I have researched a lot of amazing stories of Asian-American legal history, but this one may be my favorite. I discovered it in a footnote and wanted to know more.
Sau Ung Loo Chan first had to prove her U.S. citizenship during law school in the 1920s. She was one of the first Asian Americans to attend Yale Law School and one of the first women to do so.
On her way back from a student trip to Europe, she was refused re-entry and was threatened with detainment. “After having finished one year at Yale, I knew just enough law to scream ‘habeas corpus’ at the immigration officials, and they finally let me in,” she later recalled.
Years later, she used her training and drive to win perhaps the most important case of her life—proving that her husband was an American.
Sau Ung Loo Chan’s Early Life and Legal Challenges
The case was rooted in family tragedy and drama long before she met her husband, Chan Hin Cheung, and the complicated racial restrictions in naturalization law in the early 20th century.
Chan was born in San Francisco in 1906, but the San Francisco earthquake ruined his father’s health and finances, so the family went to China in 1907, and his father died soon afterward.
Chan grew up in China but wanted to go to the United States to study at Phillips Academy. His mother was worried he would not return to her, so she let him believe he would be an international student in the United States, not a native-born citizen returning home.
Soon, upon arrival, he began to suspect that he had been born in the United States. But he did not know until 1927 when he confronted his mother in China, and she admitted the truth.
He tried to clear this up with U.S. immigration authorities in 1928. Still, they were suspicious and concluded that he was an “impostor seeking a return certificate through fraud and misrepresentation.”
The Struggle for Citizenship
Clearing up his citizenship became a priority after he met Sau Ung Loo, a Chinese American born in Hawaii and attending Yale Law School. Marriage could have serious legal consequences for her – U.S. law at the time stripped American women of their citizenship if they married a non-citizen. This law reportedly had been designed to punish rich American women who married European men with titles (think Downton Abbey). Still, the law severely impacted Asian-American women who married Asian-American immigrant men.