Utilizing Chinese-and-English-language sources, this essay addresses the “official and bureaucratic gaze” of U.S. immigration administration posed upon the racialized Chinese bodies especially female foot and Chinese responses during the Chinese exclusion era from a trans-Pacific perspective. It foregrounds the body as an important analytic tool to examine how the U.S. enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws complicated the social significance of Chinese foot binding, and how the construction of U.S. national identity and boundaries was articulated through Chinese bodies. It explains how and why bound foot acquired a remarkable role for both the immigrants and the immigration officials to establish Chinese admissibility in comparison with other “physical peculiarities.” It demonstrates that the immigrant body was a contested terrain in which both countries’ race, gender, class, and body ideologies collided, overlapped and renegotiated. Accordingly, the lines between inclusion and exclusion, modernity and tradition, and globalization and nationalism were rearticulated, redrawn and obscured.