Uncover The Dark Past Of The Island Which Once Hosted The Western Port Of Entry For Immigrants From Asia And Beyond
Angel Island is a softly rising tree-covered dome, measuring 38 acres, right in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Once the hunting grounds of native tribes and later a cattle ranch, the land hosted the western port of entry for immigrants from Asia and beyond before World War II.
It was that history as an immigration station, as the “Ellis Island of the West,” that poses some difficulties for the place, which is now a California state park. Unlike Ellis Island, which represents something positive about the national character, Angel Island hides a darker history.
Once arrived, Chinese laborers were far from assured of entry into the U.S. They were the specific targets of an 1882 exclusion bill that was written to bar them from the U.S. Historical authors point out that Chinese immigrants were subjected to intense and detailed interrogations, as they sought refuge in the United States after a long journey across the Pacific Ocean.
In a sense, the immigration station at Angel Island was set up to implement that law.
Judy Yung, a professor emeritus of American Studies at UC Riverside, has written two books about the Chinese plight on Angel Island. She has a special interest in the place. Her father was one of the Chinese migrants who passed through the station, but only after he assumed a false identity that would fool the officials.
"My name – Yung -- is from that paper identity," Yung said. "Everyone in Chinatown (San Francisco), we all had dual identities. You can think about how that would screw up our minds and our identities.”
Yung's father was stuck on Angel Island for two months waiting for his interrogation. A migrant farmer by trade, he assumed the identity of a merchant’s son from Mainland China, and memorized every aspect of his life in order to pass the intense interrogation he faced.
The immigration station at Angel Island was set up in the early 20th century after Congress appropriated $200,000 to the project. Previously, migrants from Asia were inspected on the ships they arrive on, and when that became impossible, they were put into a wooden shack on San Francisco pier 40, where more than 200 immigrants would be stacked for weeks on end. This drew the ire of Chinese diplomats, and Congress acted to build the immigration station.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were inspected for health and identity on Angel Island over the years. But the Chinese had the worst of it, Yung said.
Even after passing the physical exam, they would often wait for weeks or months to stand before the interrogation board (Yung said the longest internment discovered was 2 years). Interrogations could take days and were prosecuted aggressively against the Chinese. Other immigrants -- say from Australia -- were often interned on Angel Island for a mere matter of days before being ushered into the country.
"They developed an elaborate interrogation process against the Chinese," Yung said. "They asked about their families, relationships to sponsors, village life. These hearings could go on for days - and if there were any discrepancies - a different answer to some question - they would be portable."
In other words, they would be going back. Yung’s father managed to learn the entirety of the background of the son of a well-to-do Chinese merchant, and slipped through the interrogation to make it into the country.
"They were stuck in these buildings for really no reason, and not understanding what their future is, and not understanding why they were there," said Ben Fenkell, state park interpreter at Angel Island. "They were coming to the U.S. with ideas of opportunities and all these positive ideas of what America is, and when they get here it is really the opposite."
The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in the middle of World War II, as a concession to the Chinese, who were allies in the war against Japan. Angel Island was then used to process prisoners of war and eventually it was abandoned altogether. In 1963, it was resurrected as a state park and it received recognition in the 1990s as a National Historic landmark.
Today, access is limited to private boats and a public ferry from San Francisco, Tiburon or Vallejo. Visitors can see what remains of the immigration station that processed so many individuals, as well as the barracks that housed up to 600 immigrants at a time, for months on end. Bunks were stacked three deep in the large room and it was impossible to sit up in the lower bunks.
A park ranger discovered that the walls of one barracks were covered in Chinese poems. Yung documented and published the poems that were etched into the walls by Chinese immigrants waiting for interrogation.
One of these anonymous poems went as follows:
Detained in this wooden house for several tens of days,
It is all because of the Mexican exclusion law which implicates me.
It's a pity heroes have no way of exercising their prowess.
I can only await the word so that I can snap Zhu's whip.
From now on I am departing far from this building.
All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me.
Don't say that everything within is Western-styled.
Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage
Yung explained that a 1931 Mexican expulsion order forced hundreds of Chinese Mexicans to leave homes in Sonora and Sinaloa and cross into the U.S. Because of the Chinese exclusion law, many of these refugees ended up detained on Angel Island while waiting to be deported to China.
Yung said Ellis Island, on the other side of the country, represents more of what Americans like to think of the US identity: An open and working immigration station that welcomed refugees from Europe to a life of liberty. The history of Angel Island is not only less known, but the desire to know about it is less, as well.
"There is relevance between this history and what is going on today with the anti-immigrant rhetoric and the reluctance of Congress to fix the broken immigration system," Yung said. "It is the one negative incident in our history and that is why people don't want to hear it."
Between hiking and camping, visitors have the opportunity to see those poems etched into the barrack walls, and think about what it must have meant to be marooned on an island so far from home, just waiting to enter a new land.
David Irvin
A graduate with a Masters Of Science from the University Of North Texas, David has written on many beats including crime and business for such outlets as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Montgomery Advertiser & USA. He enjoys RVing and surfing the Internet.
Make Sure To Stay At:
Marin RV Park, the closest recreational vehicle park to San Francisco--just 10 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. We are ideally located for sight-seeing of San Francisco, the Golden Gate National Recreational Area, Muir Woods, Pt. Reyes, Napa Valley and many other California sights.