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Paper Sons And Chosen Families: Blurry Archives And Non-Biological Kinship In The Chong Family Album, Sam Battles

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

In the face of Chinese exclusion and Victorian-era morality, this project presents a family photo album as a counter-narrative to racialized and gendered immigration policies. The photo album is from the Chong family who were part of a Chinese American community living in San Francisco around 1915. The paper follows the fluctuating and non-chronological layout of the album and the uncertainties within to analyze Chinese Americans family formations in the context of state control of Asian migrants, including hyper-policing and surveillance around immigration status, queerness, and class. The Chong family album demonstrates how Chinese Americans employed flexible definitions of family …