Tung Pok Chin 1915-1988 encountered great difficulties during his life. Bandits kidnapped him when he was a youth in Taishan County, Guangdong, China, and sold him to a childless couple. Emigrating to the U.S. as a paper son in the summer of 1934, he had to leave his wife and two sons behind in China. Chin first settled in Boston and then in New York City.
Unscrupulous men deceived him into purchasing a Harlem laundry that had few customers. Chin not only persevered but overcame adversity. The absence of constant business at the Harlem laundry gave Chin time to learn English and read literature and poetry.
Military service during World War II allowed Chin to see the world, filling his mind with new experiences to write about. After his wife had an affair with another man in China, Chin remarried and started a new family in America. Since his "paper" had recorded him as "single," a dissolution of the first marriage was not necessary in the eyes of United States jurisprudence.
He also managed to save enough money to purchase a profitable laundry in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) placed him under surveillance during the 1950s because he wrote editorials and poetry for the China Daily News, a newspaper believed by the FBI to have pro-Communist leanings. Concerned that the FBI surveillance might lead to his and his new family's deportation, Chin burned his poems.
Yet this same concern influenced Chin's decision to teach his children to speak and write Chinese and educate them in Chinese literature and history. After FBI agents indicated to Chin in 1959 that they did not consider him a threat to the U.S., he resumed writing poetry.
Retiring from the laundry business in 1978, Chin remained active writing for the China Daily News and teaching English language courses at a senior citizens' center in Chinatown. He also commenced the monumental task of writing his memoirs, "Paper Son, One Man's Story" (Temple University Press, 2000).
