January 18, 2023

By Matthew Turk

…By 1910, the Angel Island Immigration Station at San Francisco Bay had opened its doors. Angel Island processed immigrants, most often those coming from China, for several decades, eventually earning its sunny epithet “Ellis Island of the West.” However, the hundreds of thousands of people who were processed — that is, detained and interrogated — had a different way of describing the place: with poetry.

Along the pale, cracking wood of Angel Island’s barracks, etched symbols from that time are still visible today. Since the California Department of Parks and Recreation took possession of the island and made it a State Park, 220 Chinese poems have been identified, along with a number of other inscriptions in English, Russian, Japanese and Korean.

Subject to medical examinations, harsh living conditions and separation from family, detainees trudged from one day to the next, in pain and uncertainty. Their poems unflinchingly strip away the euphemisms from Angel Island’s history. Though the poems are untitled and authors unknown, it’s believed that the poems were largely written by young Chinese men from ages 14 to 18 living in the detention barracks, according to the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. These detainees had some formal education and likely had rosier prior expectations of how the New World would be. (read more)