When I first started researching Angel Island as part of a personal project, I wasn’t expecting much. Very few primary sources have been left behind by those who passed through Angel Island. Most Chinese immigrants during the Exclusion era, when Angel Island was active, were illiterate. Those who were literate often had limited access to writing materials, didn’t preserve their writing, and produced work that remains untranslated. Yet, I found a wealth of knowledge about Asian-American history translated through one medium: poetry. “Abandoning wife and child, I crossed an entire ocean.
I do not know how much wind and frost I’ve
Weathered; it was because my family was poor
That I searched for the white jade.
Bidding farewell to relatives and friends, I drifted
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It is difficult to keep track of all the
Rain and snow I have endured; it is all due to a
Harsh purse with a reverence for copper coins.”
-Written by an anonymous immigrant on Angel Island, from “Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940” by Him Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung Hundreds of thousands of poems were scrawled on the walls of Angel Island, the immigration processing center that prevented Chinese entry during the Exclusion era. Through these poems, a resounding message of a mixture of anger, bitterness, sorrow, and hope was expressed. Most were sloppily written by barely literate Chinese farmers, but the impact of them is still great. These poems discussed factors leading to immigration, such as poverty, arranged marriages through the “picture bride” system, and ambition. They communicated to historians the complex and differing stories of immigrants bravely facing a new world of American Sinophobia and Yellow Peril, allowing a more complex analysis of Asian-American history. These poems, alone, have shaped much of our modern understanding of early Asian