Iboya Szabo-Hancock’s recollections about Chinese immigration

This video clip is an extract from an interview with Iboya Szabo-Hancock that was recorded by Héritage Sutton.

People just moved back and forth across the border. It was like going from here to Sutton; nobody took the border into consideration. They were renting a house in Abercorn near the border.  The house is still there. They rented upstairs, and  there was a register in the floor (device controlling the air flow) and they had a little girl, a couple years old and aunt Mary. The girl must have taken the cover off the register and she fell through and landed on top of a table downstairs. There were a bunch of Chinese people down there. Somebody was smuggling them over. How or when, we don’t know, but I remember her grandmother telling me how scared she was. They were all talking away in Chinese and she was alone at the house with that baby. Yes it must have been, because she died maybe five ten years ago when she was 95. Early 1900s, yeah. I also heard that there was a man and his family in Freligshburg who were quite into smuggling. A very nice family, but they were smuggling. The father was taking Chinese people over in a piano. He was selling pianos in Vermont, but in the box they had a Chinese person. He’d tell about it and he’d laugh; he’d distract the officers and they’d just let him go through.