Throughout the thirty years of its history as an immigration detention center from 1910 to 1940, those incarcerated at the Angel Island Immigration Station never ceased writing on the wooden barracks walls. Each of the hundreds of inscriptions tells the story of an individual, and taken together they illuminate historical, economic and cultural forces that shaped the lives of ordinary people in the first half of the twentieth century. The Chinese writing there is already well known, and is compelling because so much of it is poetry. Yet only a portion of the Chinese poems is as yet known to the public. Immigrants of other nationalities did not leave poems on the walls, but they did frequently contribute poems to the literary pages of ethnic newspapers in California. This talk will introduce Chinese, Japanese, and Korean poems drawn from the Angel Island walls and from the daily papers. These works provide rich perspectives on the Asian immigrant experience and its challenges.
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