KQED's Discovering Angel Island: The Story Behind the Poems
In Asian American Studies, we’re taught that history is something to be actively retrieved. If we just approach our study of history passively, we lose many stories to a single, dominant narrative – it’s said that history is written by the victors.
It’s one thing to neglect those alter-narratives. As students, we might detect this trend in our U.S. history books from elementary or high school. However, when the dominant culture purports to cover up these histories, we face a more difficult challenge.
Angel Island exemplifies a history that we almost lost to such systematic erasure. Nearly every square inch of the immigration station’s walls display carvings by the detained immigrants, attempts to ensure they would be remembered, especially if they would not survive to live beyond those walls. The government would later set about filling in those carvings, now known as Angel Island Poetry, in order to paint over them, abandoning the station and making plans to burn it to the ground.
Even in San Francisco, a city known today for its liberal attitude and its strong Asian-American community, this part of the
city’s immigrant narratives remains noticeably absent. One architecture specialist undertaking restoration of the carved poetry testifies in the video to the sad reality that the history of Angel Island was and remains not widely known even by Asian American natives of the Bay Area.
The video ends with hope. In keeping with KQED-style production, this documentary-style video shows that it was created or educational purposes, reinforcing the necessity of an active recovery of multiple histories. On an individual level, the video follows Alexander Weiss, the park ranger who rediscovered the immigration station’s carvings in 1970 and led the movement to save the site from destruction. Overlaying shots of ostensibly Asian American elementary school children on a field trip to the station, Weiss asserts that young people should know the history of the United States, both right and wrong, in order to prevent the recurrence of the kind of racism now laid bare at Angel Island. Likewise, California State Parks interpreter Darcy Moore conceives of the landmark today as a site of healing and learning.
Lastly, Dale Ching, a former detainee, recounts the day of his release, when after three and a half months of imprisonment, he was finally able to walk free. In the final moment of the video, he’s shot standing on the helm of a ferry, then gazing out onto the waters of the Bay, before he occupies one of the station’s dorms for his interview. He says that thinking of new generations brought him back to Angel Island – the chance, the responsibility, “to tell my side of the story.”
By Samantha Ching
Media Credit: KQED
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