Chinese Americans

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."

Even before the morning dew dried on the knolls of Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary in Whittier on Saturday, hundreds of Chinese families were lined up outside the gate, their cars packed with bountiful offerings: fruit, noodle and vegetable dishes, whole roasted pigs. The long procession of cars -- 15,000 to 20,000 are expected through this afternoon -- meandered up the steep pathways to the west side of the cemetery, where many of Southern California's Chinese are buried.

The hundreds of brittle bones were buried in a forgotten cemetery with intricate ceramics, jade jewelry and opium pipes. They were the last earthly possessions of what could be dozens of Chinese workers too poor to have been buried back in China and too little-known to merit headstones. Some more than a century old, they offer an irresistible window into a dark chapter in Los Angeles' history.

Headlines about dangerous toys from China dominated the news for months last year, prompting congressional hearings and consumer questions about the Asian manufacturing giant's product safety. But Walter and Shirley Wang, Bel-Air residents with three children, asked a different question: Where were the headlines pointing out that some of the problems were caused not by shoddy Chinese manufacturing practices but by American design flaws?

Cars, bank notes and TVs were going up in flames one chilly winter morning in the parking lot of Universal Chung Wah Funeral Home in Alhambra. Thirteen white-clad relatives of Dam Lam, 87, formed a circle, each cradling a stack of paper models: a foot-long 747 jetliner, a black-and-gold car sitting in the courtyard of a 2-foot-tall, red-tiled paper mansion. One by one, the items were thrown into the fire licking out of a 4-by-4-foot wheeled container, charred from years of use.

This wisp of a town owes its existence to Chinese laborers who panned gold in the mid-1800s and laid railroad tracks linking Utah and Sacramento. Yet the immigrants were mostly ostracized, made to live in a wood-shack Chinatown that later was bulldozed to make way for Interstate 80. Now, their legacy is relegated to Larry De Leeuw's garage. On a recent afternoon, De Leeuw squeezed into a cubbyhole walled off from his power tools and bottle cap collection.

They used to call Monterey Park "the Chinese Beverly Hills," a suburb east of downtown Los Angeles that for three decades has been synonymous with the explosion of Chinese immigration and trade in the San Gabriel Valley. But in recent years, some of the luster once associated with Monterey Park has moved east to newer communities including City of Industry, Walnut and Diamond Bar. And that's left city leaders debating the town's future. Enter developer Jason Chung.

The politics of burying and respecting the dead was at the heart of Saturday's traditional Ch'ing Ming festival, an annual Chinese event at which families visit their loved one's burial place. Mounted by the Chinese Historical Society, the festival at the historic Chinese shrine in Boyle Heights' Evergreen Cemetery is meant to honor those buried there nearly a century ago.

As the Olympic torch made its way through the streets of Paris, London and San Francisco, tens of thousands protested China's treatment of Tibet and the Dalai Lama. But inside some Chinese American communities, notably the San Gabriel Valley, the view of Tibet and its spiritual leader is far more complex.

It was far from the biggest protest in Los Angeles. But when more than 1,000 demonstrators including students, business people and engineers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia rallied in front of CNN's Hollywood headquarters a week ago, it marked a milestone for the local Chinese community.