Bolin Yu: A Short Story

I, Bolin Yu, was born February of 1928 in Huangpu, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. The village that I lived in was pretty isolated, but not far away from danger. My mother and I get our food from raising crops and ponds where we raised fish, a pretty fair way of living and not going hungry. The house we lived in had no electricity, so life was pretty desolate then, it was made of brick and our floor was made out of dirt, we had outhouses as bathrooms. I remember my village having had gun towers that were positioned throughout the village, that really had no use because we barely have any firearms, to protect ourselves from robber bandits but nonetheless we scared most of them off. Thinking about it now, our life was pretty well off because I had a grandfather that migrated in California, he would send money back to us because apparently he made a

In 1939, I was brought over in the U.S. on the S.S. President Coolidge, one of the last steamships that left the coast of Hong Kong. I vaguely remember reaching Angel Island, the immigration station for asian people, located in California at the end of September of 1939. I remember being given the numbers “93829” as an identification number, and being called to interrogation with the number I was given written on a blackboard. The interrogations last for an hour or more even, when I got interrogated there would be an official sitting on a table with a secretary typing, a translator, a guard, and sometimes one more person known by the other immigrants as a “scouter.” I was detained for almost a month in Angel Island because I got very many answers wrong, no matter how much my grandfather taught me. The memory that stood out the most to me was when they eventually let me go. On the blackboard that I held was my number and a word that says “San