A Crack in the Edge of the World (44 page)

From all along the curving northern coastline of San Francisco—from most of the Embarcadero, from North Beach, from Fort Mason or the Marina or Crissy Field, from the Presidio or up by the tollgates at the Golden Gate Bridge—the hills of Marin County lie green and billowing beyond the choppy waters of the Bay. There are pale scatterings of houses and dark patches of forest, and the peninsulas and embayments and hills on which they stand distinguish themselves from one another only by a careful scrutiny of their geography. The view has all the appearance of a diorama, with pastels done on drop cloths, the fly curtain pulled aside. Mount Tamalpais looms tallest, to the left and in the far background; somewhere within its folds is Muir Woods, with its ancient trees made memorial to the long-dead Scotsman who was the archdruid, so-called, of the Sierra Club; in front are Sausalito and Tiburon and the low hills of the Headlands, and beyond them all there is San Quentin and Bolinas and Corte Madera, and then the low hills and valleys of Napa and Sonoma, warm and sheltered places where wine is made.

In front of this scene stand two islands—of which only one appears properly insular, since it is possible to see from all along the city shore the sea that entirely surrounds it. This is Alcatraz, the incorrigibles' prison island, with its ever-flashing lighthouse and the sand-yellow fortress that stands on top, its giant water tower attendant, and all now for the tourists. The other island, however, is very much larger, with a grassy flattish-topped peak called Mount Ida
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that looks quite similar to the Marin Hills that range beyond it. Since from the south—from San Francisco, in other words—it is impossible to glimpse the sea behind, it is easy to assume it is a part of the mainland only a little closer than the rest. But is in fact quite separate, has for the last two centuries been called Angel Island, and it is a place that enjoyed a short and poignant spell of importance as a direct result of the events of 1906.

It was all to do with one peculiar coincidence of two of the episodes of ruin: The first, the utter destruction of almost all of Chinatown; and the second, the burning of all the records relating to the thousands of immigrant Chinese who lived there. From April 1906 onward no one in official San Francisco had any significant idea of who had lived in the city's Chinese quarter—and this degree of ignorance had important implications for those back in China who wanted to emigrate, to join their relations already living in what was still known from its Forty-Niners-era reputation as Jin-shan—the “Gold Mountain City.”

For them, everything depended on the precise wording and interpretation of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—its title and its intent so nakedly racist as to be barely credible today. It began:

Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof:

Therefore,

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is, hereby suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or, having so come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the United States.

Over the next two decades a number of amendments were added to the legislation: The most important, so far as it affected matters in 1906, was a liberalizing clause that allowed relatives of Chinese people who were already legally settled in America to go there to settle, too.

Until the spring of 1906 all would-be Chinese immigrants had been processed and interviewed in a small two-story shed that belonged to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company on the San Francisco waterfront. It was there that immigration officials, armed with index cards giving the details of every Chinese-born American citizen legally in the country, conducted Exclusion Act interviews with the arrivals, and did so with clinical efficiency: If the arrival turned out to have a father or brother already rightfully in America, then the official stamped them in; if not, they were first put in the lockup, then marched down the docks and put in the hold of a China-bound ship without further ado.

But after the earthquake and fire there was no more two-story hut—and there was a sudden rise in immigration from Canton and Shanghai and the so-called coolie ports on the coast of Fukien, all of it brought about specifically by the rumor that it was suddenly going to be very much easier to get into America. Word went around that all would-be immigrants had to do was invent their own family trees—to become what were known as “paper sons” and “paper brothers,” or, for those young women claiming that fiancés were waiting on the California harbor fronts, “paper brides.” What began after 1906 was, then, the invasion of the “paper people.” Official America's job was now to identify any fictions and to prevent their authors from coming, settling, and establishing a beachhead in San Francisco—hence the elaborate game, serious and bizarre by turns, that was to go on for the next three and a half decades.

Maxine Hong Kingston summed it up impeccably in her celebrated book
China Men
, published in 1980. “Every paper a China Man wanted for citizenship and legality burned in that fire,” she wrote. “An authentic citizen, then, had no more papers than an alien. Any paper a China Man could not produce had been ‘burned up in the Fire of 1906.' Every China Man was reborn out of that fire a citizen.” It was swiftly realized that everyone wanting to come into America from China could quite easily invent his own history. He could give himself a brand-new genealogy, in which he could claim a relationship with someone who was already settled in San Francisco. Since there was now in the City Hall files no evidence to the contrary, how could any immigration official properly deny the immigrant's stated story as the unvarnished truth?

It was on Angel Island that the confrontations caused by this dilemma took place—with the stakes being both simple and life-changing. Those who convinced the skeptical authorities won the right to remain in America, and those who did not were told to leave. The end results of the confrontation games were sometimes tragic, sometimes inexplicable, sometimes prosaic and unexceptional: In all cases they left an indelible imprint on the face of Chinese-American society.

The Bureau of Immigration had always planned to create an Ellis Island West, as it were, on the hitherto almost deserted thousand acres of Angel Island.
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The initial decision had nothing to do with China. Rather, it was assumed that once the Panama Canal was opened, Europeans who had an eye on living in the western states would buy their sea passages to California rather than to New York, and would undergo the immigration process in San Francisco, conveniently close to their expected front doorstep, as it were. The idea was thus to create on the Pacific Coast as welcoming an environment for Europe's “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” as already existed on the Atlantic seaboard.

