The Roulette of Angels
“No man is an island.
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
. . .
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.”
- John Donne
No man is an island entire of itself. Though one who seeks a place in America may hear in those words the exclusion of their presence, knowing that a poet often writes when the hope inside his words cannot be realized before one more death begins its work to diminish the living who remain. One presses upon a line in a poem that it may fulfill the patience of a triumph surpassing the duration of one life, and certainly the duration of words in their own history of deeds as the elected presence of meaning in the polyphonies otherwise concealed by a voice in power. Perhaps such a polyphony—even that which conditions the very belief in community—is stronger in the imagination at a certain hour than in the scripts arising from a real conversation, for the patience Donne’s words ask of a reader is a kind that many children of Asia-America will never need to know, in fact or hope, and which others may never come to rely on even if its semblance might conserve a sense of autonomy through repetitions of the unknown, quelled rightfully by a more refined pedagogy, and in the illusive certainties that knowledge may offer us. No man may be an island, yet not every man is a man in the eyes of these words; to be less than a man is to live on an island no form of knowledge may entirely restore to human time. The immigrants who passed through Angel Island between 1910 to 1940 are of every origin: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Sikh, Mexican, Russian, Italian, French; scholars also discovered in their company Norwegians, Afghans, Persians, Nicaraguans, Australians, Tahitians.[1] Their living conditions during their stays varied widely, as their treatment by those employed at the station, from immigration officers to cooks and medical staff, were influenced by the differences in their race, gender, class, and nationality in the selective process that tapered into the perpetually contested definition of who would be American, at least by law, and who would remain foreign in their flesh.[2] A document titled “The History and Problem of Angel Island” from the Survey of Race Relations organized by researchers at Stanford University, was authored by one who identifies themselves as “an American in spirit and a Chinese in citizenship.”[3] The historical details in the report are, thus, inflections of how one who positions themselves as a foreign observer may preserve America as a protean idea haunting the reality of every other life excluded from its promise even in the clarity of offering pragmatic solutions for bettering the conditions of transit.[4] The author of the document affirms their common ancestry with the Chinese immigrants who center their own framework for the problem of Angel Island as “a Chinese problem” of immediate and remote troubles, balancing what may be interpreted as injustices committed by the U.S. government with aspects of the internal strife in the Chinese community, even as the document notes the dangers of how a negative reputation of the Chinese is not by their own doing, but the result of the conditions they were forced into surviving, and through the perpetuation of myths.[5]
It is telling that almost all of the poems discovered on the walls of the immigration station were written in Chinese, often following the styles and the strictness of form in Classical Chinese poetry of four or eight lines with five or seven characters composing each line.[6] There were exceptions in so far as other markings showed the facts of another immigrant’s stay on the island—a name, date, and an origin—but the making of language in which poets carved out from the wooden walls their expressions of absence, despair, or uncertainty, were principally in Chinese, and often in conversation with one another.[7] The document argues that the Chinese Exclusion Act from 1882 is the principal cause for the greater number of detainees of Chinese rather than of any other Asian or European descent.[8] Although immigrants of other national origins suffered during their detainments as well, each immigrant’s stay depended largely on the legitimacy of their character and social status as measured through the highly subjective lens of immigration officers.[9] Because the law only granted admission to immigrants of certain professions such as merchants and their families, and at times teachers, students, and other professionals, fraud was a common way of bypassing the legal regulations over what constitutes a professional identity.[10] The document debriefs how tong organizations which brought together Chinese men for criminal activities increased the frequency of prostitution, that disease and immoral behavior were realities alongside the marked and unmarked innocence of other migrants who sought entry through Angel Island. Many girls were forced to immigrate through real birth certificates belonging to other children that would prove their American citizenship to prolong their roles in the circling of prostitution.[11] The document argues for the deportation of the Chinese at the helm of illegal businesses, and suggests that “a better type of Chinese is coming,” one more educated and affable to the ideals of a Christian America.[12] The document approaches the social nuances of immigration with pragmatism, but if we read it in the context of Asia-America at large, the details of the immigration station as an unsanitary place in need of repair and fireproofing, assume more than the strain of material necessity.[13] The document argues for the construction of a recreational space on the island that might diminish the potential for violence among the youth who are at risk by the enforcement of idleness, with few opportunities besides gambling to pass their time.[14] It cites: “”The United States has a right to protest themselves against undesirable citizens,” but why laborers of another race can come and not Chinese is a thing unjust in itself.”[15] The author neither pushes for a radical attitude against American dogma, nor entirely faults the Chinese for conditions that make them less desirable as citizens.
