Charles Egan:
Catherine Toy:
Charles Egan, associate Professor, San Francisco State University.
Catherine Toy, executive director, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation
Recorded by Michael Johnson
TRACK 1: (longer version of track 3)[ANGEL POETRY]
Charles Egan: Okay. I’m Charles Egan and I’m Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. And I got involved in this Angel Island project when they formed a small research group to do a, take another look at the walls of the barracks, as they hadn’t really been studied comprehensively for the last, say 20 years or so. So we were going to just take a new look to see A, if we could find the locations of the poems that have previously been published, and B, if we could find new inscriptions in both Chinese and other languages – if we could try to transcribe those and translate them and put them into some kind of context. The way that they’re arranged, the way that they’re carved….
SKIPS…national importance, not just for the Chinese community. Second thing which I found really interesting is the, as far as poems go, the way that they’re arranged, the way that they’re carved, shows you that there was a real community effort in creating these things. It wasn’t just a few individuals who thought up a few lines and put them on the walls. People were writing poems in response to other poems. And people could have been in the barracks at the same time, writing at the same time as other poets, or it could have been after a period of years, it really doesn’t matter. You get this real sense of a community of people expressing a community feeling that’s really quite remarkable.
PAUSE
Charles Egan: It’s quite a combination. It goes all the way from a kind of melancholy, very traditional Chinese themes – homesickness, feelings about loss of power, loss of self, all the way to very angry poems on political topics. There are quite a few poems there that show indignation at the Americans for locking them up, and hope that China will rise soon to match America in power. So it’s quite a range. You even have a few that are less poetic sentiments than they are admonitions for other detainees to follow. For example there’s one poem up there, or I guess you may not even call it a poem, cuz it’s sort of in doggerel verse. Of an immigrant complaining about his money being stolen by another immigrant and warning all the others around that there’s a thief in the house.
. Charles Egan: ..as regards its connection with Chinese poetry. One, even though these poems were written between 1910 and 1940, you know, modern times, every one of them is written in traditional style. At the same time in China there were all these experiments with free verse and Western…that’s what the myth has been, but what you find from the walls is at least some of the people out there were quite well educated. Nobody would know how to write poetry like this unless they had had a decent education. The rules are too esoteric for one thing. You see, there’s a whole lot of use of historical illusions on the walls too, which definitely shows study of the classics. And also a few of the poems are just very eloquent in Chinese. There’s definitely a range: you go from poems that are somewhat more doggerel style, to some which are clearly amateur efforts to some that are very very polished, but definitely the whole group shows a certain educational level and how should I say, understanding of the importance of high culture.
Charles Egan: Sure, let me read one. This one is from, was published in “Island,” so I’m reading the translation that was already published. It’s called “Random Thoughts Deep at Night.” “In the quiet of night I heard faintly the whistling of wind, the forms and shadows saddened me. Upon seeing the landscape I composed a poem. The floating clouds, the fog, dark in the sky. The moon shines faintly as the insects chirp. Grief and bitterness entwined are heaven-sent. The sad person sits alone leaning by a window.” That’s “Random Thoughts Deep at Night,” number 13 deep in Island.
Charles Egan: Sure. I’ll read it in Mandarin, though, not in Cantonese.
Charles Egan: Thank you. So that’s an example of one of the homesick style ones. See if I can find one that’s a little bit more…
…have its impact. Let me read this one. “I lean on the railing and lift my head to look at the cloudy sky. All the mountains and rivers are dark. Eastern Mongolia is lost and the date of her return is uncertain. The recovery of the central plains depends on the youth. Only the tongue of can slay the villainess. To kill the bandit, we must wave the whip of . I’m ashamed to be curled up like a worm on an island. I grieve for my native land, but what else can I say?” And this appears to have been written in the 1930s after the Japanese had invaded. And the Chong Shan in that couplet there refers to an offical of the Tong dynasty – Yen Gou Ching, who led an army against the rebels in the An Yu Shan rebellion in 1755 to 1760. He was defeated and captured, but all during the execution he continued to revile the enemy. So the tongue of Chong Shan can slay the villainess. And Zhu Di was a general during the western Zhin dynasty during the 4th century, and when non-Chinese peoples seized control of the yellow river valley in the 4th century, Zhu Di vowed to recover the lost territory. One of his friends also a general once said, “I sleep with my weapon awaiting the dawn. My ambition is to kill the barbarian enemy. But I am always afraid that Zhu will crack the whip before me.” Thus the reference means to try hard, be first, and essentially to get back lands that have been taken. So those notes are also from the published book.
