Reckoning

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine M. Elaine Mar’s Paper Daughter, the story of a child-immigrant’s path to citizenship and a Chinese girl’s desire to become an American. The memoir addresses the difficulties all immigrants face in attempting to achieve a new public identity as a citizen in all dimensions, legally but also socially and emotionally. But the immigrant experience is not monolithic. The long history of immigration in the US reveals that many factors—social, economic, ideological, legal, political—influenced who was allowed to immigrate, when, and from what countries, and how immigrants were treated and received once they arrived in the US. Mar’s Paper Daughter focuses on Chinese immigrants arriving in the US in the mid- to late 1960s, an era marked by civil rights legislation and more open immigration policies initiated by the 1965 Immigration Act. But her story unfolds as she grows up in an America marked by economic stagnation, inflation, and budget deficits throughout the 1970s, and the rise of an increasingly conservative political climate, resulting in the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980.