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I conducted this interview with Byron Yee, writer/performer of the autobiographical solo show Paper Son, as part of my coverage of the New York International Fringe Festival. The show deals with his investigation into his family's past, and particularly the way his father immigrated to America as a "paper son," so called because he used faked documents and a fictionalized back story to overcome the discriminatory Asian Exclusion Acts that severely limited Asian immigration into the U.S. I first met Byron ten years ago, when we were both performing our respective one-man shows at the Toronto Fringe Festival. He�s continued to tour his both nationally and internationally over the last decade. The FringeNYC preview that I wrote for TheaterMania can be viewed by clicking here. This is an expanded version of our interview, containing a whole bunch of stuff that could not be fit into the article. The interview was conducted August 3, 2007.
DAN BACALZO: Obviously this is an autobiographical performance, but are there many fictional elements in it as well, or do you keep pretty close to facts?
BYRON YEE: 98% of it is as it happened. I did this audition in Los Angeles, where I had to do a Chinese accent and couldn�t. �You win some, you dim sum� -- that was the line I had to say in the audition. I can�t write stuff like that. And after I came out of that, I started to question who I am and what I�m about. I asked my mom, who wouldn�t give me any information, but I got a key clue that my father came to the United States in 1937 or �38 in Boston. I called the Boston National Archives, and within three minutes, they had his file. I got a copy of it and it became a detective story. I found his file, and then his father�s file, which turned out to be his brother -- his paper father. And then I was able to uncover this tremendous story of what it took to come to America. And that�s juxtaposed against my own story of being a stand up comic and telling jokes about being Chinese American.
DB: What�s special about performing the show in New York?
BY: Paper Son is my father�s story, and my father�s side of the family lives here. I�ve got a bunch of cousins who haven�t seen the show yet, so it�s going to be quite interesting when they do. One cousin is very interested in the genealogy, and has contributed some stuff from my father�s side of the family. But for some of my cousins, in the show I�m talking about their fathers. The back end of the story is that my paper grandfather, who is really my uncle, passed away in 1957, and they buried him in Evergreen Cemetery. On the tombstone, they put his Americanized name, and in Chinese they wrote his real Chinese name. Some relatives who saw that were afraid the American government was coming in late at night to photograph the Chinese tombstones to see if the names matched up, and they actually destroyed the tombstone, and in its place they put his name matching in both American and Chinese. So, I�m going to go out to Evergreen Cemetery in the next couple of days to find the tombstone. That�s actually a story I tell at the very end of the show, and it hits home in terms of the fear of deportation and shame of coming into this country under those circumstances.
DB: Are you doing further investigation into your family history while you�re here?
BY: I visited the national archives here in New York, which is over on Houston and Varick. The national archivist there said there weren�t a lot of people coming to look at the records, but that there are about 19,000 interrogation records sitting in Greenwich Village right now. These are people who entered thru Ellis Island, or the Port of New York. I have two direct relatives whose files are there that I may or may not be able to see. You can look at a file that�s over 75 years old, but if it�s less than that you have to have permission from that person, or you have to be able to show that the person is no longer living. There are probably many people living here in New York that have their ancestors� records in the national archives here, and they probably don�t even know about it.
DB: In the show, you talk about becoming a tour guide on Angel Island. Do you still do that?
BY: I live in Los Angeles now, but when I was in San Francisco, I did give tours. The original Angel Island administration building burned down in 1940, and the barracks where the Chinese stayed were preserved. At that point, they moved the immigration station to San Francisco. Then the exclusion act ended up getting repealed four years later, and the barracks became a prisoner of war camp for German and Japanese soldiers during World War II. There�s Japanese and German writing on the walls, which is also preserved. Then it was abandoned for a good 30 years and was going to be demolished, except a park ranger saw these poems on the walls. He was taking a zoology course at San Francisco State, and he had a Japanese professor whom he got to come out to Angel Island with him, who told him these are Chinese poems. There was a frantic effort to preserve the poems, and they were able to get historical status and saved the building as a historical monument. When I first discovered the poems 10 or 12 years ago, it was not a place to go. They basically had very little money for upkeep, but they did do tours. And when you went into the poem room, which is where Chinese immigrants would carve these poems into the wall, it was incredibly authentic. Then over the last several years, the state of California has been able to do an initial renovation of the building. It�s closed right now to the public, but they�re doing a very good job of renovating it, preserving the poems and bringing the rest of the building up to code.
