The Writing on the Wall
Sorrowful Angel Island poetry reveals another dark age in American immigration.

BY JOY LANZENDORFER

Over a hundred poems are on the walls.
Looking at them, they are all pining at the delayed progress.
What can one sad person say to another?

The above is a section of one of 200 Chinese poems found on the walls of the Angel Island immigration station. Carefully scripted in pencil or ink, or carved into the wood, the poems are remnants of a long-ignored part of Bay Area history. As the United States looks at whether to change immigration laws in this post 9-11 world, these poems are a reminder of a time when exclusion laws governed the fate of Chinese immigrants.

From 1910-1940, over 175,000 Chinese people went through the immigration station, which is on the northeast side of the island facing Tiburon. The immigrants were given invasive medical exams, interrogated and crowded 500-at-a-time into barracks designed to hold 100 people. Stuck in these prison-like conditions, the immigrants had no idea when they would be allowed to enter San Francisco—if ever. A stay on Angel Island could range from overnight to as long as two years; and during that time there was nothing to do but play games, talk, worry and write poetry on the walls of the barracks.

Now, 66 years after the last Chinese immigrant left Angel Island, the poems are being preserved.

The California State Parks Department and the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation (AIISF) have partnered in a $50-million project to restore the 14-acre site, which includes the barracks, a hospital, a heating plant and the remains of several other buildings.

Currently, the project is in phase 1, which should be completed in early 2007. The barracks are being converted into a museum and an outline of the administration building, which burned down in 1940, will be erected. While this is going on, scholars are in the process of documenting and preserving the poems.

This is not an easy task. The poems were not only written all over the walls, they were painted over by the guards, who dismissed them as graffiti. In some cases, all that is left of a 96-year-old poem is a few blurry Chinese characters. So, scholars like Charles Egan, associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University, have the difficult task of deciphering what’s there.

“We have to read the poems straight from the walls, so we basically do a lot of staring at smudges,” he says. “I never wore glasses before I started studying Chinese.”

To start with, the scholars are comparing the walls with the 135 poems published in the book Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung. At this point, the scholars have matched 85 percent of the poems in the book with the walls, and have also found over 60 new poems.

And that’s just a start. Unknown numbers of poems are sandwiched between the layers of lead-based paint. The foundation has tried x-ray and other methods to see under the paint, but has had no luck so far.

“At this point, our goal is to preserve the building as much as possible,” says Erika Gee, director of education for AIISF. “In the future, some new technology may come along that will let us see under the paint.”

Published in 1980, Island compiled poems from photographs and a manuscript by Smiley Jann and Tet Yee, two detainees who recorded the poems they saw during their time on the island in the early 1930s. Judy Yung, who co-wrote Island, is not surprised that it has taken 26 years since the publication of the book for the poems to be preserved.

“I understand why,” she says. “It took so long for the Chinese-American community to get the government to make the station a national landmark and allocate funding towards its restoration. If they had not pushed as hard as they did, the building would have been destroyed.”

In the 1970s, the barracks were scheduled for demolition when a park ranger discovered the poetry and contacted the Chinese-American community. After the initial flurry of interest, resulting in the book, the station fell into disrepair again. In 1997, the National Trust named the immigration station one of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” and it became an official project of Save America’s Treasures.

While over $19 million was raised for phase 1, another $31 million is still needed, although federal funds may soon come to the rescue. Last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s federal bill to restore Angel Island passed both the House and Senate. In later phases of the project, the hospital, now a gutted shell, will be turned into a museum and a genealogy center will be set up.

Life in the Barracks

The insects chirp outside the four walls
The inmates often sigh
Thinking of affairs back home,
Unconscious tears wet my lapel.

Like most immigrants, the Chinese came to the U.S. for greater economic prosperity and personal freedom. Most who came here were young men in their teens and early 20s, often from rural parts of China where poverty was taking its toll.

