But the interrogations were the worst of all. The immigration process deteriorated into a mind game between inspector and immigrant, whereby American officials tried to identify paper sons or daughters through extensive questioning about their past history and home villages. Many questions were excessively detailed and had nothing to do with a person’s right to enter the United States. When a Chinese arrived at the immigration station, paper son or not, he had to remember all the answers he gave to authorities, because he might be quizzed on them later if he left the United States and then tried to return. The transcripts of these conversations often ran for hundreds of pages, yet one wrong answer, no matter how trivial, could easily result in deportation. Even a correct answer might elicit suspicion, such as in the following exchange:

Q: Is your house one story or two stories?
A: There is an attic.
Q: Are there steps to the attic?
A: Yes.
Q: How many?
A: Twelve.
Q: How do you know?
A: I counted them, because I was told you would ask me questions like these.
Q: Then you were coached in the answers to be given? You rehearsed and memorized the information to make us think you are the son of Wong Hing?
A: No, no, no. I was not coached. I am the true son of Wong Hing, my father, who is now in San Francisco. He told me that you would ask me questions like these and that I was to be prepared to answer in the most minute detail.

In this environment, it was inevitable that some inmates cracked under the strain. Separated from their families, interrogated by hostile strangers, and haunted by the fear of deportation, a few lost all control of their senses. The most traumatized tended to be Chinese women separated from their children. “There are many cases at the Immigration Station now where the Chinese wife of an American-born Chinese citizen is denied admission, while her little infant children are admitted,” J. S. Look told interviewers for the 1924 Los Angeles Survey of Race Relations. To handle depression, panic, or hysteria, immigration authorities threw emotionally troubled émigrés into a special isolation room, a tiny windowless closet three feet square, where they were kept in solitary confinement, sometimes for weeks, until they were able to “calm down.” These brutal immigration practices continued for decades, causing some Chinese women to attempt or commit suicide.

(Chang 149-151)