A trip into Angel Island's past

SOURCE: Mercury News

Don Lee was 11 years old and recovering from seasickness when the SS President Coolidge anchored in San Francisco Bay in the summer of 1939. He had spent weeks in the luxury liner's steerage on the voyage from Hong Kong, struggling to sleep beside the rumbling of the ship's engine.

His journey would soon take a frightening detour.

Immigration officials boarded the Coolidge, separated Lee from his grandfather and ferried the boy and several dozen other immigrants to Angel Island. Here, he was detained in a bunk room behind barbed wire, with frequent interruptions for interrogations about his family lineage and his tiny village in southern China.

"They asked me where did I live, and then they have a diagram of the house. Who's the closest neighbor? Who are your relatives?" recalled Lee, now 81, on a tour of the newly renovated Angel Island Immigration Station, a multimillion-dollar project. "It's designed to trip you up. The whole aim of the immigration system there was to reject. Instead of Ellis Island, which was to welcome you, it was really designed to discourage you."

Now, for the first time in more than three years, the public can catch a glimpse of what life was like for Lee and tens of thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and other immigrants from Asia who passed through the Angel Island station from 1910 through the early 1940s.

Much has been lost: The administration building is gone, burned down along with most of its records in a 1940 fire. A row of staff cottages designed by architect Julia Morgan was destroyed long ago in a training exercise for Marin County firefighters. One of the four original palm trees died, and the old pier can't accept new boats.

But after this major renovation on the surviving detention barracks, park officials say they hope they have created a new and improved window into California's immigration history.

Oakland-based museum designer Daniel Quan helped chart the years-long project to turn the immigration station into a more effective and accessible learning tool.

"You start to paint a picture, much in the same way you might put a film together," Quan said. "You're trying to tell a story."

Like many Chinese immigrants who passed through Angel Island, Quan's father never told his children about his time there as a 13-year-old. After his death, Quan found his father's name, and records of his three-week detention, in government rolls.

The father never looked back at an experience seen as a stigma, spending a short time in school before going to work as a butcher's apprentice and beginning a new life.

Lee, who now lives in Concord, told a similar story.

On Angel Island, he would spend nights in a room full of bunks that was tucked into the slope of a wooded hill and surrounded by barbed wire. In the daytime, he said, the bright ceiling lights shone a harsh glow on the gloom that surrounded him, while illuminating the remnants of poems inscribed on the walls decades earlier.

He played with wooden blocks he brought with him on the voyage, or he took rare opportunities to breathe fresh air in a tiny, fenced-in outdoor recreation spot.

His detention lasted about three weeks, and then he settled into American life — so different from his tiny village in southern China. He would grow to enjoy the United States, learning English in its public schools, obtaining an engineering degree from the University of California-Berkeley, serving in the Army and raising a family here.

In the years after the Gold Rush and a demand for railroad labor sparked a huge wave of mid-19th-century Chinese immigration, race-tinged fears about job competition and assimilation fueled a growing anti-Chinese movement in state and federal politics and newspapers. Congress passed a law in 1882 to prohibit any more Chinese laborers.

That same year, a record 40,000 Chinese immigrants entered the United States as part of a rush to beat the ban before it took effect. By the late 1880s, the number of Chinese immigrants entering the country each year dropped to the double and triple digits. It would be another century, in the early 1980s, before annual Chinese immigration came close to and eventually surpassed the numbers reached before 1883.

Angel Island was not the first Bay Area facility designed to restrict Asian immigration, according to Robert Barde, the author of "Immigration at the Golden Gate" and deputy director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at UC-Berkeley. But it has become a vivid symbol of a 60-year era of exclusion because it is the only place where the buildings have survived.

Immigrants from Europe and elsewhere traveled through the island in smaller numbers, but their visits were typically much shorter and they slept and ate in separate sections.

Before the station's 1910 opening, detained immigrants were held in a cramped facility along the city's wharf, or sometimes in a floating prison of available merchant ships docked at the shore. The new island facility was at first seen as a major improvement, but was soon found to be a fire trap, with poor ventilation, terrible bathrooms, a lack of fresh water and intractable problems of bureaucratic graft.

Bard said that for today's Angel Island visitor, soaking in the bay views, "it doesn't seem like such a bad place. But you know that in the afternoon, you're going to leave. For a lot of people, they had no idea how long they were going to be there. I think that's what really weighed on people."

Despite significant hurdles, most of those who landed on Angel Island were able to stay in the country, Quan said. Those ordered deported appealed the rulings, and many appeals were eventually accepted. Government documents researched by Bard document how one Chinese woman, whose "alleged husband" was a legal immigrant, was detained for more than 600 days before the government finally let her free in San Francisco.

"There was no great calamity that happened as a result of these people immigrating," Quan said. "There was no real reason to go to those extremes."

State park officials say they hope the improved museum, when it becomes ready to again accommodate school, self-guided and group trips this spring, sparks interest from Bay Area residents, including descendants of the many immigrants who passed through the "Guardian of the Golden Gate."

Berkeley resident Buck Gee, a retired engineer, said that after his father's death, his family discovered a "cheat book" the immigrant had brought with him on the voyage to San Francisco. It was a sign that the father was most likely a "paper son," one who memorized invented details about his heritage so he could circumvent exclusionary laws. Like the Quan family, the Gees never discussed the island.

"There was shame, I think, some fear," Gee said. "The Chinese who came through Angel Island, they just wanted to bury it."

Gee helped lead a private tour of the state park last month for fellow members of the Silicon Valley-based Asia America MultiTechnology Association. Elizabeth Xu, making her first visit to the island with her husband and two young sons, was struck by the sorrow, but also by the literary skill reflected in the poems she read on the walls.

"He says it looks very pretty here but it's a cage for him," Xu said, interpreting one Chinese detainee's poem. "He felt that even though he's a very capable person, he couldn't do anything about the situation. He felt hopeless."

For most of her American life, Xu said she did not think twice about the Chinese immigrants who arrived decades ago. With few complications, she arrived from Beijing as an immigrant in 1990.

"It makes me really appreciate the generations before us," she said.