“They were coming from conditions of famine and civil unrest in China,” says Marisa Louie, exhibition coordinator at the Chinese Historical Society of America. “They wanted to come here to support family businesses and just because of the greater economic conditions here.”

In 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigrants (except for a few exempt classes such as scholars, merchants, students and diplomats). During the 1906 earthquake, a fire burned down San Francisco’s City Hall, destroying all official documents including the immigration records. From this, a black market of Chinese paper identities emerged. People in China who didn’t fit the exempt classes could claim to be the sons of people already living in San Francisco, giving them automatic citizenship. These “paper sons” paid a large sum for their false identities, as much as $100 for every year of the immigrant’s life. In return, the paper son got a detailed history of his new supposed family, usually in a booklet that he memorized on the way to America.

In many cases, families sacrificed to send their sons to America, which they called Gold Mountain or the Land of the Flowery Flag. Because of the financial investment, many detainees worried that if they were deported, they would be letting their families down.

“Spending more than five-thousand golden coins, I drifted alone to this place,” wrote one poet. “If I am unlucky enough to be deported, my parents will be grieved.”

When the immigrants arrived on the island, they were first examined at the hospital for parasites and diseases. They were asked to strip naked and give a stool sample, things that were not common in Chinese medicine. Many people were shocked and humiliated by the exams.

“At the hospital, everything was white, which is the color for funerals in China,” says Gee. “So they were entering a white building and seeing doctors dressed all in white, and it was quite upsetting for them.”

Afterwards, the immigrants went on to interrogations, where they had to prove their claims to enter the U.S. If they claimed to be the son of a resident, their testimonies were scrutinized and compared to the testimony of his relatives. Officials tried to catch immigrants off-guard with detailed or surprising questions. If the slightest discrepancy was detected, the immigrants were detained.

In the barracks, the detainees were surprised by how much the conditions resembled prison. Segregated by race and sex, they slept two or three sharing a folding metal bunk and were not allowed outside except for a limited time in a fenced yard. The rooms were locked at night and guards were stationed in towers.

And the food was terrible.

In fact, the detainees protested the food so much that officials posted signs warning them not to spill food or cause other disturbances. In 1919, a riot broke out in the dining hall and federal troops were called in to restore order. A year later, a Chinese cook was brought in, and things seemed to improve.

Less is known about the female immigrants who came to Angel Island. While fewer Chinese women came to the U.S., there were still cases of “paper daughters.” The women’s dormitory was in the administration building, so if they wrote poems on the walls, any poetry was destroyed in the fire. The women may have had more freedom than the men while on the island. They were able to take walks with local churchwomen, for example.

Shortly after the administration building burned down, the station closed. Then China became an ally in World War II, which changed diplomatic relationships between the two countries.

Of course, the Chinese were not the only people to stay at the immigration station. In fact, 1 million people went through altogether. Much of that was during World War II, when the barracks were used to detain Japanese, Italians and Germans. Each group left marks on the walls, all of which will be translated in time.

Good Poetry?

The silvery red shirt is half covered with dust
A flickering lamp keeps this body company.
I am like pear blossoms which have already fallen;
Pity the bare branches during the late spring.

In China, poetry is a public expression of emotion and is often written as a group activity. The poetry on Angel Island follows that tradition—it was a public declaration of private shame.

“These are good poems,” says Egan. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they are highly educated poems—some of them are, and some of them aren’t. But they definitely speak directly about an emotional experience, which in Chinese poetry is probably more important.”

The poems are in the style of classical Chinese poetry, with some educated language and historical or literary allusions. The immigrants may also have formed poetry clubs to decide what would go on the wall. The calligraphy and carvings throughout the building are carefully and uniformly done, suggesting supervision. Some of the poems were even signed by the Angel Island Liberty Association, which may have been the name of one of the clubs.

The poems express loneliness, homesickness, worry and anger, especially at the doctors or America in general. There are poems about feeling hopeless, but also outrage at being oppressed and a desire for revenge.

