Angel Island Poetry

In an audio clip on the Two Words site, Marlon Hom discusses the poetry etched by Chinese immigrants into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay.

For 30 year the Angel Island Immigration Station processed over 200,000 immigrants, most of them Chinese. Confined to a small cell and awaiting their fate, Chinese immigrants found various ways to assuage their anxiety: one of them was poetry, which they carved into the station’s wooden walls. These poems speak of anger, frustration, uncertainty, and hope, and they contradict the myth that Chinese immigrants were illiterate laborers . . .