contribution.
“I’m glad he stood up,” he said of his great-grandfather. “Him doing that gave me something I never had before – a validation of my own life. And, so, yes, I’m proud of him. But remember, he was a stranger to me. It’s kind of like Wong Kim Ark is for all of us. He’s not for me to own.”