On Angel Island Detention Center's Enduring Verse

At The New Yorker, Beenish Ahmed meditates on two books, one academic and one in verse, to fathom the plight of Chinese immigrants upon entry to the United States in the late 19th century. On the walls of Angel Island Detention Center, Chinese men wrote poems of peril. (A fire in the separate women's house destroyed their words.) What remains is a brutal reminder of the era's intolerance. It is the exact opposite of the Statue of Liberty, where the immigrant experience is commemorated, nearly celebrated, in compassionate verse by Emma Lazarus. Ahmed notes that "signatures and comments were written on the walls in various languages, but 'only the Chinese wrote poetry,' according to Judy Yung, a professor emerita in American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who co-edited 'Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940.'" Let's start there:

Yung has dedicated much of her career to studying the immigration station through which her own father entered the U.S., along with a hundred thousand other Chinese immigrants. With meagre rations, restricted access to the outdoors, and separate quarters for men and women, the facility very much resembled a prison for Chinese detainees, who were held there for weeks or months. Meanwhile, European and many other Asian émigrés were typically allowed entry to the U.S. after just a few hours or days. More than half of the poems express deep-seated resentment for the immigration station’s dismal conditions or describe the desire to avenge unfair treatment.

It's possible that much of what was written was destroyed. In 1922, twelve years after it opened, the Commissioner-General of Immigration declared Angel Island to be filthy and unfit for habitation—"the ramshackle buildings are nothing but firetraps," he warned. In 1940, the facility finally did catch fire, and the blaze ravaged the building where women detainees were held. Whatever poems women wrote on those walls were lost to history.

In "Islanders," which was published last year, Teow Lim Goh imagines English-language versions of the poems that Chinese women detainees might have composed. Goh, who lives in Denver, told me over the phone that she didn't consider herself a poet when she first visited Angel Island, several years ago. Goh is both a Chinese immigrant and an American citizen, and although she insists that her own journey to the United States is not very interesting—she came for college and stayed on to work—she felt a connection with the detainees. The book's first poem, written in her own voice, begins, "I am not the daughter of a / paper son / false citizen / prisoner," before declaring, nonetheless, "This is my legacy."

Read more at The New Yorker.