Composer Huang Ruo gives voice to the dark history of Angel Island
Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo has teamed up with the Del Sol Quartet and vocal ensemble Volti to explore the struggles of Chinese immigrants detained at Angel Island in the early 1900s.
It's easy to miss the poems carved into the walls of the immigration station on Angel Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. But if you look carefully, thousands of Chinese characters start to emerge from the dingy layers of green and yellow paint. The roughly hundred-year-old verses tell a little-known story of what happened to many Chinese immigrants when they tried to get into the country at a time when they were not welcome here.
Now a California state park, Angel Island has a history as an immigration hub far less familiar than that of New York's Ellis Island. It's also much darker: U.S. authorities detained hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants there between 1910 and 1940,
