The Poems Carved into Angel Island's Walls

Between 1910 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of immigrants — most of them Chinese, arriving during the Chinese Exclusion Act — were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. Some were held for weeks. Some for years. They were interrogated over and over, separated from their families, and given basically no way to tell their side of anything.

So some of them carved poems into the barracks walls.

The poems are in classical Chinese, and they record everything the immigration files leave out: the grief, the anger, the humiliation of being locked up within sight of the country they had crossed an ocean to reach. Most of the writers never signed their names. They were writing for the other detainees, and maybe for whoever came after. It's the most literal version of "art as testimony" I can imagine — people carving their experience directly into the building that imprisoned them, because there was nowhere else to put it.

The part that scares me

Here's the thing, though. Those poems came within one demolition order of not existing.

The immigration station closed in 1940, and by 1970 the abandoned barracks were falling apart and scheduled to be torn down. Then a California park ranger named Alexander Weiss walked through with a flashlight and noticed the walls were covered in carved characters. He told people. Bay Area Asian American activists, scholars, and community members fought to save the building, and today the site is a National Historic Landmark, where school groups stand in front of those same walls and read testimony from people this country tried very hard to forget.

But do the math. The poems existed for sixty years, and for almost all of that time, essentially nobody saw them. Sixty years of testimony with no audience, protected by nothing except the wood it was carved into and the fact that nobody had gotten around to demolishing the building yet.

I used to assume that if something important gets made, it naturally becomes part of history. This story is why I stopped assuming that. Testimony doesn't preserve itself. It needed a ranger with a flashlight, and then it needed a community that refused to let the building fall. Every piece of witness art that survives, survives because someone carried it — and every piece that didn't get carried is just gone, and we don't even know what we lost.

That's a big part of why AAA exists, honestly. Somebody has to keep taking the handoff.

If you're ever in the Bay Area, you can visit Angel Island and see the poems yourself. Translations have also been collected in the book Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, which is where most people (including us) first encounter them.