In the 1990 movie “Green Card,” Gerard Depardieu’s character is deported because he cannot recall, under questioning by immigration agents, the type of skin cream his American-born wife likes. In real life, dread of such encounters has prodded many aspiring immigrants to prep for their interviews with elaborate “study aids,” particularly if they were adopting new identities.
Annotated pages from a notebook found among the papers of Fook Wing Chung.
Few of these crib sheets survived. “You were supposed to throw the cheat sheet overboard,” noted Nancy Shader of the National Archives and Records Administration in New York.
Which is why there is excitement in archivists’ circles about a small brown notebook with handwritten Chinese characters, long overlooked in her archives, that once belonged to a Chinese immigrant. Read more…