L to R: Angel Island, carved poetry, detention quarters, author Genny Lim
I initially met Genny Lim when we collaborated on poetry jazz shows for the Litquake literary festival. Genny is a fantastic poet and performer, and also has a keen eye for curation (all of the shows were sold out). During this process, she mentioned that she was once part of a project that translated the poetry at the Angel Island detention center.
If you're not familiar, Angel Island sits in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It was once called the “Ellis Island of the West.” From 1910-1940, approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrants were detained here, some for two weeks, others up to two years. While incarcerated, many of them wrote poetry, carving the Chinese-language characters into the walls. Genny, along with collaborators Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung, was the first to translate and edit these poems. The compilation appeared as a 1980 book, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940.
Genny also wrote a play based on the detainee poems, which eventually was filmed for PBS, and is being screened in theaters this year. Many more projects continue to emerge from the Angel Island history. Composer Huang Ruo's Angel Island: Oratorio for string quartet and chamber choir has been touring since 2021. The San Francisco classical quartet Del Sol frequently performs pieces from the Oratorio. In March 2024, Berkeley Repertory Theater will present the West Coast premiere of The Far Country, by Pulitzer Prize finalist Lloyd Suh, which is set at the Angel Island Immigration Station.
Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung have since passed away, leaving Genny Lim as the sole survivor of the original translation project. It has been part of her life for over 50 years, and as you can see, it’s still going. I really wanted to ask her more about it. This is an edited version of our conversation.
The detention center closed in 1940. And you were born not long thereafter. Growing up in San Francisco, were you aware of its existence?
No, nobody, except maybe the former detainees were aware of it, but they never spoke about it to their kids. That was just something they wanted to bury, and just sort of move on. And assimilate if possible.
How did the poetry become known to the general public?
Well, it's always a fluke. The park ranger on Angel Island, a white guy, Alexander Weiss, happened to be taking an Asian American studies class with George Araki, who was a biology teacher. He mentioned to George, I'm going around the island and I see these barracks, and inside there's Chinese writing, but I can't read it. I'm curious to know what the origin of these are, and what they represent.
So what year was this?
1970. It was just sitting there, and it was earmarked for demolition. When he discovered the poems, he didn't even know they were poems. And so George Araki got his friend, Mak Takahashi, a photographer, to go to the island. And Mak took photographs and brought those back, and people looked at them and said, Oh my god. These are poems written by former Chinese detainees in the immigration station.
Several of them made it into a local San Francisco Chinese-English bilingual newspaper called East/West, which no longer exists. I happened to work as a volunteer for East/West. At that time Judy Yung was the editor of East/West. And Him Mark Lai, who was a Bechtel engineer, happened to be a lay historian. His Chinese-American history stories would get published in East/West.
So when these poems got to the newspaper, Judy and Mark and I said, wow, let's check it out. We should get more of these and translate it and put it in the newspaper. We went out there and got photographer Chris Huey to come and photograph. He was with the Kearny Street Workshop people at that time. And then he brought in people to do rubbings of the walls of the poems.
We were thinking to publish them. But before we even got started, Judy became a librarian for the Asian American library in Oakland. And while she was there, these two gentlemen, at different points of time, came forward with their notebooks and said they were former inmates on Angel Island. And they happened to have copied down all these poems. About a hundred poems. Copied by hand in their notebooks. They felt it was important to document them.
You and your team were translating versions from photographs of it. And then here were these detainees.
But listen to this, Jack. The poems that they had in their notebooks, many of them had been painted over and even puttied. They weren't even there anymore. So all we had was a handful. Our thinking was, oh, we'll just put these in the newspaper and get it out to the masses. And then these two detainees decided to come forward and come to the Asian community library and say, look what I got. One of them was Smiley Jann and the other was Tet Yee.
Many of their poems we looked at corresponded. They were the same poems, but then at some point, maybe the characters were a little bit faded, or one of them had a different character than the other. Maybe they improved upon the original and thought the composer had used the wrong word. We had to discern which meaning was probably the original intention.
So can I back you up for a second? I want you to talk about the first moment you saw them when you walked into the barracks. These empty rooms. It's brutal, it's a detainee center. You'd seen the photographs. But what was your first impression seeing them in person?