The earthquake, however, changed all that. The buildings that had been begun in 1905 would now be pressed into service not to welcome Europeans but to prevent tale-telling Chinese from getting in. Precisely because of the Exclusion Act, and because of the new suspicion that untold numbers of Chinese immigrants might now try to outwit the system, Angel Island fast became notorious as the place where the American government tried hard to identify them, exclude them, and not welcome them at all. (Besides, as it turned out, barely any European immigrants-to-be ever used the Panama Canal. But for the Chinese and a smattering of other arriving Asians, the Angel Island Processing Center might never have been used at all. As it happened, from 1910 onward they had the island almost all to themselves.)

Central to the technique employed by American officials to trip up each would-be immigrant was a lengthy and detailed interrogation. Back on Ellis Island the typical immigrant was asked around 30 questions, and all of them fairly perfunctory. But most Chinese arriving at Angel Island were often asked as many as a thousand questions—certainly 200 at the very least, and all of the answers to be corroborated by those on the mainland to whom they were supposedly related. Each experience was miserable in the extreme—with Angel Island now mythologized among most of today's Chinese as a place of “great sadness and pain.”

Once they had landed and passed through the undignified rigors of deratting and delousing—Angel Island was also a quarantine station, with body searches and lice dustings—the Chinese were separated from any other Asians, such as any Punjabis or Siamese, who had been on the voyage,
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and then divided by sex: Generally speaking there were, at any one time, as many as 300 Chinese men in one barrack block and 50 Chinese women held separately in another, behind doors four inches thick. They were told that it would be folly to try to escape: The currents around the island were fierce and the waters unusually cold. Just as with Alcatraz, few tried to leave.

Each day they were called in, alone, for questioning—usually by a pair of white officials helped by an interpreter and a shorthand reporter. The questions to each applicant invariably related to the supposed relative who was already living in America. Exactly where in China did that relative come from? How big was the family house? How many steps do you think it took to go from the front door to the rice bin? What was the eldest brother's favorite breakfast? Who sat where in the mah-jongg games? The answers, laboriously written down, were taken back on that evening's ferryboat and given to officials, who took them on to the target relative—who may well have lived in New York or Dallas or Kansas City. They then tried to see if the answers were right.

It often took months for inquiries to be completed. Several detainees were held for years, always under lock and key, in their barracks. Coaching was forbidden; visits were banned; all kinds of efforts were made by officials to ensure that the applicants were surprised by the questions, and by the applicants and their friends to ensure that they were not. One woman who was prepared for the interrogations while still in China made copious notes, turned them all into a lengthy song and—during the weeks that her ship was sailing to America by way of Manila, Honolulu, Yokohama, Shanghai, and Hong Kong—learned the song by heart. And the kitchen staff who prepared the (reportedly virtually inedible) food that was served to detainees could be bribed to pass messages back and forth between the Chinese in the city and those waiting on the island.

The detention center functioned until 1940, when a fire—ironically—destroyed it. The law that permitted its existence was repealed in 1943, and then only because China decided to become America's ally in the Pacific theater of war. Even then, white American antipathy to the Chinese was not entirely extinguished, and only 105 Chinese were permitted full immigrant status each year. Today matters are more equable, relations more benign. The story of Angel Island and the role it played following the earthquake has a continuing resonance—not least in helping to ensure, through some kind of social Darwinism, that those Chinese who did manage to get in over the Exclusion Act's innumerable hurdles were either very clever and capable, or very cunning indeed.

But there was one other legacy, discovered by chance by a National Park Service warden only in 1970. The wooden walls of the detention blocks, he noticed, bore dozens of carved inscriptions, Chinese characters written in vertical lines, seven characters to a line, the lines usually grouped in fours. Interpreters called to inspect them discovered them to be poems—all brief and elegant expressions of misery that had been carved into the wood, in sets of near-perfect ideographs, by many of the lonely, angry, and frustrated Chinese men who had been held in the barrack blocks. None of the poems comes up to the standard of Li Bai, maybe; but all have a certain elegance that lifts them well above doggerel. All are unsigned, and many make reference time and again to the sadness of the “wooden buildings” in which they are held, and to the “Land of the Flowery Flag” in which they still hoped to be allowed to settle:

Imprisoned in the wooden building day after day
,

My freedom is withheld; how can I bear to talk about it?

I look to see who is happy but they only sit quietly
.

I am anxious and depressed and cannot fall asleep
.

The days are long and bottle constantly empty
;

My sad mood even so is not dispelled
.

Nights are long and the pillow cold; who can pity my

loneliness?

After experiencing such loneliness and sorrow
,

Why not just return home and learn to plow the fields?

And in some of the poems there were thoughts expressed of, one day perhaps, demanding recompense for all their suffering:

If the Land of the Flowery Flag is occupied by us in turn

The wooden building will be left for the angel's revenge
.

Some might care to look around at today's San Francisco—at today's America, even—and see how those who passed through the Angel Island experience, directly or indirectly, have made their mark. Clever, tough, determined, resilient—and, to judge by the poems, cultured and sensitive also—the Chinese are making an impression on America today like few others of those hundreds of racial groups that now make up the country. To the extent that this strength and resilience and doggedness can be said to have been born of their experiences following the events of April 1906, one can suggest, without too great a stretch of the imagination, that the earthquake did have its effect: It tempered the will of some of the Chinese who immigrated, and it helped to render them particularly able to succeed, in a society where success is all.