Many Chinese have different Chinese last names than their English-translated last name. For example, someone may have the last name Wong in English, but in reality, they may be from the Chin family. Chinese immigrants that came to the United States as "paper sons" have this false identity. Paper sons are Chinese immigrants that claimed to be sons of American citizens using false papers.

Unfair laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Geary Act of 1892 prohibited the legal immigration of Chinese laborers into the United States. Congress thought that there were already too many Chinese in the United States in 1882. About .002 percent of the population (2 out of every 100,000 persons) were Chinese.

The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 in San Francisco destroyed the Federal Building housing all of the official records of the U.S. Government, including immigration records. The fire burned most birth and citizenship records kept by the city. Many Chinese people started to claim that they had been born in the United States, that their birth records had been destroyed, and that they were in fact citizens. American citizenship would allow them to travel freely and bring their families to the United States from China. This plan would get around the strict immigration laws.

The legal Chinese immigrants in the United States claimed that they had sons in China. The Chinese would create fake documents or "papers" for their "sons". They would sell these documents to Chinese who wanted to come to the United States. The documents included information, letters, identification papers, and false testimonies that would prove the relationship between the prospective immigrant and the Chinese American citizen. Everyone would benefit from this plan because the legal Chinese immigrants made money, and the Chinese who wanted to immigrate to the United States now had the chance.

Congress did not want members of the mostly male Chinese population to marry and have families with white women. The state of California even created the Anti-Miscegenation Law of 1906 prohibiting Chinese from marrying non-Chinese. (This law was eventually nullified in 1948.) As American citizens, the Chinese men who were in the United States before 1882 were allowed to return to China, marry, produce children, and bring their sons back to the United States. The government had restricted Chinese women immigrating to the United States for fear the Chinese would reproduce in large numbers.