You know, it was like walking into a time capsule, walking into a past that you had no reference experience of. You really feel the spirits. And people going there now, say the same thing. There's just some very overwhelming presence in the dormitories. Some people say they can't stay in there for more than a few minutes because it's just too oppressive. I didn't have that feeling. I felt a lot of the spirit of people that I grew up with in Chinatown, like the old bachelors sitting in Portsmouth Square that I was told not to talk to. My father's generation. It helped to get a little glimpse of what it was to be Chinese in America. That first encounter with a hostile population.
I have felt that through my parents. My mother never learned English. So I understood that fear and feeling of claustrophobia, And I said, my god, there were 100 men sleeping and eating and living in there, and they would get out once a week to go walk or play in the yard for a bit. Doing something wrong, just by immigrating. That's a real frightening feeling of terror, to know that just by virtue of who you were, you were guilty. Because you can't do anything about it.
It's a situation of immigration all over the world. You're automatically guilty.
You look at Palestine and you see these children being bombed, just by virtue of being Palestinian. It was that same feeling. There's nothing you can do about it. The feeling of helplessness. But at the same time, guilt, there's a psychological guilt of like, wow, what can I do?
Did you get a sense of, oh my god, what might have happened if your parents came over during a different time period?
That's a really insightful question, because when I look at the later immigrants that came in the 50s and 60s and 70s, they have a totally different outlook and psyche. I always envy them, because they seem to be able to take it for granted. That they could transition into this culture and compete, and they're successful in school and in whatever they do. And they don't have that dark cloud of inferiority hanging over them. It was the guilt and the shame that I felt my parents' generation, the trauma of immigration, passed down, transmitted to us.
When I was working, for instance, for CBS News, I'd say, wow, I'm gonna get to cover the news. And my father said, they'll never let you. Flat out. He felt sorry for me that I had got my hopes up, and he knew it was only going to be dashed. And I was so angry at him. I said, just because of that, I'm going to crawl under people if I have to, and shove my mike in front of somebody and scream my question.
It's always your relationship with your parents, isn’t it, which dictates the level of tenacity you have in your life.
When Judy, Mark and I were interviewing people, we decided we should interview our own parents. I interviewed my mom. My father found out, he was livid. He just went off. “I don't want you to put that in anything, any book or anything. Why would you want all of these terrible stories and stories about how we were interned and mistreated? Why would you want to focus on that negative chapter?”
I told Mark and Judy. I was really embarrassed. I said, I'm sorry, we're going to have to pull my mother's interview. He was really angry that we went ahead and did that.
Oh man. Okay, let's go back to when you were collecting the poems and beginning to translate them, and then these two detainees came forward. What happened in the timeline of the project after that?
We had no choice but to translate all the poems we had access to. And Mark and I started to do that. But at the same time, we felt it was important to provide a context around the poems. So that the public would understand the reason why these men would write – they were all predominantly men, unfortunately. We didn't get any of the women's poems because they were destroyed. We tried to identify former detainees, the former inspectors, anyone involved with the immigration administration and interpreters.
Wow, from 30 years ago, right?
Yeah. Good thing we did, because many of the subjects we interviewed died within five to ten years after.
So the translations were primarily from the Cantonese language?
Yeah, Cantonese. At that time, the immigrants came mainly from the Pearl River Delta area of southern China. And they came from villages which spoke what they called the third dialect and the fourth dialect. I speak the fourth dialect. And so for the majority, we were able to speak to them in my dialect. And then if they spoke other dialects, Mark could understand some of the other dialects and translate it.
It's an intense journalism experience to explore a project that hits you in such a deep way. All of you knew this language, or the languages. How young were all of you at this time?
My first daughter wasn't born until 77. So we started working on this in 1970. I didn't have kids, I wasn't even married when we started. But the project went on, and we were still working on the book until 1980. We had so many poems to go back and forth. And then we split hairs over one word. I said, well, I think, and Mark says, no, I don't agree. There was one poem that's really embedded really well into the wood. And that's the one everyone photographs, the one that's carved deeply.
Maybe you can talk about what insights you learned about what goes through the lives of men at a detainee center. Were they poetic? Or was it, dear god, just get me out of here? Describe the variety of poetry and subjects that these men were writing about.
