As Estelle Lau succinctly explains, Paper Families is a depiction of the interrelationships between the administrative system for immigration and the Chinese immigrant population. Through close reading and personal interpretation, Lau illustrates how the point of entry itself can be considered significant in instituting elements of immigrant identity as well as the development of the rudimentary US government bureaucracy. Paper Families personalizes this interface between the private and the political by emphasizing the uncertain culture and language confronting nineteenth-century immigrants and drawing upon the multifarious restrictions of legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In the early chapters detailing initial US legislation, Lau explains the formation of “paper families” through the buying and selling of “appropriate” documents exploiting a loophole in the law which granted residency to children of US citizens. This, Lau argues, led to a superficial transformation of basic family structures, one which she illustrates through individual reminiscences textually juxtaposed with handwritten plans coaching new arrivals. Lau further develops her balanced and nuanced perception of both sides of the cultural divide through an explanation of the difficulties which the authorities faced, burdens which led to uncertain outcomes in many immigration cases and ever-increasing levels of governmental surveillance that further fed hyper-bureaucratization and hyper-discretion.

Later chapters propose that this implementation of subterfuge not only changed the ways in which the Chinese spoke about and understood themselves but also changed the ways in which they interacted as a community and with the greater populace. Accordingly, the intricate ruses utilized by the Chinese, the practices and techniques employed by immigration officers, came to form the fundamental basis for modern immigration regulation. Thus Paper Families concludes with a call for additional crossdisciplinary work, in areas such as race, politics and state formation, on the implications of government legislation. This concise text succeeds in being a firm foundation for such future scholarship.