Asian Exclusion and Enforced Leisure

Despite their differences, Chinese and Japanese migrants and their American children occupied a shared location in an American racial framework that placed them outside the possibility of inclusion through cultural and political assimilation, regardless of long residence or native birth. The detention of Chinese Americans at the Pacific border and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II were physical manifestations of exclusion. Even as social scientists challenged earlier fears about cultural and biological blending, most Americans consistently held Asian people apart as inherently foreign and often threatening. Detention as a measure of national defense, enacted at Angel Island Immigration Station and in wartime incarceration (or “internment”) camps, separated detainees from the norms of work, family, and sociability. Even as the United States screened working-class immigrants for their risk of becoming “public charges,” the government enforced leisure on those incarcerated. Unchosen leisure thus became a problem to be solved.

Portraying Race beyond Ellis Island: The Case of Lewis Hine

Lewis Hine first went to New York’s Ellis Island Immigration Station to take photographs that would elicit sympathy from his students at the Ethical Culture School toward the new immigrants. Since then, the photographs, dating from 1905 to 1926, have visually defined his sitters as foreigners in classrooms, in print, and at museums. Produced at a time when the so-called race of the foreign-born was deemed indicative of their overall character and abilities, the photographs both sustained and countered turn-of-the-century racialized conceptualizations of newcomers. More recently, contemporary artists including JR and Tomie Arai have returned to Hine’s Ellis Island work for installations that bring the past into direct dialogue with the present, confronting contemporary viewers with enlarged versions of his photographs. Hine’s pro-immigrant intentions and reputation as a social reform photographer, however, have clouded how these photographs also racialized their sitters. This article traces the circulation of a selection of Hine’s works in different contexts dating from 1905 to today, and considers them within the broader histories and theories of photography, race, and immigration.

Angel Island Poetry

Angel Island poetry refers to Chinese poems carved on the barrack walls of the US Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, which was in operation from 1910 to 1940. An estimated 50,000 Chinese were processed and detained during that period there and left their words, recording a dark chapter of racial exclusion in history. These poems were written in the classical style of Chinese poetry and were discovered by California State Parks ranger Alexander Weiss in 1970, who contacted his teacher George Araki from San Francisco State College. Araki brought the site to the attention of the community and invited San Francisco photographer Mak Takahashi to photograph these poems. Today, around two hundred poems from the Angel Island barracks have been deciphered and published in various places, though many still remain indecipherable. The Angel Island poetry sources include the Jann and Yee collections, Mak Takahashi’s photographs, Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) rubbings, poems published in various Chinese newspapers, and the findings of poetry consultants commissioned in 2003 by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation for an evaluation. In this article, the Angel Island poetry more specifically refers to two editions of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940, edited by Him Mark Lai (who passed away in 2009, between publication of the two editions), Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, since most scholarship has derived from these two books. The first edition of Island was self-published in 1980, which set up a model of editing and presenting Chinese-language material, consisting of a historical introduction, 135 poems in Chinese and English, excerpts from thirty-nine oral-history interviews, and twenty-two photographs. Island went into a second printing in 1983 and was republished by the University of Washington Press in 1991. The second edition of Island, published in 2014, combines all 135 poems into one section and expands the Chinese poems by adding those on the walls from the immigration stations at Ellis Island in New York and Victoria, British Columbia. Yung and Lim rewrote the historical introduction and replaced the excerpts of oral histories in the first edition with twenty full profiles and stories, with new translations, correction of errors in the first edition, and more photographs. Island possesses a unique place in Asian American studies, ethnic studies, US immigration history, and American literature classes.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and Early Asian American Literature

The 19th century featured two opposed yet interconnected historical trends: the growth of a multigenerational and deeply rooted Chinese American community; and the development of the cultural prejudices and fears comprised by the Yellow Peril narrative. Those xenophobic fears produced violence, social and political movements, and legal exclusions, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its many follow-up laws and policies, all designed as much to destroy the existing Chinese American community as to restrict future immigration. But out of that period of exclusion and oppression came some of the first Chinese American literary and cultural works published in both Mandarin/Cantonese and English: the personal and collective poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station by detainees; auto-ethnographic memoirs of Chinese American life and community such as Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (1909); and the journalistic, autobiographical, and fictional works of Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, the first Chinese American professional creative writer. These works both reflect and transcend the realities of the Exclusion era, helping contemporary audiences understand those histories, connect them to later Chinese American writers, and analyze the exclusionary debates and proposals of the early 21st century.

