Walls of broken dreams
1930s Chinese poetry reflects disillusion in American dream
Phillip Zonkel, Staff Writer
U-Entertainment
Article Launched:05/31/2006 12:00:00 AM PDT
IN 1985, RICHARD Turner, an Orange resident and professor of fine art at Chapman University, visited San Francisco's Angel Island Immigration Station, a California state park, and saw intricate poems carved and painted on the walls of the men's barracks. They were created by Chinese immigrants who were detained on the 470-acre island in the middle of San Francisco Bay under Chinese exclusionary laws in the early 20th century.
The poems — long forgotten until they were rediscovered accidentally in 1970 by a park ranger — express grief, frustration, nostalgia and the broken dreams of the languishing victims.
The works inspired Turner's sculpture, "Bridge to Angel Island," which flanks the entrance to the art gallery of the University Art Museum on the Cal State Long Beach campus. It consists of four panels comprised of glass, steel and wood — materials similar to those of the barracks. The panels, which have been at the site since 1994, contain etchings, carvings and sandblasted calligraphy replicas of four Angel Island poems written in Chinese characters.
One reads:
The insects chirp outside the four walls. The inmates often sigh. Thinking of affairs back home, unconscious tears wet my lapel.
Another reads:
America has power, but not justice. In prison, we were victimized as if we were guilty. Given no opportunity to explain, it was really brutal. I bow my head in reflection but there is nothing I can do.
The panels, although mounted on a conjoined grid, are monolithic and tombstone-like memorials.
Turner wanted the represented poems in their original Chinese.
"The viewer is in the shoes of a Chinese immigrant who can't read English," he says. "The viewer becomes for a moment in a small sense an outsider."
These poems mirror the feelings of many Chinese immigrants who were housed at Angel Island. PROCESSING CENTER From 1910 to 1940, Angel Island Immigration Station served as a processing and detainment center. The station processed about 1 million immigrants (Japanese, Russian, Indian, Korean, Australian and Filipino), including 175,000-200,000 Chinese. The station was closed in 1940, but was used by the U.S. Army as a prisoner of war processing camp during World War II. It was permanently shut down after WWII.
Despite its innocent sounding name, Angel Island was more of a devil's island. It was the West Coast's insidious version of Ellis Island. It was established through federal legislation aimed at stemming the tide of immigration — the physical embodiment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. The law was enacted in response to complaints about the influx of Chinese laborers, who had come to work on the railroads. In some cases, traveling U.S. citizens of Chinese descent had to endure the same procedures and some were not granted permission to re-enter America.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first U.S. legislation to ban a specific ethnic group. It was repealed in 1943, when China became America's ally in World War II, and replaced with a quota system that allowed only 105 Chinese per year into the U.S.
Chinese were not on equal-immigration footing with other ethnicities until the laws were completely rewritten in the mid 1960s.
Unlike Ellis Island, where most immigrants only stayed several hours, Angel Island held Chinese immigrants for an average of two or three weeks, some for nearly two years, as officials verified their immigration status with grueling interrogation interviews.
Historical accounts of life at the station showed great disparity between treatment of Asian and non-Asian immigrants, who were held in separate quarters. Asian detainees, housed in sections of the two-story barracks building that were meant to accommodate 100 but often held 500, were given substandard food, saltwater showers and limited recreation behind barbed-wire fences.
Views from triple-stacked bunks only hinted at the lush greenery and deep blue ocean just outside their confines. Detainees were kept on the north side of Angel Island, facing away from the bustling city that promised them so much opportunity. EXPRESSIVE POEMS Languishing from indefinite stays, prison-like quarters and humiliating medical examinations, many Chinese turned to poetry to vent.
"These walls are talking," says Erika Gee, education director at the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
The raw, poignant language reveals the poet's intimate feelings and state of mind.
"Poetry with a personal feeling is a bedrock in Chinese literature," says Charles Egan, associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. "It dates back as far as 500 B.C. when the 'Shijing' or 'Book of Poetry' was compiled.
"Poetry was seen as a natural product of emotional experience, so there was always a premium placed on expressing yourself, especially in a time of high emotion.
"This is not gibberish," Egan says. "It's good poetry. "These people received at least some education. They use historical allusion and classic language. There are references to classic literature and mythology."
In traditional China, writing poetry was a social practice, with groups of people getting together to transcribe their feelings. The authors also posted their work on public walls.
The poems at Angel Island suggest the writers were well-educated and well-organized, possibly working in "poetry clubs" that were selective about what became mural-like carvings on the wall, Egan says.
"There's a call and response going on in the poetry," he says.
Homer Lee, who was 16 when he arrived at Angel Island in 1926, remembered seeing groups of older men — many of them schoolteachers — huddled together to discuss and display their poetry on the walls during his six-month detainment.
"They tell the truth of their lives and the future of their lives on the wall," says the 95-year-old, who now lives in Berkeley.
Dismissed as graffiti by guards and officials at the time, the writings frequently were painted over and/or filled with putty, which obscured them for decades until a park ranger rediscovered them in the 1970s.
RESCUED FOR HISTORY
At the time, the dilapidated barracks were scheduled for destruction, but were saved from demolition. In 1997, Angel Island Immigration Station became a National Historic Landmark. It is one of only two sites related to Asian-American history (the other is the Japanese-American Internment Camp Manzanar) that hold national-landmark status.
"There is no other historical presence like this in the United States for Chinese Immigrants," says Daphne Kwok, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
The poems have been the focus of a $50 million, three-phase state parks restoration project under way at the Angel Island Immigration Station. A mix of federal, state and private money funds the project.
Before work began last August, a team of scholars combed the station's barracks and hospital, locating every visible piece of writing on the walls. It was the first-ever attempt at creating such a record, and scholars are using it to find out more about the life of detainees.
Until now, the most comprehensive account was the 1980 book "Island," which published 135 Angel Island poems. But the collection, based on 1930s-era manuscripts by two detainees who reportedly copied poems off the walls, never was physically corroborated. The project located most of those poems and found about 60 new ones.
In 1979, researchers started the process of conducting oral histories with 30 detainees, who wanted to remain anonymous, and translating the poems.
Historian Judy Yung, a co-author of "Island" who conducted oral histories of former detainees, says researchers have been unable to locate any of the poets. Unlike writings by detainees of other nationalities, most of the Chinese work was unsigned.
"There was a sense of secrecy and shame to what happened at Angel Island," Yung says. "It doesn't matter who wrote them, but that the poems speak certain truths and speak certain feelings that we all understand."
Former detainees did not share their stories of incarceration with their children, wanting to put their unpleasant experience behind them. Chinese immigrants who came under false names lived in fear of government retribution and even possible deportation.
"Some (former detainees) want to forget or minimize what happened," says Georges Van Den Abbeele, professor of humanities at UC Davis, who is directing the third phase of the oral history project. "All these things conspire to make it difficult" to record the stories.
"It's not one of the more pleasing parts of American history; it's pretty negative, and it's a forgotten chapter," he says. "But it's important to get the story told."
Angel Island Immigration Station will reopen to the public in the summer of 2007 after completion of the first phase of restoration, featuring a new exhibit with the scholars' findings.
The exhibit spotlights the Chinese poetry, but it also includes writings from other Asian, Russian, South American and Middle Eastern immigrants who passed through the station, as well as World War II prisoners of war later held there.
While those writings were mainly just short messages and name inscriptions, Egan says the diversity shown hopefully will help visitors understand the Angel Island experience as "a real American story out there that has a large resonance."
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