"For thirty years, from 1910 to 1940, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay was the first, often the only, toehold in America for immigrants from China. From the Cantonese Pearl River delta district of Taishan they sailed, fleeing famine and the foreign concessions, bound for the Land of the Flowery Flag, the Golden Mountain. Some were relatives of earlier Chinese immigrants who had come to America for Sutter's gold and stayed to help lay transcontinental railroad tracks. Others, in their anxiety to get to America at whatever cost, pretended to be relatives and arrived with identification papers bought in Canton, and with 'coaching papers," carefully constructed and memorized family backgrounds that they hoped would pass them through immigration examiners. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had been relaxed somewhat under pressure from Chinese Government officials in Canton by 1910, when Angel Island was opened, for Chinese immigrants only. But the immigration laws, so far as the Chinese were concerned, seemed designed to exclude rather than to admit. ...
"During the time they spent on the island, as little as a few days, as long as three years, they carved and ink brushed their concerns onto the walls of their barracks. One hundred thirty-five calligraphic poems survived, first discovered by a Federal park ranger after Angel Island was abandoned in 1940. These tell of voyages from China, detainment on the island, attitudes toward the first Americans encountered -- immigration officials and social workers -- and finally the disappointments and triumphs of the immigrants.
"To augment the translations of the poems the authors have interviewed older Chinese who once passed through Angel Island and immigration workers as well, and have set their recollections down verbatim as oral history. Together with the interviews, the poems -- angry, heroic, wrenchingly forlorn, despairing, provocative, resistant -- convey, as no secondhand or thirdhand account could ever do, what it was like to be Chinese and to be on Angel Island." -New York Times

Ai lun shi ji

Lai, H. Mark; Lim, Genny; Yung, Judy

Buffalo Bill Historical Center

Univ. of Washington Press ed., 2. print., Seattle [u.a.], 1991

United States, United States of America

Seattle, Washington State, 1991

4. printing, Seattle, 1999

June 1999

[curator]paul.n@archive.org[/curator][date]20091201181909[/date][state]approved[/state][comment]199[/comment]

English and Chinese, with additional bibliography in Chinese.
Cover title also in Chinese: Ai lun shi ji.
Reprint. Originally published: San Francisco : HOC DOI, 1980.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 172).

In this revised edition sixty-nine poems in the main text have been combined with the sixty-six poems in the appendix into one section. Chinese poems that have been found on the walls of the immigration stations at Ellis Island in New York ad Victoria, B.C. in Canada are also included. Charles Egan, David Chuenyan Lai, Marlon K. Hom, and Ellen Yeung helped with the new translations and corrected any errors in the poems based on a report commissioned by the Angel Island Immigration Foundation. The historical introduction is rewritten to include the new research that has been done since *Island* was first published; excerpts of oral histories are replaced with twenty full profiles and stories drawn from our oral history collection and the immigration files at the National Archives, San Francisco.

English and Chinese, with additional bibliography in Chinese
Cover title also in Chinese: Ai lun shi ji
Reprint. Originally published: San Francisco : HOC DOI, 1980
Includes bibliographical references (p. 172)
Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, was the entry, internment center, and often closest approach to the US for Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century. Here are the thoughts they carved and inkbrushed on their barrack's walls, discovered after the center closed in 1940. Facing pages of Chinese and English. No index

Angel Island, now an idyllic state park out in San Francisco Bay not far from Alcatraz, was the point of entry for the majority of the approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrants who came to America between 1910 and 1940.

Text and poetry from immigrants who passed through the island which has been called the "Ellis Island of the West".

2023-06-28