Charles Egan: Sure, let me give it a try.
Charles Egan: I try. It’s actually a very long-standing Chinese tradition to…
Charles Egan: …yes, there definitely is. And it’s actually a very long-standing Chinese tradition to add person expressions to place. It’s a whole different kind of idea of what place meant. Here in America when we want to go to the mountains we go to an unspoiled place that humans have never been. We want to go to Yosemite and it looks like nobody’s ever been there before. But in China the tradition was to go to a place and then think of what the great poet Lee Boah said about it, or remember how it had been used in history, or so on. So this combination of words and text with place is a long-standing tradition. If you travel in China, you’ll see enscriptions everywhere, right up on the walls of buildings or carved into cliffs or on stone tablets. All of these are markers of the same idea. So it’s not surprising really. It’s remarkable in this country to see this here, but it’s not surprising from the Chinese context.
TRACK 2: [ANGEL POETRY WORK 2]
Catherine Toy: I’m Catherine Toy, executive director at the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. I’ve been with the foundation for four years now. The immigration station opened in 1910 and its reason for existence is really enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act which was passed by Congress in 1882. For many years, so from 1882 to 1910, Chinese immigrants were processed and detained at the docks of the Pacific Mail Steamship company, down on the wharf, and that was really seen as inadequate. So an island location was selected. One, in I suppose the same reasons that Alcatraz was built to be a prison is that it was difficult, that they really thought it would be more difficult for immigrants coming in to try to collaborate stories with relatives and friends in Chinatown. During the operation of the immigration station it’s actually been kind of interesting and fun to read the commentary, or the comments and the memos and so forth, correspondence back and forth between government officials about the quote, unquote, graffiti and the writing on the walls, while the immigration station was in operation. So we know from memos from the National Archives when we’ve done research about the immigration station that as early as 1910 the immigrants were writing on the walls. So the first year it opened, they were already writing. And we know that the immigration station employed an interior painter full-time, and I think it’s sort of like the old joke about painting the Golden Gate bridge – you start on one end and once you finish, it’s time to start on the other end again. And we know that the interior painter was so busy, in fact, that they had to outside-contract to a painter to paint the outside of the building. So there were also memos between officials that said things like, we’ve got to post signs in five languages to tell people not to write on the walls, that that’s government property and so on and so forth. It seems like they were continuously painted over and what we’ve discovered in the restoration work in the last two years is that the reason the poems are currently difficult to read is that they were filled with putty and painted over. We think that they were inked onto the wall and then carved, so that the carver was following the ink lines. The first book that was really about the poetry, that book being “Island: the History and Poetry of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island,” Genny Lim of course being one of the authors, that was the first published work about the poetry. But the work that they did that from was really based on two notebooks that were created by two detainees of the Immigration station in the 1930s, who at the time wrote down poems into notebooks and then Genny and Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung used those notebooks to create the book “Island.” My understanding is that they were copying poems off the walls. We do know their notebooks contained poems from both the first floor and the second floor, so it’s interesting that they weren’t restricted in their access, at least by floor. There were barracks on both floors. Most of the poetry is in two large rooms – one on the first floor and one on the second floor. In fact, they’re right above one another. Those were the large men’s barracks. And so that’s where you find most of the poems. You will find other inscriptions and writings in other places, including poems, but far fewer than you see in those two main rooms.
Catherine Toy…stay for a Chinese detainee was two to three weeks. The average stay for a Chinese detainee was two to three weeks. The longest recorded stay was 22 months and if you hear of somebody who stayed longer than several weeks, likely, so if you hear about people staying six months, 8 months, 10 months, that kind of thing, almost for sure the reason that they were staying that long is that they had been set for deportation and they were challenging their cases. The immigration station at Angel Island was really built as the Guardian of the Western Gate, in fact that’s how it was referred to, so unlike Ellis Island which was built to welcome immigrants to America, Angel Island was really built to keep certain immigrants out and to specifically enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act, which later excluded all Asians, basically. And immigrants, Asian immigrants, Chinese in particular, had to prove that they had the right to enter, during the years of exclusion because exclusion limited Chinese immigrants to those of only 5 exempt classes: merchants, scholars, diplomats, tourists, in which case you’d probably be held over on a bond, and children of American citizens. But what most people don’t realize is that Asians could not be naturalized citizens of the United States until the mid-20th century. And so for it to be the 1880s and for you to be the child of someone of Asian descent born in the United States was difficult, but in 1906 in the San Francisco earthquake and fire, the fire destroyed all the birth records in City Hall and opened a window of a way for Chinese immigrants to circumvent what they saw as a very unjust law that targeted them unfairly. And so all of a sudden there were these guys in Chinatown saying I was born in China and I have five sons and I’d like to bring them all over. So certainly the immigration inspectors caught onto this, this system known as “paper sons,” where immigrants assumed an identity that was not necessarily theirs, and it was only a relationship on paper. And so the interrogations that took place at Angel Island and at other ports of entry for Asian immigrants was really designed to ferret out who was the legitimate son or daughter of an individual and who had a false paper relationship.
