The Chinese in America (23 page)

In 1910, the government fenced off ten acres of Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, as an immigration facility. This island had previously served as a military depot for recruits as well as a detention center for prisoners of the Spanish-American and Indian wars. Officials found its location advantageous for two reasons: as with nearby Alcatraz, the surrounding bay formed a natural barrier to escape; moreover, the physical isolation provided effective quarantine for the communicable diseases that American officials claimed were “prevalent among aliens from oriental countries.”

Over the next thirty years, some 175,000 Chinese immigrants, along with arrivals from other countries, would pass through Angel Island. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of the Chinese were detained until they could prove who they were, which usually required detailed investigations. Though modeled on Ellis Island near Manhattan, for decades the primary immigration gateway for the United States, Angel Island served a much different purpose. Ellis Island was a way station, with most immigrants processed and released within hours, whereas Angel Island was a long-term detention center, where many Chinese were imprisoned for months, even years. Looking back at how each was run, one might say that Ellis Island was operated to facilitate immigration and Angel Island to discourage it.

The Immigration Service used an elaborate process to inspect the Chinese. When a ship docked at San Francisco, the authorities went on board to examine the paperwork of the passengers. A few Chinese might be allowed to disembark, but most were ferried to Angel Island to await a more detailed review of their applications. At the station, government workers separated the men from the women, even if they were married, and then examined them for disease. “They are dumped together as so many animals,” an observer wrote:

It was an unlucky immigrant who fell ill at Angel Island. Because hospitals in San Francisco still refused to accept Chinese patients, ailing Chinese were moved into a wooden building near the immigration station that one official called a “veritable firetrap.” There were no separate rooms to segregate those with highly contagious diseases from those with milder, more manageable afflictions like trachoma or hookworm. When one Chinese man came down with cerebral spinal meningitis, the immigration authorities pitched a tent for him in a remote area on the island, where he was kept until he died.

Reports of mistreatment soon surfaced. In 1913, quarantine officers imprisoned a group of Chinese students at Angel Island for several days, for no other reason than their arrival in San Francisco by second-class passage. One Chinese man, L. D. Cio, was interrogated by authorities even though he had the requisite paperwork. Officials demanded to see evidence of the means of his financial support, forcing Cio to show them $300 in cash. Not until a telegram was received from the New York YMCA on his behalf (apparently one of his sponsors in America) was Cio considered free and permitted to travel eastward. Later, he described the Angel Island station as “a prison with scarcely any supply of air or light. Miserably crowded together and poorly fed, the unfortunate victims are treated by the jailers no better than beasts. The worst is that they are not allowed to carry on correspondence with the outside.”

The Seattle immigration facility was no better. Chinese immigrants complained that inspectors treated them like “cattle,” that they were “thrown into a big room with about 75 people,” where they were forced to “pack ourselves like sardines” and “sleep on the floor beside an open toilet.” “This,” they wrote, “was our first impression of America.”

And sometimes there wasn’t enough to eat. At Angel Island, officials tried to justify scanty meals by claiming that it was customary for the Chinese to eat only twice a day. To protest these conditions, young immigrants held angry demonstrations in the dining room, prompting the Immigration Service to post a sign in Chinese warning inmates not to cause trouble or throw food on the floor. In 1919, the inmates rioted, forcing the government to suppress the disturbance by dispatching troops to Angel Island.

But the interrogations were the worst of all. The immigration process deteriorated into a mind game between inspector and immigrant, whereby American officials tried to identify paper sons or daughters through extensive questioning about their past history and home villages. Many questions were excessively detailed and had nothing to do with a person’s right to enter the United States. When a Chinese arrived at the immigration station, paper son or not, he had to remember all the answers he gave to authorities, because he might be quizzed on them later if he left the United States and then tried to return. The transcripts of these conversations often ran for hundreds of pages, yet one wrong answer, no matter how trivial, could easily result in deportation. Even a correct answer might elicit suspicion, such as in the following exchange:

In this environment, it was inevitable that some inmates cracked under the strain. Separated from their families, interrogated by hostile strangers, and haunted by the fear of deportation, a few lost all control of their senses. The most traumatized tended to be Chinese women separated from their children. “There are many cases at the Immigration Station now where the Chinese wife of an American-born Chinese citizen is denied admission, while her little infant children are admitted,” J. S. Look told interviewers for the 1924 Los Angeles Survey of Race Relations. To handle depression, panic, or hysteria, immigration authorities threw emotionally troubled émigrés into a special isolation room, a tiny windowless closet three feet square, where they were kept in solitary confinement, sometimes for weeks, until they were able to “calm down.” These brutal immigration practices continued for decades, causing some Chinese women to attempt or commit suicide.
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Forbidden to communicate with the outside world, some educated inmates wrote or carved poetry on the walls of the immigration station, venting their sorrow, frustration, and rage, sometimes speaking of retribution. An immigrant who signed his work as “One from Taishan” wrote, “Wait till the day I become successful and fulfill my wish! I will not speak of love when I level the immigration station.” Another penned the following lines: “Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my sword, I came to America. Who was to know two streams of tears would flow upon arriving here? If there comes a day when I will have attained my ambition and become successful I will certainly behead the barbarians and spare not a single blade of grass.”
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Immigration officials wrote poetry, too, although their verse contained different sentiments from those of the inmates. One inspector composed the following lines of mocking doggerel:

Release from Angel Island did not guarantee the Chinese freedom from further harassment by the Immigration Service, for exclusion-era policies gave immigration officials enormous discretion to seize and detain the Chinese as they wished. As the Chinese would soon learn, all it would take was one crime committed by one Chinese individual to tarnish the entire Chinese American community.

