While rummaging through his desk one day, she found a card in one of the drawers that came from the Department of Immigration and Colonization and had his father’s baby picture on it. Strange, because her father wasn’t an immigrant: he was born in Canada. There was a number in the top right corner and a note on the bottom that read, “This certificate does not establish legal status in Canada.” When Linda asked her father about it, he scolded her for going through his private belongings.

It would be years before she learned what the document was: one of many certificates issued by the Canadian government to monitor and contain Chinese people after the 1923 exclusion act. The act, officially known as the Chinese Immigration Act, took effect on July 1, 1923, a day local Chinese called Humiliation Day. It halted immigration from China — immigration the government had welcomed when labour was required for the transcontinental railway. In some cities, Chinese residents hung mourning wreaths on doors.

Systemic racism, as it turned out, required a lot of paperwork. In the years leading up to the act, the government was already issuing various certificates for Chinese residents in Canada, paperwork used for everything from identification to travel authorizations. These documents were cutting edge, issued with photographs starting in 1910, the first mass use of picture identification in the country.

Documentation became even stricter with the exclusion act. All Chinese residents in Canada were required to register or re-register as part of a mass, nationwide drive. “Everyone was going to get scooped up,” explains Catherine Clement, the curator collecting evidence of this paper trail for an exhibition at the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver set to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the act. “There were posters everywhere in English and Chinese about what you had to do. You had to prove who you were and justify what you had been doing. Failure to do this meant a $500 fine, imprisonment or being shipped out of the country. It scared everybody.” 

Most of the papers issued have likely been lost or thrown out, unknowingly by descendants or purposefully by bearers, according to Clement. She heard some bearers, upon receiving citizenship later in life, burned the discriminatory papers that once held a tight grip on their lives. “This was over-documentation, over-surveillance, over-control and incredible intimidation,” says Clement.