TRACK 3: [ANGEL POETRY WORK 4]
Charles Egan: I’m Charles Egan and I’m Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. And I got involved in this Angel Island project when they formed a small research group to do a, take another look at the walls of the barracks, as they hadn’t really been studied comprehensively for the last, say 20 years or so. So we were going to just take a new look to see if we could find the locations of the poems that have previously been published. The way that they’re arranged, the way that they’re carved, shows you that there was a real community effort in creating these things. It wasn’t just individuals who thought up a few lines and put them on the walls. People were writing poems in response to other poems. And they could have been in the barracks at the same time, writing at the same time as other poets, or it could have been after a period of years, it really doesn’t matter. You get this real sense of a community of people expressing a community feeling.
Charles Egan: It goes all the way from a kind of melancholy, very traditional Chinese themes – homesickness, feelings about loss of power, loss of self, all the way to very angry poems about political topics. There are quite a few poems there that show indignation at the Americans for locking them up, and hope that China will rise soon to match America in power. So it’s quite a range. You even have a few that are less poetic sentiments than they are admonitions for other detainees to follow. For example there’s one poem up there, or I guess you may not even call it a poem, cuz it’s sort of in doggerel verse. Of an immigrant complaining about his money being stolen by another immigrant and warning all the others around that there’s a thief in the house.
Even though these poems were written between 1910 and 1940, you know, modern times, every one of them is written in traditional style. What you find from the walls is at least some of the people out there were quite well educated. Nobody would know how to write poetry like this unless they had had a decent education. The rules are too esoteric for one thing. You see, there’s a whole lot of use of historical illusions on the walls too, which definitely shows study of the classics. And also a few of the poems are just very eloquent in Chinese. There’s definitely a range: you go from poems that are somewhat more doggerel style, to some which are clearly amateur efforts to some that are very very polished, but the whole group shows a certain educational level and understanding of the importance of high culture.
Charles Egan: This one is from, was published in “Island,” so I’m reading the translation that was already published. It’s called “Random Thoughts Deep at Night.” “In the quiet of night I heard faintly the whistling of wind, the forms and shadows saddened me. Upon seeing the landscape I composed a poem. The floating clouds, the fog, dark in the sky. The moon shines faintly as the insects chirp. Grief and bitterness entwined are heaven-sent. The sad person sits alone leaning by a window.”
That’s “Random Thoughts Deep at Night,” number 13 deep in Island.
Charles Egan: So that’s an example of one of the homesick style ones. Let me read this one. “I lean on the railing and lift my head to look at the cloudy sky. All the mountains and rivers are dark. Eastern Mongolia is lost and the date of her return is uncertain. The recovery of the central plains depends on the youth. Only the tongue of can slay the villainess. To kill the bandit, we must wave the whip of . I’m ashamed to be curled up like a worm on an island. I grieve for my native land, but what else can I say?”
Charles Egan: It’s actually a very long-standing Chinese tradition to add person expressions to place. It’s a whole different kind of idea of what place meant. Here in America when we want to go to the mountains we want to go to an unspoiled place that humans have never been. We want to go to Yosemite and it looks like nobody’s ever been there before. But in China the tradition was to go to a place and then think of what the great poet Lee Boah said about it, or remember how it had been used in history, or and so on. So this combination of words and text with place is a long-standing tradition. If you travel in China, you’ll see enscriptions everywhere, right up on the walls sometimes of buildings or carved into cliffs or on stone tablets. All of these are markers of the same idea. So it’s not surprising really. It’s remarkable in this country to see this here, but it’s not surprising from the Chinese context.