The authorial perspective of a Chinese citizen perhaps strategically confines itself to a nativity aligned with the source of discrimination experienced by those who actively sought to become American citizens, but it is also a passive claim in its very grasping of an ideal, to gesture towards an American ephemera in its allegiance to the reasoning behind every adventurous or forced sacrifice an immigrant of any nation may make.[16] It is an allegiance that falls short of closing the distance, and thus, it preserves the distance, between a longing for an idea of America, and the reality of being more than American in spirit, not yet under pressure of the claims an American spirit may make over the history of one’s own idea of a soul, or whatever names the inaccessible being within the affairs of keeping a personal identity or a shared identity. It is in this environment that one may read the document which presents itself as an unbiased report of the immigration station, to be, in fact, a refracted encounter of every man who is not an island, isolated as an island in the conduit of America’s self-definition with a focal point on Chinese immigrants.
Angel Island is the largest of the islands in the San Francisco Bay; archeological records show that for over a thousand years the Hookooeko tribe of the Coast Miwok American Indians inhabited the island where they once fished and hunted.[17] A Spanish expedition in 1775 gave the island its name: La Isla de Los Angeles.[18] European explorers, principally sealers and whalers of Spanish, French, Russian, and British descent, turned the island into a naval base as a respite along their arduous voyages through the Golden Gate.[19] It is an irony shared between the fields of the history of science and intellectual history that the presence of European settlers would dramatically diminish the number of Miwok natives through their introduction of foreign diseases. Contagion is an origin of America as the known cause of innumerable native deaths, and it remained, also, the motive behind the organizing forces on the island into the early twentieth century. Every metamorphosis of the island is a battle of not only the contagions of disease brought by settler colonialism, but the contagion of ideas and dreams brought by immigrants of countless other nations. Perhaps the history of the island’s metamorphosis situates the history of Asia-America as more than a mosaic of isolated symbols between the epics that tell themselves within a narrative of diversity, and across the diasporic epics neighboring the phantoms that compose our history. Under the authority of the Mexican government in 1821, Angel Island became a cattle ranch.[20] From there and after the U.S-Mexican war, the U.S. federal government turned the island into a military base that would remain in use through the Civil War until 1946, during which the island served as a discharge depot for troops in transit to Hawaii or the Philippines.[21]From 1891-1946, the island was also home to a quarantine station. . Before the one million immigrants that would pass through the station, there were Germans during World War I considered at the time as enemy aliens, federal prisoners, and other prisoners of war.[22] The document itself begins with the date of 1910 when the island was leased to the Department of War.[23] The island’s final metamorphosis, before the station was salvaged as a state park, was its most prominent role as an immigration station. Asia-America, like Angel Island itself, shares the metamorphosis written by many ideas of origin other than the plurality of its own.
A nation is the island of a conscience loaded with the power to define each piece of the continent which labors to make its own definition, who desires to become a part of a new definition, or in the revival of an older one. No one’s labor is an island entire of itself, and to every expected indifference of a main, not least because each relation endures a weight of its own interpretation imperceptible to the relation. Freedom is the figure of an island in one’s mind, and self-knowledge may share the wingspan of an island, but the poet says no man is an island. One excluded from the nation may be the nation’s delusion of itself enabling its powers. The poems carved into the walls of the immigration station on Angel Island open each island in the mind to a communal memory for Asia-America, just as any future choice of one’s own words will open one to the time of a common language in which delusions have long abided in the esteemed attitude of a sacrifice. The American Dream sustains its lure with the innocence of a newborn, notwithstanding every death it produces through these freedoms of definition. It may be too radical, precisely because it is always untimely to be true, and even if it is agreed upon in more gentle ways, that the successes every diaspora may fasten their identities to, are involved in a family of unspeakable deaths no one has the social immunity to identify themselves with beyond the prescriptions of grief. For every great brawl against silence death never pauses, and in a social fashion of remembrance, such that the reparation one may seek is, in fact, the impossibility of a history that never transpired beneath an actual writing of time.