It was a whole gamut. There were those who were real philosophical and waxed poetic, and were more positive in their outlook. And then there were those that were outright incensed and angry. And one said, if I ever get out of here, I'm gonna behead the head of every barbarian!
So you have that whole range of emotions and experiences. Each person handles their suffering and their burden in their individual way. But you have to remember that, for the most part, these were teenagers. When you're reading the poem, you don't get that. These are expressions of educated men. When you look at the elementary schools in Southern China, they learned the classics in grammar school. And so a lot of them were quoting the classics, and alluding to historical figures that were imprisoned for years by, you know, an enemy tribe.
So they were quite literate young men, from southern China. A ship full of people sailing across the Pacific to San Francisco, to Chinatown. They were coming into San Francisco thinking, I'm going to get a job, I'm going to land on my feet. What was their mindset, before they were arrested?
You have to also know that their family's life savings was spent on their passage. So they had a great responsibility. They had to get here and earn a living and be able to live on their wages, and send the larger part of their wages back home. It often was the first born, or the most capable. And they would sell everything to buy his passage. It's a lot of burden.
And San Francisco police would just go, show me your papers, and then boom, they're sent to Angel Island? Is that the route of how the detainees ended up there?
Oh no, they wouldn't even land in San Francisco. The boat would land on San Francisco for all intents and purposes, but they wouldn't set foot on land. They'd be transferred to a smaller ferry to Angel Island. And then the interrogations. They had to go through the hearings.
The hearings did not originate from any judicial system. It was created out of need. And so a lot of the inspectors were civil servants. None of them were official judges. That made the situation even more arbitrary and in some sense absurd. Because you look at the questions, and they're all over the place. Some of them were so ridiculous. Like, how many stairs are there leading to your family temple? Who counts stairs, you know? Designed to trick them. They didn't have a uniform process to do all of this stuff. It was just thrown together.
There's so much here. I can understand why it would take you ten years to put a book together. Obviously it wasn't your full-time job. Judy was a librarian, and you were a journalist, and Mark worked at Bechtel. And so, as the process sort of continued, you had other things to do, raising families. This was hopefully going to appear as a book. You had the photographs, you had the translations. What happened next?
This was another holdup. We couldn't get anyone to publish it. We couldn't find anyone who would touch it. We were adamant that we had to keep the original Chinese. And every publisher said, oh, I'm sorry, you should go to a foreign language press. We don't deal with foreign language books. We don't have the capacity to deal with it. Well, you have Spanish, you know? As soon as they saw the Chinese characters, they said, oh, no, no. That was like a deal breaker.
Did you have someone representing you, or were you three just approaching publishers on your own?
We didn't have any agent or anything like that. We just went around networking, asking people. We couldn't even get the university presses.
That's shocking to me because this is such a textbook idea. It's a title that you’d think students would have on their required reading lists. Were you discouraged? Did you think maybe we should just drop this?
No, we were adamant that we had to get it out one way or another, by hook or crook. And so we finally got the Wallace Gerbode Foundation to give us a loan. And they recommended we partner with San Francisco Study Center, who also had been subsidized by Gerbode. And so they designed the book for us. They did the layout and design. And then at that point, we finally self-published, in 1980.
The first edition.
Yeah, the first edition is under Hoc Doi Press. Hoc Doi, in my dialect, is like a visitor, a guest, guest sojourner. And then after that came out, University of Washington Press picked it up. There have been several editions.
So it's never been out of print.
No. Now other people are doing translations of the poems. And then, there's a play now coming to Berkeley Rep, The Far Country, which is about Angel Island. And when Del Sol was in New York doing the Angel Island: Oratorio, we found out that there is someone writing a play about the women on Angel Island. And what is surprising to me is like, this stuff that I worked on in the 70s and 80s, all of a sudden it's like the newest thing. It took all these decades.
Why do you think this history is now more part of our public consciousness? Were people afraid to admit this part of history, or is it a younger generation being more curious because of the internet? And how do you react to this?
I was so shocked. I’m getting all these calls about Angel Island, like the poems were just discovered yesterday. And when they did the oratorio, I was told that nobody in New York, even in the Chinese community, had ever heard of the Angel Island history. Well, we're not out there promoting it and trying to get blockbuster films or anything like that, we're just trying to get it into the public consciousness.
