ANGEL ISLAND STATE PARK — At Angel Island Immigration Station, the walls really can talk. Until now, though, they haven't told the whole story of this notorious West Coast entry point in the heart of San Francisco Bay.
Their first words were in Chinese, stately poems of longing and revenge carved into the wooden barracks by desperate detainees between 1910 and 1940 and discovered by accident more than a generation later.
"Sadness," wrote one anonymous poet, "kills the person in the wooden building."
"Thinking of affairs back home," wrote another. "Unconscious tears wet my lapel."
Angel Island was patterned after Ellis Island in New York Harbor, but law and geopolitics conspired to make it a vastly different experience -- particularly for Chinese immigrants, who arrived in greater numbers, were detained longer and were deported more often than Europeans.
After the rickety complex was shuttered, it was turned over to the state park service and slated for demolition in the 1970s.
But a sharp-eyed ranger spotted the ghostly verses.
Demolition canceled. Poems published. Image solidified.
The 740-acre island became the symbol of a shameful chapter in Chinese American history, when laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred some immigrants on the basis of race for the first time.
"Ellis Island was a processing station of entry," said historian Judy Yung, whose father was detained on Angel Island for two months. "Angel Island was a half-open door at best."
But as Angel Island Immigration Station reopens Sunday after a $16-million refurbishment, the walls have begun to tell a more complex tale, revealed by a new generation of scholarship and the discovery of more inscriptions.
Poems, yes, including about 80 newly discovered Chinese verses. But there are also writings from many other nationalities. Desperate demands in Japanese: "Get me out of here fast!" Impatient orders in German: "Close the doors. There's a draft." A simple tally in Gurmukhi, a script used by Sikhs: "100 days. Tara Singh." Carved birds and a shrine to good fortune, with a butterfly and a basket.
If such recasting softens the edges of Angel Island's grim story, said park Supt. Dave Matthews, so be it.
"The story was darker when it came to the Chinese," Matthews acknowledged. But "many Americans got their start on the West Coast. This is where that happened for them. . . . We want to broaden the identity of the station to its true identity as a place where hundreds of thousands of Americans got their start."
