Cynthia Chin-Lee: Hello, my name is Cynthia Chin-Lee. The last name, Chin-Lee, is actually my paper name plus my real name. In 1882 the US Congress passed a law called the Chinese Exclusion Act in which they decided that they no longer wanted Chinese immigrants into this country. The Chinese were excluded from 1882 to about the 1940s, and immigration was restricted to a few hundred a year that were mainly merchants and scholars. The way people got around this was if a legal Chinese resident in the United States decided to leave the United States, he could come back to China and then sell his identity papers. That became the paper name.

My grandfather, whose name was Lee, bought a paper from a man named Chin and came to the United States pretending to be Mr. Chin. When my dad was in his middle age years he decided he wanted to go back to his real name, and so instead of changing our name from Chin to Lee, we just appended our real name to our paper name, and that's why my last name is Chin-Lee.