Exclusion and Confession, the two slamming doors of America
When the PBS documentary on the Chinese Exclusion Act aired, I needed to watch it alone. All day I’d been clearing out my late father’s basement in San Francisco. From his travels as a merchant seaman, he’d collected crazy finds: a piece of railroad track, a gas mask with instructions in Hebrew, a gold-flecked rock from Alaska engraved with the year 1956, burial jade from Hong Kong, a shield-size turtle shell from Tahiti. But what got me was the least traveled item—a dusty unopened bottle of Seagram’s 7—left over from our plentiful family Chinatown banquets at the once-elegant, now-shuttered…
