Wong Kim Ark Won a Landmark 1898 Case, But His Family Forgot His Name

Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1873. He worked as a cook, traveled to China to visit family, and in August 1895 stepped off the SS Coptic expecting to come home. Instead, the Collector of Customs at the Port of San Francisco turned him away, invoking the Chinese Exclusion Act and declaring him a Chinese subject despite his San Francisco birth. He spent five months confined on steamships off the California coast before being freed on $250 bail. Three years later, on March 28, 1898, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 in his favor, establishing that the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born on American soil, regardless of their parents' nationality.

That ruling shaped the citizenship of millions. His own family, it turned out, barely knew his name.

Sandra Wong, one of his great-grandchildren living in the North Bay, learned of her connection to the case not from a relative or a history book but from a newspaper clipping pinned to her father's memorial photo board at his funeral. "My father never mentioned so much about his past, growing up or coming to America," she recalled. "I only found out about our connection to Wong Kim Ark at my father's funeral." That was 2011. She has been piecing the story together ever since, primarily through internet searches.

Her brother Norman Wong, 75, a retiree from Brentwood, California, had a similarly indirect introduction. In his late fifties, visiting his father in Rio Linda, he watched as his father quietly pulled a Chinese-language newspaper from a stack by the table and pointed to an article with quiet pride. Even as a teenager learning about the Chinese Exclusion Act in school, Norman said, the history had felt distant and abstract.

The uncertainty about their exact lineage compounds the erasure. Sandra and Norman do not know whether their father was Wong Kim Ark's son or his grandson; discriminatory immigration laws of the era made paperwork for Chinese nationals so unreliable that the generational link itself cannot be confirmed. Their father did not speak Chinese at home, partly because their mother, Kimiko Wong, was Japanese American. The language was lost along with the name.

"We didn't grow up knowing who this man was," Sandra said.

Wong Kim Ark's legal victory was built on a straightforward argument: the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment covered all persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, including children of Chinese immigrants who were permanent residents but barred from naturalization. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association raised funds for his legal representation. The case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, became the binding precedent for birthright citizenship that has held for more than 125 years.

That precedent came under direct challenge in January 2025 when President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants or parents on temporary visas. Federal courts blocked the order, and the Supreme Court took up the question of whether those nationwide injunctions could stand.

Sandra, who in 2016 participated in a documentary pairing Wong Kim Ark's story with that of Dred Scott, has been measured about her great-grandfather's place in history. "Sometimes, Wong Kim Ark is called a hero, but I've always thought he was just doing what anyone would do," she said. "He stood up for his rights and for what he believed."

The family that forgot his name is now among the loudest voices carrying it forward.