DB: Do you have a personal connection to Angel Island?
BY: The first time I visited there was before I knew my father�s story. Afterwards, I found out about my direct connection to my paper grandfather/real uncle. He was the first one in my family to come to America in 1916, and he actually spent a good month, two months in that room. It became incredibly personal at that point.
DB: In the course of performing your show over the years, you must have come across people who were Paper Sons or descendents of Paper Sons. Are there any particular stories that came out of that you could share?
BY: I probably helped 10-20 people over the years to find their records in the National Archives. I�ve also met people who spent time at Angel Island. Someone in L.A., a young Chinese American guy, was going to be doing a news story documentary about it. He said his father was in the Bay Area and he�d come up. He shows up with his camera crew and he brings his father along. He looks at me and says, �My father came thru Angel Island and I didn�t know about it until I talked with you, and asked him.� His father had stayed there for several months, and the son had no idea. It was the father�s first visit to Angel Island since he had come to the United States. Here�s this young Chinese American guy, 30-35, who had a direct connection to this, and is trying to use me as a source for information and narrative, and it turns out his own father was a much better source since he lived thru that. We went up there, and the son, his mind was absolutely racing because this was a lot of information to handle in 24 hours. His father was walking through the building, saying �I stayed in a bunk that was over here,� and �Yes, I remember these poems,� and all that. It was kind of a �Gotcha!� moment.
DB: Have you ever gotten any negative or angry reactions from folks?
BY: No, not at all. A lot of people see my show. It�s the American immigration story, that happens to be told from a Chinese American perspective. But when I perform it in front of mostly Asian audiences, the younger Asian Americans mostly respond to the play�s humor -- all the jokes, and some of the comedy. The older Asian crowd that comes to see it, to them everything�s serious because I�m talking about a subject matter that just isn�t talked about. They appreciate the show, and are deeply touched by it. But I don�t get much of a response, until the very end when they come up and talk to me afterwards about their own families and about themselves.
DB: Do you make any parallels to current immigration controversies?
BY: I don�t have to, but I sneak a history lesson into it. If you look at the way the Chinese were treated, for the most part it�s very similar to the way the Hispanics and Mexicans are treated now. The United States had an open immigration policy up until 1882; the INS didn�t exist and anyone could come. But because they were fearful that the Chinese would overrun the West Coast, they created the Exclusion Act to keep them out. And in 1880, there were approximately 100,000 Chinese in America, and by the time the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1940, the number of Chinese in America was numbering about 60,000, and they estimated that had the Exclusion Act continued, the population of Chinese in America would have been negligible. If you look at any kind of statistics between 1880-1940, every other population grew. So, the Act had the intended effect. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Japanese Americans got sent to the internment camps, the U.S. repealed the Exclusion Act as a favor to the Chinese government, although they still kept a quota system in place. So, if you look at what the parallels are, they�re trying to keep the Hispanics out, they�re trying to do all these laws to keep people from coming. But the great American Dream is that people are willing to jump through all these hoops for the opportunities in this country, and when their kids are born, their lives will be much better off here than where they came from. And the amnesty that they�re offering right now, well in the �60s, they said that if you came forward and told who you were, what your real name was, all was forgiven. But most Chinese never took that amnesty offer up because the shame was too much.
DB: You�ve performed this show at numerous fringe festivals over the years. How do you define fringe and how is your show fringy?
BY: Fringe shows are the opportunity to put up a piece of work at a relatively low cost. This is a way to present it and find an audience. The fringe allows me the opportunity to do something different. I�m not Billy Crystal doing a Broadway show; I�m an unknown guy. It�s a very personal story, told in a very personal setting. I found this tremendous story, and I have so much more respect for my father now than I did when he was alive. I was trying to be American, he was very Chinese, and I disassociated myself from him. I�m about the same age now as he was when he passed away, and I�m so incredibly thankful for what he did and for what my relatives did. The show has helped me find a lost relationship.
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