TRACK 4: [ANGEL POETRY WORK 5]
Genny Lim: Land’s End. “They say that the gods live in the peaks of mountains, just above the valley of clouds. I believe it’s true. On a clear San Francisco morning, you can see the dense strip of fog receeding like a rolling wave. Below, Yerba Buena and the Golden Gate drifting in a mist. Angel Island rises as if on a Chinese scroll. I have never seen the vastness of the Andes, nor the heights of Wu Tai Shan, but this morning I saw the heavenly mist enshrowd the banks of China beach. Two tiny fishermen stood below the shore, knee-deep in the tide. I held my breath and chanted. As the sun cast its rays into the dissapearing fog. Oh great and bountiful nature, how indelible your temple in my heart. May you endure countless eons and man’s indomitable will to conquer you. I sit in reverie, watching two blackbirds foraging in the pines. Now there is no fog, just a thin vale of smoke dissolving in daylight, like a dream that ends. The mountains, which were the mountains of the gods, have become the mountains of men and maps, and the day which was not just any day but the beginning of all days, has returned once again to a day named Lai Bai Lai, Thursday, the fourth day of the week.”
Genny Lim: I’m Genny Lim, I’m a poet, playwright and educator. My connection with Angel Island poems was, it’s happened around its discovery around the 1970s and three of us, historian Him Mark Lai, a librarian Judy Yung and myself, found out through a local newspaper, Eastwind, that some poems had been discovered which were written by Chinese immigrants and they were inside of this barrack building on Angel Island which was earmarked for destruction. We started to translate the poems on the walls that were also copied into this looseleaf notebook by this former detainee and we had over 120 of these poems. Genny Lim And this was quite a task to translate them because if you’ve ever tried to translate a foreign language, especially Chinese, it’s such a different cultural aesthetic and mindset that there’s certain words that there just were no equivalents for. So this project was a real personal journey for the three of us who, all three of us had parents who actually came through Angel Island so we decided also to collect the oral histories of as many of the former detainees as possible, because so many of them had passed on, so we interviewed our own parents, parents of any friends we knew. Word got around in the Chinese community that this project was going on and many people came forward. What I learned from the interview with my mother was that there was still a lot of paranoia, shame and fear involved with that whole Angel Island experience. First of all, there was never a formal amnesty afforded the immigrants. Many of them came in as “paper sons” and lived the life under cover. So they functioned as second class citizens and I’m sure that many of them never bothered to vote or bring lawsuits for criminal cases, things of that nature. Everybody was very very discrete in how they carried on their daily lives in the community. And we had our own family associations in the six companies(?) so disputes were arbitrated, mediated within the own community, and became in some way a community within a larger mainstream community. So Chinese have this character of self-sufficiency, of not complaining, and a lot of that was because the immigrant experience was so hard on them. She remembered going to the, rushing to the window in the afternoons and looking to see the boats. They would try to see the boats that were coming in, which meant that the witnesses were being ferried in from San Francisco onto the island, to be witnesses on the hearings for, to corroborate the testimonies of the detainees. So that meant that if their witness was coming in, of course they couldn’t see the individuals coming off the boat, but it was symbolic of freedom.
Genny Lim My mother came in 1935 and she brought my third sister. The two older ones stayed in China and she brought Betty, who was only 5 years old, with her. And they stayed on the island only about a week. So they were one of the lucky ones. Somehow their paperwork was in order so they landed, but of course we know the stories of others who were held there for months at a time, and just waiting to get your appeal…
Genny Lim..the legacy of Angel Island is particularly relevant today, at a time in our history after 9/11 where our immigration is being examined as a negative force. As a reason for pause, as a risk to our homeland security. And those immigrants are being looked at again, as our own parents and grandparents and ancestors were looked upon, as threatening, not as potential contributors to our society, not as people with common dreams and aspirations as we who are Americans. And the whole idea of the alien, that’s a very derogatory term to call an alien, and it evokes that kind of freak, somebody who is not human. And here we’re facing the same history lesson again and my fear is that we’re not going to learn and we’re going to be repeating the same mistakes that we’ve made time and again throughout human history. And I’ve felt that Western culture is based on history and it follows the linear chronology. We have a beginning point and in our country it’s Native American history then the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and we don’t think in terms of cycles that many non-western cultures think in: more mythical, more epic terms. That things are constantly repeating itself. There’s the creation myth and then the hero’s arc so to speak, and then the journey and then the downfall or the transformation that occurs after some great event in time, and then there’s the reconciliation and the beginning again. And so the mind is more prepared to look at events in history as cycles repeating and therefore you respond accordingly and try to transform that experience because you recognize that the mistake was made and that there was not the realization that this could have been transformed or changed into something positive.
