At Immigration Station at Angel Island, some Asian-Americans are learning their family’s painful history for the first time

The wooden house on the hill is haunted, and those who once endured its wrath are now the ones holding the doors wide open.

Come inside, and you can almost hear the echoes of the suffering and smell the stench that immigration officers once blamed on the prisoners trapped inside, as a picture of what happened here less than a century ago starts to become clear.

This is the Angel Island Immigration Station, where more than half a million people took their first steps on American soil between 1910 and 1940. Some 300,000 of them were held in its inhospitable walls for weeks, months, even years, while awaiting word on whether or not they would be given a chance in the Land of the Free.

Today, Immigration Station is part of the California State Parks and open to the public. Restored with more than $40 million in public and private funding, it has become a museum that hopes to educate visitors on the wrongdoings of the past and raise awareness of the similar immigration sentiments that still exist today.

“It’s safe to say, nobody detained here thought this place would ever become a museum,” says Casey Dexter-Lee, now in her 24th year as a state parks employee, living on the island and giving tours. “The history here is so complex that I continue to learn.”

Angel Island has about 30 residents in all today, an eighth of the population that once occupied a single room in the wooden detention barracks a century ago.

With information shared by the park’s inhabitants and its volunteer docents, many of whom share a personal history with Immigration Station, the stories of those who suffered here are starting to resurface.

“In the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, there was no representation or hardly any mention of us (Chinese-Americans) in the history books,” says Mill Valley resident Felicia Lowe. “There was a real question of, ‘Where do I belong? Who are we?’

“My father spent three weeks detained at Angel Island… And once I understood Angel Island, I’ve been so committed to helping promote and continue to tell the story with the context of connecting the dots. Why do we have anti-Asian hate? It started a long time ago. We’re all still affected by it. And among our own cultures, we’re not talking about it.”

Today, we can retrace the steps of Lowe’s father, Thomas Wing Lowe, who arrived at Angel Island as a 21-year-old on April 15, 1938.

Born and raised in China, he walked ashore after a three-week voyage across the Pacific Ocean in hopes of starting a new life as a “paper son,” a term given to those trying to claim citizenship without a birth certificate.

After the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires burned down the San Francisco government building that housed all the birth records, there was no way to prove that someone wasn’t an American citizen.

“People could come forward, claim citizenship and list their children with names we know were exaggerated, in part because nine out of 10 of the children reported were boys,” Dexter-Lee says while giving a recent tour. “That’s just not how the world works.”

Even today, immigrants are more likely to be boys, “particularly when you’re immigrating for labor,” she says. “Men get paid more than women in most industries, and you want to send the greatest earner to be able to send money back home.”

To counteract the new influx of immigrants claiming to be family members of American citizens, the government developed strict tests designed to weed out imposters.

What it really did was create a de facto prison for hopeful immigrants, including many who were legitimate family members or actual citizens, and build a pattern of discrimination that skewed heavily against the Chinese.

The Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882 put a stop on Chinese immigration and was the first known law to ban immigration of a particular race. Not only did it halt laborers from entering, but it created harsh regulations for legitimate Chinese-American citizens reentering their own country.

For the next 80 years, Chinese immigration was strictly limited, until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, which was intended to remove racial discrimination.

At Angel Island, immigration officers went to great measures to keep Chinese out of the country. While the average stay at Angel Island was only three days for people from other countries, the average stay for a Chinese person was three weeks. Some were detained as long as two years. Several died during that time.

“Some from illness,” Dexter-Lee says. “And some by their own hand.”

The conditions were brutal.

Typically a steamship with American hopefuls would anchor between Alcatraz and San Francisco. Doctors would board to look for signs of highly infectious diseases. If any were found, the ship would head to Angel Island for “disinfection.” If not, immigration officers would board and begin the investigation process.

But first-class passengers were hardly ever detained.

“Wealth could override any other barrier,” Dexter-Lee says. “Even barriers you would think would be insurmountable, like tuberculosis, something that would be deportable today.”

For third-class “steerage” passengers, the inspection was harsh. Most would be sent to the Angel Island detention center, where they’d step off the boat, register in the administration building and head straight to the hospital, where they were forced to offer blood, urine and stool samples on the spot, with little or no privacy. Women were inspected harshly, as officers performed invasive exams to identify signs of pregnancy without marriage, which was seen as immoral.

Afterward, immigrants were guided up a large set of caged-in stairs (open now for visitors) and separated into wooden barracks. Boys, 12 and older, went with the men to the second floor; women and children stayed on the first floor. Passengers were forced to give up their belongings, save for a set of clothes and a toothbrush, and sleep on metal bunks that initially had no padding.

In the early years, there was no water or soap in the bathroom. After severe health issues presented themselves, Angel Island finally added a second bathroom with fresh water access and two showers for hundreds of people. The toilets, still viewable today, offered no privacy.

Two hundred people were crammed into a room considered by health officials to be “healthy” for only 30. In private journals, immigration officers complained of the stench and often blamed the immigrants’ race, rather than the conditions that had created it.

The rounds of interrogations that followed were intense, especially for anyone claiming to be related to an American citizen. Fathers and sons were questioned separately and their files searched for discrepancies as immigration officers searched for reasons to deport.