In 1909, a young white girl named Elsie Sigel was murdered in New York, her decomposing body found stuffed in a rusty trunk in her apartment. The chief suspect was William Leon, the owner of a chop suey restaurant in Manhattan who had courted Sigel but was believed to have become jealous when Sigel grew attached to another Chinese man. By the time Sigel’s corpse was discovered, Leon had long vanished, no doubt having fled the city, if not the country. When the authorities threw a dragnet out for Leon, they suspended the constitutional rights of anyone who looked even remotely Chinese.

The memorable aspect of the Sigel case was not the tragedy of the murder itself but how the nation reacted to it, and its long-term consequences for the Chinese community. The New York City police ordered that no Chinese person could leave the city without permission, and those Chinese with railway and steamship tickets were turned away at the stations and docks. Every ship leaving New York harbor was searched, their Chinese crews interrogated. As the investigation rippled across the country and into Canada, officials rounded up Chinese men from Norfolk to Chicago, from Vancouver to Revelstoke, British Columbia, arresting some the moment they stepped off trains. Chinese businesses nationwide were placed under surveillance. In Providence, Rhode Island, the police commissioner even ordered all draperies to be removed from each room, stall, and booth of the city’s Chinese restaurants so that the interiors could be viewed from the outside at all times. Japanese Americans were hauled off the streets and harassed by the police. In the end, countless Asians, entirely guiltless, bore the full brunt of suspicion, but the primary suspect, William Leon, was never caught. To the beleaguered Chinese, the Sigel case illustrated just how swiftly their rights could be stripped from them in times of mass hysteria and government-declared emergency.

Even without a sensational murder case in the background, all throughout the 1910s American immigration officials repeatedly raided homes and businesses, without warrants or just cause and at all hours, in searches for illegal aliens. Most of these unjustified searches were failures. In Cleveland, the Chinese complained that more than 90 percent of such raids produced no results—but this fact did not prevent authorities from arresting the Chinese in front of newspaper reporters and photographers, handcuffing them for the benefit of the cameras, and hauling them down to the immigration office, where they were fingerprinted, examined, and measured as if they were dangerous felons.

The public rarely saw the treatment of the Chinese once they were in government custody. Many Chinese later claimed that they were detained for hours, without food or water, sometimes in “solitary, dark confinement.” Often they were not permitted access to counsel or even to learn the charges filed against them. The detainees also claimed that the interrogations were timed so that they would miss their meals, in hopes that hunger and exhaustion would disorient them and cause them to give ambiguous answers from which guilt could be inferred.

During raids, inspectors often demanded to see the residence certificates the Chinese needed to stay in the United States. In some cases, the inspectors confiscated them without providing receipts, causing the owners months of agony, knowing they could not prove their legitimate right to reside in the United States. If the Chinese could not produce their certificates, they were expected to explain how they had lost them, which was impossible for many to do. Some immigrants exhausted their entire life savings paying legal bills and hiring detectives to locate witnesses to testify on their behalf.

The deportation process was horrendous. According to a 1913 report compiled by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Chinese-American League of Justice of Los Angeles, the Chinese deportees were packed into railroad cars “unfit for the transportation of cattle,” poorly fed, and then herded into the holds of ships, where they endured “real torture, especially in the summertime,” when the ship sailed close to the equator. With the constant danger of such deportation hanging over their heads, the Chinese were vulnerable to legally sanctioned blackmail and could be fleeced mercilessly by officials and hoodlums alike. White racketeers would fabricate complaints about Chinese merchants and threaten to sue them unless they received payoffs. Many Chinese preferred the illegal payoff to the more expensive legal fees. But some of the worst extortionists were the immigration officials themselves, upon whose whim depended who was admitted or deported; with no restraint on their powers, many officials traded influence and authority for bribes.

Not all white Americans were callously anti-Chinese, and it must be noted that there were some who were seriously troubled by what was being done in their name. In 1916, when Washington could no longer ignore rumors of corruption at Angel Island, the federal government appointed John Densmore, a labor attorney, to head a special investigation. Densmore discovered a smuggling ring and system of graft within the Immigration Service that had been thriving since as early as 1896. “This business had been going on for a number of years and had mounted to colossal proportions in the number of Chinese illegally admitted and official records destroyed, and the amount of graft money involved in these transactions runs into hundreds of thousands,” one report of the investigation asserted in 1917.

The graft business was a lucrative enterprise, with payoffs around the globe. Some American immigration authorities garnered as much as $100,000 a year by charging $1,400 to admit each illegal alien. The participants included not only high-ranking U.S. government officials but attorneys, notaries public, photographers, and Chinese merchants. The system entailed theft of documents, sale of biographical information, destruction or mutilation of data, creation of new records, substitution of photographs, and counterfeiting of official seals and stamps. So extensive was this Immigration Service racket that it even encompassed a special paper-son tutor school in Hong Kong, where prospective Chinese émigrés were coached on how to answer questions upon their arrival in San Francisco.