From There to Here

Abstract Combining an expansive view of family with a limited source base, this essay for History Unclassified examines a small collection of materials originating from the family members of the author’s mother-in-law: objects that they made and left behind, pictures that they sent into the world to call loved ones home, and papers that established or masked identities and granted passage or prevented movement. Transnational in scope and microhistorical in scale, it reveals the multistage, multigenerational, and gendered migrations of an ordinary Chinese American family over extended periods of separation and reunion in the second half of the twentieth century.