“The dragon out of water is humiliated by ants;” wrote one poet. “The fierce tiger who is caged is baited by a child.”

The poems also call and respond to each other and use imagery unique to Angel Island.

“There is language there that is not seen in other places,” says Egan. “The imprisonment of an ancient Chinese emperor is mentioned a dozen times at least, but the allusion is not common in China. Somehow this particular emperor struck a chord in the people there—he was imprisoned and then went on to do great things.”

Shame and Fear

Each day my sorrow increases as I stay on the Island.
My face, as well, grows sallow and my body, thin.
My detention and mistreatment has not yet ended.
I am afraid my petition will be denied, and I, sent back.

In later years, few immigrants talked about their experience on Angel Island. Some felt shame at being detained or just wanted to get on with their lives. Others, especially paper sons, were afraid of being deported. So it was not uncommon for families to keep the Angel Island experience to themselves.

Both Gee’s grandmother on her mother’s side and grandfather on her father’s side came through Angel Island. Gee never learned her grandfather’s story before he passed away, but her grandmother, who is still alive, had a good experience. She spent only one night there and even assisted officials in translating.

When Gee was hired at the AIISF, she decided to look up her grandfather’s experience. She knew that in 1928, her grandfather Moon Fong Gee immigrated to San Francisco from China, so she asked about him at the National Archives.

“I said, this is my grandfather’s name, do you think you might be able to find anything?” she says. “And about 15 minutes later, a man came out with this file. Not only did they interview the Chinese immigrants in those days, but they took photographs of them. So inside the file, I saw this photograph of my grandfather. It was the youngest I had ever seen him.”

A week later, Gee went to her other grandmother, Moon Fong Gee’s wife, and told her about finding the file.

“And my grandmother said, ‘Oh yeah, Angel Island. He almost got deported because of his gold teeth,’ ” she says. “And I was like, ‘What?’ ”

Looking again in the file, Gee saw that there were questions about where her grandfather got his gold teeth. Because of this, he stayed at Angel Island for three weeks. Gee also learned that because her grandfather was a paper son, his real name was not Gee—before coming to America, he had been Chin.

In 1959, California held a confession program where paper sons could get amnesty for their illegal status and become permanent residents. At this time, they could also take back their birth names if they wanted.

But some seemed to like their paper names. For example, Yung’s father, who spent two months on Angel Island before coming to San Francisco, was Tom Yip Jing in China. His paper name, and new identity, was Yung Hin Sen.

“My father chose not to get amnesty,” she says. “He never confessed. It says his paper name on his tombstone, so he chose to keep his name all the way to his grave. We honor his choice in that.”

Parallels to Today

I am distressed that we Chinese are detained in this wooden building.
It is actually racial barriers which cause difficulties on Yingtai Island.
Even while they are tyrannical, they still claim to be humanitarian.
I should regret my taking the risks of coming in the first place.

Angel Island has been called the Ellis Island of the West, but it is more like Ellis Island’s darker doppelgänger. Ellis Island processed 12 million people, and only 2 percent were turned away. In addition, people were processed within a few hours on Ellis Island, compared to an average of two or three weeks on Angel Island.

“Angel Island is a symbol of the darker side of immigration,” says Yung. “There were laws to restrict Asians and an open-door policy to Europeans. I don’t think Americans want to remember that our immigration policies have not always been open and equal.”

These days, we are still dealing with the same questions Angel Island grappled with: Who is allowed into the country? What do we do with undocumented immigrants? How much should race be a factor? Given this, Angel Island is more than a time capsule of a particular immigration experience.

“We look back at the Chinese exclusions laws and we think they are awful and racist and unfair,” says Egan. “Then again, look at our feelings about other places today. Are we as progressive as we want to be? Clearly not. And that is the other reason Angel Island is important. It is living history—not just an archive. It speaks to modern times.”

“For what reason must I sit in jail?” one immigrant lamented. “It is only because my country is weak and my family poor.”

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