Mason Labash
English 48b
March 24, 2011
Journal: Sui Sin Far

“For twenty moons my wife care for and nurse the old people, and when they die they bless her and my son, and I send for her to return to me. I had no fear of trouble. I was a Chinese merchant and my son was my son.”(p.881)

"With the completion of the railroad and end of the gold strikes, Chinese immigrants became targets of a decade-long wave of violence and discrimination in western cities such as Los Angeles."

Sui Sin Far is deepening the sympathy we feel for these caring Chinese immigrants by showing how Hom's wife is a very thoughtful individual. She never in a million years could ever deserve the horrible treatment that the United States government bestows upon her. She cared for Hom's mother and father when they were desperately ill and had no one else to turn to. Now Hom and Lae Choo need someone to help them keep their child, but the officers show zero compassion. Of course they are just doing their job which goes to show the extreme indifference and downright hatred demonstrated by our government towards immigrants. It doesn't make any sense that a couple would have to prove ownership of their own son. The child expressing their unhappiness with being taken away from their mother should be proof enough. Sui Sin Far's titling the story “In the Land of the Free” is very ironic since these immigrants are being treated like inferior people that have no rights at all.

Hom's description of his life before being hassled by the government shows sharp contrast to his current situation: “I had no fear of trouble. I was a Chinese merchant and my son was my son.” Hom shows the absurdness of the ordeal by pointing out a painfully obvious truth. They are questioning the ownership of a child whose father is a hard working man that didn't even have the option to fill out the papers. Hom doesn't understand why a country would want to take away someone's only child. His ability to be with the most important thing in his world becomes dependent on these officers giving up their orders to use logic instead. The officers don't care that the papers weren't filled out because his son was with his wife in China caring for his dying parents. It's a possibility that these officers took the child so that their lawyer friend, James Clancy, could come along and take everything valuable that they own. That would explain why the officers took the child no matter what. It's a very reasonable explanation considering that there could be no doubt in the officer's minds that this was their kid. Maybe it was a policy to take Chinese children from their parents to go live in missionaries so they could be “Americanized.” 

 "A History of Immigration from China to the US." Golden Venture Immigration Documentary. Web. 25 Mar. 2011. <http://www.goldenventuremovie.com/Chinese_Immigration.htm>.