Books: Non-Fiction

Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain

Book — Non-fiction. By Russell Freedman. 2014. 96 pages.
An account of Angel Island, California, the entry point for one million Asian immigrants in the early 20th century.

Time Periods: 20th Century, 1910, 1920
Themes: Asian American, Immigration

angelisland9780547903781Today Angel Island, sitting in the midst of San Francisco Bay, is a wooded California State Park with trails, picnic tables, and spectacular views. But between 1910 and 1940, Angel Island was the site of an immigration station where most Asian immigrants were interrogated pending entry to the United States — and sometimes imprisoned. Russell Freedman’s Angel Island offers a brief but valuable overview of immigrants’ experiences on Angel Island, filled with photographs, vignettes, and examples from the short poems carved into the walls of detention barracks:

For more than 20 days I fed on wind and tasted waves. . . .

How was I to know that I would become a prisoner/suffering in this wooden building?

[Description by Rethinking Schools.]

ISBN: 9780547903781 | Clarion Books