Local News

ANGEL ISLAND (BCN) ― The past and the future blended Tuesday during a preview of the $60 million, five-phase restoration of Angel Island's Immigration Station, the first stop for immigrants who crossed the Pacific Ocean to America.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from 90 countries came through Angel Island between 1910 and 1940. They were detained there under quarantine, because their immigration paperwork was being processed or because they were Chinese.

An estimated 175,000 Chinese immigrants were banned from coming into the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only legislation banning a specific ethnic group from America. The act was repealed when China became America's ally in 1943.

The act, however, could not keep the sons and daughters of Chinese who were U.S. citizens out of the country. They arrived at Angel Island.

The average stay of those who arrived at the Immigration Station, women and children in the Administration Building and men in separate barracks, was two or three weeks but some were there for several months. A few were there for two years.

Several of the former detainees joined members of the media this morning for a preview of the restoration of the barracks at the Immigration Station on the 700-acre Angel Island.

Don Lee, 81, arrived at Angel Island in 1939 when he was 11. He stayed one month. His grandfather brought him to America because he was too young to travel alone.

Lee said he was seasick for most of the 18-day journey. His grandfather then returned to China to resume his way of life.

"He had the old habit. He smoked opium," Lee recalled.

Lee remembers being intimidated and afraid during his stay on Angel Island.

"Everything was different, the food, the language," he said.

"I don't harbor anything against it. To me it was a process," he said, standing next to the exact spot where he slept in the upper of three narrow bunk beds in one of the barracks. The discrimination afterward, especially in the U.S. Army, bothered him more, he said.

He met his father for the first time in San Francisco when he left Angel Island.

Lee eventually attended University of California at Berkeley and became a civil engineer. He is now retired and lives in Concord. Today was his second visit back to the barracks. He brought his children and grandchildren there in 2006.

Li Keng Wong spent only one week on Angel Island in 1933. She was happy to leave and refused to talk about her experience for 50 years.

"It was a traumatic experience," she said.

Her book "Good Fortune" recounts how she and her family tried to assimilate into the culture while living in Oakland's Chinatown.

Her father ran an illegal lottery ticket sales business to support the family. Wong, 82, also graduated from UC Berkeley and was a schoolteacher for 35 years.

Many detainees on Angel Island carved poems and their personal thoughts into the unpainted walls of the barracks during their stay. As many as seven layers of paint were applied to cover them.

The first phase of the restoration of the Immigration Station, known also as "Ellis Island of the West" and "Guardian of the Western Gate", has made both floors of the barracks buildings and the poems on their walls accessible to the public.

The poems were nearly lost forever in 1970 when the Immigration Station and other unused structures on Angel Island were scheduled for destruction.

Park Ranger Alexander Weiss, touring the barracks with a flashlight, discovered the poems, recruited help from friends in San Francisco colleges to translate them and launched the preservation effort. The true number of poems has been estimated in the hundreds.

The poems speak of anger and frustration, reasons for coming to America and how the immigrants felt when they arrived.

"I am distressed that we Chinese are detained in this wooden building. It is actually racial barriers which cause difficulties on Yingtai Island," one etching reads.

State and federal funds account for $30 million of the estimated $60 million needed for the restorations on Angel Island Immigration Station. The barracks will reopen as a fully functional museum to the public on Feb. 15, 2009.

Other planned renovations include adding an interpretive footprint of the Administration Building that burned in 1940, stabilizing and rehabilitating the hospital, the mule barn, the POW Mess Hall, and the World War II barracks, and converting the central heating plant into the Immigration Station Visitor Center.

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