Poetic Justice for a Feared Immigrant Stop – Patricia Leigh Brown

Posted by Sophie Beach | Dec 7, 2005

It was known, simply, as “the wooden building.” For 30 years, from 1910 to 1940, the barren walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station gave mute testimony to the experiences of roughly 175,000 Chinese immigrants who were detained and exhaustively interrogated on this island in San Francisco Bay, the West Coast’s insidious version of Ellis Island.

“Today is the last day of winter,” begins one of nearly 300 poems surreptitiously carved in Chinese characters by detainees on the walls.

“Tomorrow morning is the vernal equinox/ One year’s prospects have changed to another/ Sadness kills the person in the wooden building.”