On the site that
reminds us that you’ve
got to go there to know there.
I’ve written a
lot, in the last few years, about San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island: from this very
early blog post to this
follow up, and at length in the third chapter of my
recent book. It’s fair to say, in fact, that there are few American
historic or cultural sites about which I’ve thought more than Angel Island, and
more exactly the Immigration
Station there that became both a prison and a poetic archive for so many Chinese and
Asian American arrivals. In this 21st-century moment, with websites
like the two to which I linked in that last sentence, it’s absolutely possible
to connect deeply and meaningfully with a historic and cultural site from afar,
and so I don’t believe that my prior writings on Angel Island were
significantly limited because I hadn’t yet had the chance to visit the site in
person. But now that I have had the opportunity to do so, I’ll admit that there
are many elements to the site that it’d be very difficult to appreciate without
such a visit.
For one thing,
there’s the island’s crucial contradiction: its closeness to San Francisco, yet
at the same time its powerful sense of separation and isolation. San
Francisco’s harbor is clearly visible from the island, and would have been
even more so in the early 20th century, with much less suburban
development in between. Riding on the ferry to the island on a pleasant early November
morning, I could imagine how that visibility felt to arriving Chinese
immigrants, the promised mainland only a short final boat ride across the bay. Yet
the island itself feels far from the
city, most especially because it is large and natural/wild enough (and again,
would have likely been even more so a century ago) that it feels very much like
a space and world of its own. It’s difficult to overstate how painful and
destructive this contradiction would likely have felt to those arrivals
detained at Angel Island, many for months and even years: to be so close and
yet so far away from their destination, to see (probably daily, and certainly
frequently) the place which was being withheld from them. It’s no wonder they
wrote such lyrical and evocative poems!
Being on the
island, surrounded by its natural and still wild (or at least un-developed) landscapes
and beauty, also led me to another and perhaps even more complex question: how
much the island, and specifically the rocky, forested inlet on which the
immigration station was built, might have reminded many of the Chinese arrivals
of the landscape and world which they had left behind. I haven’t been to China,
so this is a particularly speculative idea; and it would seem to conflict with
the opening of one of the Angel
Island poems, which reads “The sea-scape resembles lichen twisting and
turning for a thousand li./There is no shore to land and it is difficult to
walk.” But on the other hand, it would be possible to read that poem’s
frustration as caused by the similarity to what had been left behind, the sense
that the speaker has traveled so far only to find him or herself seemingly no
closer to a new world—a reading that would relate to the poem’s next line, “With
a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so.” And no matter what,
a visit to Angel Island helps us to think with more depth about such poems, and
the Chinese American experience overall.
Next site
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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