Each self-definition of America acclimates to the stratum of civil duties between an empire’s custom of gatekeeping, and the mutual patronage President John F. Kennedy in 1958 would cast into America’s narrative as a nation of immigrants without which no American dream has a form or future.[24] Nativity is relative—it is either a pernicious myth to shelter the insecurities of a power in action, or a myth of utilitarian humility softening the craggy features of self-determination. It is a myth, also, which many immigrants have outwitted in their various gambits to independence like the Chinese paper sons who passed through Angel Island between 1910 to 1940 to begin their lives in America. No presence in the country is endemic to the successive rationing of its ideals. It is an American fantasy, perhaps, as much as it remains proof for each exception of the fantasy’s lapse into reality, that the strength of the ideal’s legibility as a phantom, with no fixed definition, that may be imparted as a freedom to self-determination, depends on the plurality of ownership over this phantom in each realization of a life. A nation is the mutating dictionary of its own promises in so far as its ideals are accessible because they are the expression of freedom from the conventions of virtue one may depend on to know who they are. Every origin has been a migration by will or force through the intergenerational odyssey of becoming a piece of the continent. To become a piece is to name oneself a part of an America in the mind’s eye confronted with the welding of every Ithaka to the part of each soul that shares the figure of a human being stranded far from home. Each arrival to one’s own memory on the same impassive shores rewrites an origin for the American dream. One cannot name America in Chinese, for instance, without proclaiming it a beautiful country. The name of the promise is a playful detainment in a speaker’s passage to their own voice. It also shares the security that birthright citizenship realizes in anticipation of every future in the nation, as the inheritance of a value, obligation, and motive between a people and their country. In the historical consciousness of Asia-America, the dream is involved with every new life like each utterance of mei guo, words hosting their own betrayal in their plurality of meaning.
The one million immigrants who sought a passage to America through Angel Island define Asia-America as a roulette of migratory fates in which no story is an island entire of itself, and no two stories are identical even through the similarity of events dictated by the power of racialization. Paper sons are a testament to the invention of origin as a strategy for evading the exclusionary laws enforced decades prior to the establishment of the immigration station. Laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act are expressions of a nation’s desire to control its sense and legacy of origin in its reliance on the mythologies that furnish a reason for every execution of power.[25] This roulette extends to American history, and the idea of America held within every interior life led by a true or false documentation, or in the undocumented time elapsing a dream which breeds its subsistence. Certain stories never begin while others are never told again after the first and only time one ever lives them. The more common stories are known by virtue of assimilation, but the most revealing ones may be the poems carved into the walls of Angel Island’s interior. Something more than the mere appearance of each individual as remembered by a stranger remains to speak for themselves. As one poem said: “I write my wild words to let those after me know.” [26]
[1]Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 29-30.
[2] Ibid, 31-2.
[3] “The History and Problem of Angel Island”, Survey of Race Relations records, [27, 150, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.], 15.
[4] Ibid, 13.
[5] Ibid, 5.
[6] Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 123.
[7] Ibid, 123.
[8] Ibid, 123.
[9] X
[10] X
[11] “The History and Problem of Angel Island”, Survey of Race Relations records, [27, 150, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.], 9-10.
[12] Ibid, 10-12.
[13] Ibid, 13.
[14] Ibid, 13.
[15] Ibid, 7.
[16] Beth Lew-Williams, “Mines, Railroads, Brothels: What brought the Chinese to America?”, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, January 24th, 2025.
[17] Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 34-6.
[18] Ibid, 34-6.
[19] Ibid, 34-6.
[20] Ibid, 34-6.
[21] Ibid, 34-6.
[22] Ibid, 34-6.
[23] “The History and Problem of Angel Island”, Survey of Race Relations records, [27, 150, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.], 1.
[24] Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 330-1.
[25]Ibid, 103-4, X.
[26] Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 154.