In California, any Chinese who aspired to be landowning farmers found their dreams thwarted by a state law called the 1913 Alien Land Act, which barred aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land, even if they could afford to buy it. Without the right to purchase and own land, some Chinese were forced to become migrant farm laborers. In an oral history interview, émigré Suen Sum provides us a glimpse of this nomadic lifestyle. Arriving in the United States as a paper son, he had settled in Locke, California, a rural community in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta with an all-Chinese population. Drifting from farm to farm, he washed toilets, chopped wood, picked fruit, tended gardens. “The whites treated us Chinese like slaves,” he recalled. Though he possessed some education—the ability to read and write in his native language, and a high school degree from China—he made barely enough money to live on: ten to twenty cents an hour, ten hours a day. At these wages, Suen Sum could not afford to marry, or do much of anything except work. There were days when he lacked money to buy food. “Every year it was the same. You work year after year, from youth to old age, and I still haven’t saved any money.” (Chang 161-162)