Melanie K. Ng

Melanie K. Ng, “Open Secrets: Methods and Archives in Chinese Canadian Histories.” JCHA 34, no.1 (2024).

“Open Secrets: Methods and Archives in Chinese Canadian Histories” by Melanie Ng offers a creative conceptual approach through a clearly written exploration of the importance of studying secrets in Chinese immigration histories. “Open Secrets” is based on Ng’s research into “paper families,” which are the relationships made by Chinese migrants through the purchase of identification documentation to circumvent restrictive exclusion laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ng offers a valuable methodological contribution, using scholarship on early American Black fugitivity as well as Jacques Derrida’s writing on secrets. Emphasizing how the performance of a false identity was necessary to conceal the truth, Ng emphasizes the generative potential of understanding secrets and the act of secret-keeping as a kind of knowledge. Ng offers essential insight into the Chinese immigration experience in Canada while simultaneously dealing with the restrictions on access that limit the possibilities of fully investigating the state records of immigration control. As Ng notes, notwithstanding the intensity of state surveillance of immigrants and their family relationships and the extensive records produced from these encounters, much of the archival record that might be used to trace these important histories is opaque. This is not a problem unique to Chinese Canadian history, but also applies to secret files produced by the RCMP and the extensive bureaucracy regulating the health, education, and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples across Canada. Ng offers critical ethical considerations rooted in a deep respect for the people using secrecy and passing in the archival sources used.