So talk briefly about how your play Paper Angels came about. Because it’s also an extension of this idea, right?
When we were doing the book, we had realized that the people who buy it are going to be academics, use it for their classes or Asian American studies students, ethnic studies students. But the average public person is not going to buy this book. It has to be made more mainstream, to reach if not the American public, at least the Asian American community at large. And so I said, if I write a play, people could come to see it. They don't have to read about it, it's not going to be a lot of dry history. And we'll make it come to life.
Now, had you written plays before?
No. I had never thought of becoming a playwright, until I felt that this would be a tool to get the story out. And so I took a beginning playwriting class at SF State, and wrote the first scene. And then later added to it, and Paper Angels was first done at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco. That was 1978. Amy Hill directed it.
We didn't have social media. You could be a big fish in a little pond forever. So after it opened, you know, nothing more came out of it. There were student productions that were done at Berkeley, Stanford, up in Portland and places like that, in Canada. Sometimes they wouldn't even tell me that we're doing it. I would find out later from a grad student, how do you feel about them changing the ending to your play? I go, who did that? I guess they didn't like the guy hanging himself. I knew it was kind of a grim ending, but I wanted to put forward that there was no happy ending, no ribbon to tie around the story. People did kill themselves.
This is why we need the arts. Because so much of this would just trickle away and just get lost in the ether.
But at the same time, you have to be accurate. Someone sent me a book for young adults about Angel Island, but it's completely fictionalized. He wanted to use the actual poems from the book. And I said, no. And U of Washington came to me twice and said, oh, he's got a publisher. I said, I don't care. I don't want this book. The whole integrity of our book is that it adheres to the actual reality and facts. I'm not going to make up stuff and put in a Native American in the barracks, who wasn't there, and things like that, to make it universal. The book is copywritten. But I’m resigned to the fact that it's gonna be cribbed. The important thing is the authenticity of the work. I don't want it to be distorted.
So this project involving you and Angel Island has been going on for decades. The book in 1980, the play in 1978, and now the music interpretations, and this upcoming production at Berkeley Rep. I don't know why Netflix doesn't call you about this.
I think a lot of it is because the later immigrants, like Huang Ruo, didn't grow up with this history. He was working in China. And then suddenly he comes to the U.S. and discovers this story. And it's transformative to him to realize that's what was happening here in the U.S. Contrary to the American dream. So he writes this opera and it becomes a big story now. Angel Island: Oratorio. He took the poems and he wrote the opera. How cool is that? They just came back from Singapore and Hong Kong, and they did huge productions. I saw the scenes with water and whatnot. It was really elaborate, beautifully produced. What Huang Ruo added in the version that they're doing, integrating into the oratorio, are the Titanic survivors. It seems to work!
So what are some of the other projects you’ve been doing surrounding this renewed interest in Angel Island?
Yeah, it's been busy. I've been having fun collaborating with the Del Sol string quartet. They're doing really well in the classical charts. They just recently were in New York doing the Oratorio at the Brooklyn Academy. And we actually performed with him on Angel Island in the site, with another chorus.
A week ago, we did a screening at Marina Theater of my 1985 PBS American Playhouse version of Paper Angels, with an all-star cast: James Hong, Beulah Quo, Victor Wong, Rosalind Chao, Joan Chen. We were over capacity and people were trying to get in. So now we're going to do another screening in June, and then at MOCA, the Museum of Chinese in America.
I also just did this thing on Angel Island with The Last Hoisan Poets. It's Nellie Wong, myself, and her sister, Flo Oy Wong, who's also a visual artist. We traced our roots back to Hoisan villages, and we read poetry in both English and Hoisan-wa dialect, to pay homage to our mother language. We've been asked quite a few times to do stuff. And now there are composers who have asked me to recite the poems from Island with their music. This one in Taiwan also wants to do something in Great Britain.
This has been so great. Genny, congratulations on everything, and thank you so much for sharing.
You're welcome. I completely appreciate it. Thanks, have a good day.
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The west coast premiere of The Far Country opens March 8, 2024, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Genny Lim and The Last Hoisan Poets appear with Del Sol Quartet at a community salon just prior to the March 15 performance. Tickets and info:
https://www.berkeleyrep.org/shows/the-far-country/
