There is a poem on the Statue of Liberty that ends with “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Angel Island in San Francisco Bay was America’s west coast Ellis Island, but those famous last lines on the Statue of Liberty Poem did not apply to the Chinese and other Asians.
From 1919 to 1940, mostly Asian immigrants entered the US through Angel Island.
After 1940, the immigration station on Angel Island was forgotten until California Park Ranger Alexander Weiss discovered the stories carved in the walls.
He thought these stories were ghosts waiting to be heard.
Over half of the Angel Island immigrants came from China and Japan and most of the carvings on the walls were poems written in Chinese.
A former detainee, Dale Ching, went through the station in 1937 when he was sixteen. Even though Dale’s father was born in the United States, he still had to go through the immigration station.
While the East Coast’s Ellis Island welcomed immigrants, Angel Island’s story was one of sadness and suffering.
Most European immigrants who went through Ellis Island stayed a few hours, but immigrants on Angel Island were kept locked up under armed guard with barbed-wire fences surrounding the buildings and some people stayed for days, weeks, months and even years.
The park service wanted to tear the Angel Island buildings down but Weiss found supporters, and they struggled to preserve this history. They succeeded and the restoration project was challenging.
Alexander Weiss sums up the video saying we should know both the right and the wrong from U.S. history.
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