Many “paper sons” and “paper daughters” spent the long journey across the ocean preparing for potential questions, but once in front of intense immigration officers, a stenographer and a translator, even actual sons and daughters often answered questions incorrectly.

When Thomas Wing Lowe attempted to immigrate in 1938, for example, his father claimed Thomas was the third child of his first wife. Thomas was actually the first son of his father’s second wife.

Felicia Lowe discovered her father’s journey at Angel Island only after his death. This is not uncommon; many of those who passed through never spoke of it again. But Lowe became curious, and it was in the public records of her father’s interrogation that she found the truth.

“I could see the process he went through,” she says. “What struck me about seeing the material in black and white was that after each time they were interrogated, they had to sign their names. In one, I saw my father’s handwriting was very shaky. It grabbed me by the heart. He must’ve been really scared that time.”

Questions often focused on the immigrants’ lives back in China. What direction did your doorway face? How many windows are in your house? How many steps are there to your front door?

To counteract these intense interrogations, detainees created the Angel Island Liberty Association with cooks from the dining hall. They were often Chinese and allowed to go to San Francisco on their days off. Detainees secretly passed questions to the cooks, who visited family members in the city to get answers. The cooks would return with the answers, written on little slips of paper and tucked in a banana, under an orange peel or hidden between a plate and a tray.

Dale Ching was the actual son of an American citizen, and yet he was detained for three months because of a discrepancy to a single question in his interrogation: Was the ladder to his family’s sleeping loft in China attached to the house or could it be moved? Ching said it was attached. His uncle had said it was movable.

“They had detached the ladder after the uncle moved to America,” Dexter-Lee explains. “They were both telling the truth and were truly related but failed because of this discrepancy.”

After three months, Ching was finally released. He never wanted to set foot on Angel Island again. But decades later, his grandchildren learned of his history and bought him a ticket to accompany them to Angel Island.

“They went on a tour and there were kids on the tour,” Dexter-Lee says. “He asked some of the kids what they learned. But the kids were just excited about taking the boat and going on a field trip.”

Ching realized if children were going to really connect to the stories of Angel Island, they needed to hear from someone who had actually passed through. Soon after his visit, he began giving tours at Angel Island once a week for the rest of his healthy life.

“He’d show people where his bed was. He’d show a group of kids, ‘Look, I slept here,’” Dexter-Lee says. “That’s so much more powerful for children.”

The immigration center closed after a fire severely damaged the site in 1940. But it soon became a holding place for prisoners during World War II, when 600 Japanese-Americans were taken from their families and sent to the haunted wooden house on the hill.

By 1970, the state had reopened Angel Island as a park, with plans to burn what was left of the old immigration buildings. Those plans changed when a park ranger, Alex Weiss, took some kids on a field trip, and they noticed all the writing carved into the barracks’ old walls. The students went back and told their families. Many of those families knew of Angel Island. Some knew it only too well.

“For many of those students, it was their parents’ first time telling their kids they were detained here,” Dexter-Lee says. “The students started a movement to save this building and turn it into a museum. Overnight, this went from an old abandoned building to one of our most significant cultural resources.

“It’s a common cliche to say, ‘if the walls could talk.’ At this site, the walls are speaking of the people who experienced this. And they saved the building. Because the detained immigrants wrote on the walls, this building was not burned down. And now we have an opportunity to learn from their experience.”

If You Go

The Golden Gate Ferry ($16 to $31 round trip) runs daily from the San Francisco Ferry Building to Angel Island. The Angel Island Tiburon Ferry ($6-$18 round trip) runs from the dock at 21 Main St. in Tiburon to the island on winter weekends.

The Immigration Station is a 1.2-mile walk from the Ayala Cove dock. Admission to the Angel Island Immigration Museum, which is open from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday, is free. The Detention Barracks Museum and WWII Mess Hall are open the same hours; admission is $3-$5, and guided tours ($3-$7) are available. Find more information at www.aiisf.org.

The poetry of Angel Island

In the barracks of Angel Island’s Immigration Station, lead-based paint concealed the writing on the walls for years. It also protected the walls from moisture and helped preserve the words carved beneath — hundreds of poems and inscriptions written by detainees in languages from around the world.

“These poems were not written for us. They were written for themselves, to express what they were feeling,” says Angel Island State Park interpreter Casey Dexter-Lee. “Some are sad, frustrated and angry. Some are more hopeful. Some are more practical, talking about experiences they’ve had, a long journey on the boat, the invasive medical exam and bad food in the dining hall. There’s a poem about a thief — making sure they don’t leave things on the beds, when they go to the dining halls.”

The following Chinese poem described the anger and humiliation one detainee was feeling:

Alas! Heaven!

So desolate is this sight;

It is disheartening indeed.

Sorrow and hardship have led me to this place;

What more can I say about life?

Worse yet,

A healthy person would become ill after repeated medical examinations;

A private inspection would render a clothed person naked.

Let me ask you, the barbarians:

Why are you treating us in such an extreme way?

I grieve for my fellow countrymen;

There is really nothing we can do!