TRACK 5: [ANGEL EDIT SHORT FINAL]
WAVES
SEAGULLS
Genny Lim: A very long time ago, you journeyed from a place the size of a mountain into a space as small as a suitcase. With a box full of herbs and a head full of dreams, you crossed the Great Sea.
FOGHORN
Catherine Toy: I’m Catherine Toy, executive director at the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. The immigration station opened in 1910 and its reason for existence is really enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act which was passed by Congress in 1882. And for many years, so between 1882 to 1910, Chinese immigrants were processed and detained at the docks of the Pacific Mail Steamship company, down on the wharf, and that was really seen as inadequate. So an island location was selected. One, sort of I suppose in the same reasons that Alcatraz was built to be a prison is that it was difficult, that they really thought it would be more difficult for immigrants coming in to try to collaborate stories with relatives and friends in Chinatown. We know from memos from the National Archives when we’ve done research about the immigration station that as early as 1910 the immigrants were writing on the walls. The first book that was really about the poetry, that book being “Island: the History and Poetry of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island,” Genny Lim of course being one of the authors, that was the first published work about the poetry. But the work was really based on two notebooks that were created by two detainees of the Immigration station in the 1930s, who at the time wrote down poems into notebooks and then Genny and Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung used those notebooks to create the book “Island.”
Genny Lim: I’m Genny Lim, I’m a poet, playwright and educator. We started to translate the poems that were on the walls that were also copied into this looseleaf notebook by this former detainee and we had over 120 of these poems. And this was quite a task to translate them because if you’ve ever tried to translate a foreign language, especially Chinese, it’s such a different cultural aesthetic and mindset.
BIG PAUSE
Catherine Toy: The immigration station at Angel Island was really built as the Guardian of the Western Gate, in fact that’s how it was referred to, so unlike Ellis Island which was built to welcome immigrants to America, Angel Island was really built to keep certain immigrants out.
VIOLIN & DRUMS (ANOTHER SOUND FILE SUPPOSED TO BE HERE? – ABOUT PAPER SONS?)
Genny Lim: There was still a lot of paranoia, shame and fear involved with that whole Angel Island experience. First of all, there was never a formal amnesty accorded the immigrants. Many of them came in as “paper sons” and lived the life under cover. So they functioned as second class citizens and we had our own family associations in the six companies(?) so disputes were arbitrated, mediated within the own community, and became in some way a community within a larger mainstream community. So Chinese have this character of self-sufficiency, of not complaining, and a lot of that was because the immigrant experience was so hard on them.
JAZZ / ASIAN INSTRUMENTS
Genny Lim: Twice I’ve passed through this blue ocean. Experienced the wind and dust of journey. Confinement in this wooden building pains me doubly. With a weak country, what can I do?
BIG PAUSE
Genny Lim: We decided … to collect the oral histories of as many of the former detainees as possible, because so many of them had passed on, so we even interviewed our own parents, parents of any friends we knew. Word got around in the Chinese community that this project was going on and many people came forward. What I learned from the interview with my mother was that there was still a lot of paranoia, shame and fear involved with that whole Angel Island experience. First of all, there was never a formal amnesty afforded the immigrants. Many of them came in as “paper sons” and lived the life under cover. So they functioned as second class citizens and I’m sure that many of them never bothered to vote or bring lawsuits for criminal cases, things of that nature. Everybody was very very discrete in how they carried on their daily lives in the community. And we had our own family associations in the six companies(?) so disputes were arbitrated, mediated within the own community, and became in some way a community within a larger mainstream community. So Chinese have this character of self-sufficiency, of not complaining, and a lot of that was because the immigrant experience was so hard on them. My mother came in 1935 and she brought my third sister. The two older ones stayed in China and she brought Betty, who was only 5 years old, with her. And they stayed on the island only about a week. So they were one of the lucky ones. Somehow their paperwork was in order so they landed, but of course we know the stories of others who were held there for months at a time, and just waiting to get your appeal… She remembered going to the, rushing to the window in the afternoons and looking to see the boats. They were trying to see if they could see the boats that were coming in, which meant that the witnesses were being ferried in from San Francisco onto the island, to be witnesses on the hearings for, to corroborate basically the testimonies of the detainees. So that meant that if their witness was coming in, of course they couldn’t see individuals coming off the boat, but it was symbolic of freedom.