Angel Island Stirs Devilish Memories in Ex-Detainee

ANGEL ISLAND, Calif. —  Dale Ching walks to the spot where he slept in a bunk for 3 1/2 months in 1937, a prisoner of U.S. immigration laws.

He wraps his hand around the pole that held his bed and tells how the joy he felt on landing in San Francisco turned into despair as he spent night after night on the narrow bunk.

“I thought, ‘In a couple of days, I’ll be with my dad,’ ” he recalls. “But they wouldn’t let us even see each other.”

Ching, now 75, was a boy of 16 when he arrived alone at the shores of San Francisco, only to be whisked to an immigration station on Angel Island a mile away.

“When you get off the ferry, there’s a welcome party,” he recalls. “What I mean is, there’s an armed guard.”

Like thousands of other Chinese, Ching was locked up until he convinced immigration officials his papers were real.

After he was released to his father, Ching vowed never to return. But in 1991, he did.

“My grandchildren made me come,” he says. “And I didn’t have the heart to turn them down.”

Soon after, Ching--afraid history might be forgotten--donned a volunteer’s coat himself. He is determined that the next generation know the history of Angel Island.

Today, Angel Island is a state park admired for its beauty and cherished as a weekend getaway.

But from 1910 to 1940, the island--accessible only by boat--served as a detention center for about 175,000 Chinese immigrants who landed on San Francisco’s shores.

The Chinese Exclusion Act, enacted in 1882 after an economic depression triggered widespread anti-Chinese sentiment, barred entry to all but students, diplomats and merchants.

But when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed city birth records, thousands of Chinese tried to prove they were the American-born sons of merchants.

They became “paper sons,” memorizing coaching books on the ship ride over and tossing them overboard as they approached shore.

These paper sons--and daughters--spent weeks, even months, at Angel Island as immigration officials scrutinized their applications.

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Ching, the fourth generation in his family to journey between China and the United States, was not a paper son. He left southern China to join his father, a merchant in San Francisco.

“Technically, I shouldn’t be here. My grandparents were born in the U.S. My father was a citizen. That makes me a citizen,” he says. “Automatic.”

But, along with the others, he was marched down the dock to the hospital. They were stripped, examined for diseases and--if healthy--were taken up a long stretch of wooden steps to the detention barracks.

Men were separated from their wives, mothers from their teen-age sons. The Chinese were housed in cramped first-floor barracks; other Asian and some European immigrants were kept upstairs.

One by one, detainees were brought before immigration officials and grilled for hours. Who were their neighbors? How many children did they have? When did they marry, and what time of day was it?

A relative was brought in separately and asked the same questions.

“Their job is to catch you saying something they don’t like to hear,” Ching says.

Some were lucky. They left on a ferry bound for San Francisco.

In Ching’s case, he and his uncle described one small detail about their house in China differently. Ching was to be deported.

Those who failed the interrogations and appealed deportations remained jailed, with despair, sadness and frustration marking their days.

Some men took to writing poetry, painting the verses on barrack walls with brush and ink or carving couplets into the wood with knives. None signed their names.

“The carving is not just a mark on the wall. It’s to express yourself,” Ching says. “There was a lot of sadness--who’s going to listen?

“All those carvings are treasures, really.”

The men played mah-jongg, traded books and listened to Chinese opera on a Victrola. The women sewed and knitted.

Some, humiliated, hanged themselves from the shower stalls.

One afternoon, a guard came to the men’s barracks, called Ching’s name, and said only two words: “Dai Fo.”

Hearing the words, Cantonese for “San Francisco,” Ching knew he had won his appeal.

“I was jumping on my bed and running all over the place like a chicken without a head,” he recalls.

Reunited with his father, Ching attended high school. In 1942, five years after the United States tried to deport him, he joined the Army.

“When I was in the service, bad memories came back,” he says. “They didn’t treat me just like everybody else. In other words, discrimination.”

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But years of bitterness wore off as Ching married and reared three children. The Chinese Immigration Act was repealed in 1943, and in 1965, a revised immigration law opened the doors to thousands of Asian immigrants.

“Now I’ve got no grudge against anybody,” he says. “As long as they want to hear about me and the time when I was there, I tell them. We want people to know about how it happened.”

A 1940 fire hastened the closure of the immigration station, which became a POW holding camp during World War II. In the 1970s, the state reopened Angel Island as a park, with plans to raze the dilapidated immigration buildings. Then a ranger spotted the Chinese ideographs, and Chinese Americans sought to have the buildings saved.

Those Chinese Americans, many of them the children and grandchildren of Angel Island detainees, are seeking to have the “Ellis Island of the West” declared a national landmark.

When Ching’s teenage grandchildren, who knew little about the discrimination of the past, bought ferry tickets to Angel Island in 1991, he knew it was time to return.

“When I left here in 1937, I didn’t want to see this island ever again,” he says. “But when I walked in that door, the tears were coming down.”

Ching, fighting back memories he’d tried forgetting, turned to ask some students what they knew about Angel Island.

“The majority of them said, ‘Nothing,’ ” he recalls.

That’s when he decided to volunteer--the only former detainee to serve as a docent. Ching was named the state park’s volunteer of the year in 1996.

“The reason I came back is because in ’91 not too many people understood why it happened.

“I said, ‘Well, if we don’t tell them, who’s going to know?’ ”

‘The reason I came back is because . . . not too many people understood why it happened. I said, “Well, if we don’t tell them, who’s going to know?” ’