On the powerful writings through which a prison became something more.
One of the main premises
underlying both my motivations in creating this blog and many of the topics
with which I’ve dealt here—and, for that matter, much of my scholarly work and
teaching more broadly—is that in focusing as we tend to on the overtly and
easily inspirational and ideal aspects of our national histories and
identities, we Americans elide not only the more difficult and dark sides but
also some more genuinely and profoundly inspirational and ideal stories and
voices. And I’m not sure any duality can better exemplify that premise than
that between Ellis and Angel Islands. Ellis is a great example of an overtly
and pretty easily inspirational and ideal site, and I don’t mean that in a
dismissive way; while certainly there were more troubling aspects of Ellis
(such as the medical tests and quarantines) that we have downplayed, there’s no
doubt that the place does represent the point of arrival for many hundreds of
thousands (if not millions) of new Americans, and that it is thus without
question the physical counterpart to and manifestation of Emma Lazarus’ poem, the
first space in which those huddled masses could perhaps begin to breathe free
and could certainly embark on the next stages of their American journeys. My
own maternal great-grandparents most likely came to America through Ellis
around the turn of the 20th century, so I get the place it holds in
our individual and collective narratives for sure.
Angel
Island, in San Francisco Bay, served as the “Ellis Island of the West” (as
it was sometimes known) for a much briefer time, from 1910 to 1940, although it
is estimated that at least two hundred thousand and perhaps as many as a million
immigrants (most but not all from China and Japan) were processed through it
during those decades. Yet the realities of the immigration laws under which
Angel existed—first the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 and then the even more restrictive and xenophobic
Asian Exclusion Act of 1924—made Angel Island into a much more complicated
space than Ellis, one that at best entailed extensive interrogations and challenges
to its arrivals and at worst (and much of the time) became a prison, one in
which Asian immigrants could expect to live for years before they were offered
the opportunity to travel to the mainland (if they were not simply turned
away). And just as prisoners often carve their voices (or at least their
chronologies) into their cell walls, so too did many of Angel Island’s
inhabitants create an amazing body of impromptu communal poetry on its
walls—those folk literary texts, which were collected and published as early as
the 1930s and are given new voice for the
21st century at this site, are an amazing record of heartbreak
and hope, of the squalid and painful conditions that greeted arrivals at Angel
and yet the continuing faith with which they endured their years there and
because of which they continued to fight for the chance to join the nation that
lay outside its walls.
Yet the story of Angel Island,
like the story of Asian immigration in this time period (and really up until
the 1965 immigration act) more generally, entailed more of the heartbreak than
the hope for far too high of a percentage of those who experienced it. And it
is those darker sides that are at the heart of one of America’s greatest short
stories, Sui Sin Far’s “In
the Land of the Free” (1912; most of it, although unfortunately not the
conclusion, is available at page 93). Only the final, briefest and most
devastating section of Far’s story is set on Angel Island itself (or a parallel
holding station), since the story’s two adult characters (a Chinese American
husband and wife) have been lucky enough to gain entry to the nation and begin
to create a new life here, in San Francisco’s Chinatown; but since it is their
infant son who has been detained upon his first arrival to America at the
story’s opening (the wife returned to China to care for her dying mother-in-law
and gave birth while there), it is quite literally the case that their family
and future are likewise detained, held in a state of uncertainty and limbo as
the story’s events play out. No paraphrase or summary can do justice to Far’s
concluding section, nor to her story’s overall engagement with the ideals and the
realities of American life through the lens of this fictional family and very
real place and issue; but since that conclusion is apparently not available
online, I will say that it is both understated and yet one of the most
profoundly tragic moments in American literature, a moment that for any
parent—and any empathetic person for that matter—brings home the human cost of
the period’s exclusionary laws and of the worst possible meanings of Angel
Island.
The Chinese Exclusion Act and its
aftermath created some of the most adverse and painful situations faced by
immigrants and Americans; and yet, as both the Angel Island poetry and Far’s
story illustrate in their own ways, in the midst of those most brutal
experiences we can find some of the most inspiring and ideal American words, identities,
and voices. More tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Powerful
responses to adversity you’d highlight?
10/22
Memory Day nominees: A tie between two nearly mythic American icons whose
actual experiences
and identities, while complex and controversial,
also comprise some of the bravest choices
in our history, Daniel Boone
and John
Reed.
No comments:
Post a Comment