Rhetorical Implications of the Chinese Detainees’ Ghostly Poems at Angel Island: Lonely Voices, Alien Discourse, and Collective Identity

Abstract

February 15th, 2009, saw the reopening of the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco as a museum that
showcases the sufferings of imprisoned Chinese immigrants who came to the west coast of the United States of America during the first
half of the 20th century. Although many travelers or immigrants from East Asian countries and the eastern part of Russia were detained
and roughed up when they arrived in San Francisco, by far the majority of the detainees were Chinese. Under the notoriously
discriminating law known as “Chinese Exclusion Act” passed in 1882 and repealed in 1943, no fewer than 120,000 Chinese were held in
Angel Island against their will between 1910 and the early 1940’s, some of them for as long as two years. Different from their fellow
detainees from Japan, Korea, or Russia, who registered their frustration and anger vocally or in short pieces of writing, the Chinese who
were confined in Angel Island wrote poems instead and carved them on the walls of their bunk barracks. These poems, totaling over
150 and all written in Chinese, recorded a range of feelings the detainees experienced: fear, uncertainty, despair, loneliness,
homesickness, indignation, defiance, and even contempt. In my presentation, I would like to categorize some of these poems by their
themes, identify the emotions expressed in them, and analyze their structural patterns in the Chinese poetic discursive tradition. In so
doing, I intend to establish a link among all these individual works of poetry written and inscribed in times of great distress and see how,
as a very alien form of rhetorical practice to the average American reader, each of these poems contributed to the collective identity of
Chinese emigrants to America in the early 20th century.