Ellis Island Immigration Station

The Ellis Island Immigration Station, located in New York Harbor, opened in 1892 and closed in 1954. During peak years from the 1890s until the 1920s, the station processed an estimated twelve million immigrants. Roughly 75 percent of all immigrants arriving in America during this period passed through Ellis Island. The station was run by the federal Immigration Service and represented a new era of federal control over immigration. Officials at Ellis Island were tasked with regulating the flow of immigration by enforcing a growing body of federal laws that barred various categories of “undesirable” immigrants. As the number of immigrants coming to America increased, so did the size of the inspection facility. In 1907, Ellis Island processed more than one million immigrants. The quota laws of the 1920s slowed immigration considerably and the rise of the visa system meant that Ellis Island no longer served as the primary immigrant inspection facility. For the next three decades, Ellis Island mostly served as a detention center for those ordered deported from the country. After Ellis Island closed in 1954, the facility fell into disrepair. During a period of low immigration and a national emphasis on assimilation, the immigrant inspection station was forgotten by most Americans. With a revival of interest in ethnicity in the 1970s, Ellis Island attracted more attention, especially from the descendants of immigrants who entered the country through its doors. In the 1980s, large-scale fundraising for the restoration of the neighboring Statue of Liberty led to a similar effort to restore part of Ellis Island. In 1990, the Main Building was reopened to the public as an immigration museum under the National Park Service. Ellis Island has evolved into an iconic national monument with deep meaning for the descendants of the immigrants who arrived there, as well as a contested symbol to other Americans grappling with the realities of contemporary immigration.

Controlling and Protecting White Women

By 1882, federal immigration officials had assumed sole responsibility for determining who qualified as eligible to enter the United States. By the 1890s, they also wielded the power to deport immigrants—what legal historian Daniel Kanstroom has called “post-entry social control”—who violated the terms of their admission. Building on Kanstroom’s framework, chapter 4 grapples with the ways that government-appointed immigration officers and employment agents, first at Castle Garden and then at Ellis Island and the immigration station in Philadelphia, used the threat of barred entry and informal prohibitions on the release of unaccompanied female immigrants to compel these white women into taking jobs in domestic labor. Committed to the idea that young, white European women, when subjected to the right type of controls, remained a vital and privileged source of immigrants, officials devised and implemented practices and regulations that allowed for their foreign contract and for them to circumvent restrictions that would have otherwise prohibited their entry on the grounds that they were likely to become public charges.

Angel Island Immigration Station

The Angel Island Immigration Station (1910–1940), located in San Francisco Bay, was one of twenty-four ports of entry established by the U.S. government to process and detain immigrants entering and leaving the country. Although popularly called the “Ellis Island of the West,” the Angel Island station was in fact quite different from its counterpart in New York. Ellis Island was built in 1892 to welcome European immigrants and to enforce immigration laws that restricted but did not exclude European immigrants. In contrast, as the primary gateway for Chinese and other Asian immigrants, the Angel Island station was built in 1910 to better enforce discriminatory immigration policies that targeted Asians for exclusion. Chinese immigrants, in particular, were subjected to longer physical exams, interrogations, and detentions than any other immigrant group. Out of frustration, anger, and despair, many of them wrote and carved Chinese poems into the barrack walls. In 1940, a fire destroyed the administration building, and the immigration station was moved back to San Francisco. In 1963, the abandoned site became part of the state park system, and the remaining buildings were slated for demolition. Thanks to the collective efforts of Asian American activists and descendents of former detainees, the U.S. Immigration Station at Angel Island was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997, and the immigration site, including the Chinese poetry on the barrack walls, was preserved and transformed into a museum of Pacific immigration for visitors.