Era of exclusion

Angel Island tells the story of California's shameful and corrupt immigration policies
By Matt O'Brien
MCT NEWS SERVICE
2:00 a.m. March 15, 2009

ANGEL ISLAND – Don Lee was 11 years old and recovering from seasickness when the steamship President Coolidge anchored in the San Francisco Bay in the summer of 1939.

The boy had spent weeks in the luxury liner's steerage on the voyage from Hong Kong, struggling to sleep beside the rumbling of the ship's engine.

Growing up in a village of a dozen houses in southern China, he found everything here new to him. The machinery. The food, especially the stench of milk and cheese. The strange languages.

Later, he would grow to enjoy the United States, learning English in its public schools, obtaining an engineering degree from UC Berkeley, serving in the Army and raising a family.

But those first weeks, he said, were an unpleasant, sometimes frightening detour. Immigration officials boarded the Coolidge, separated Lee from his grandfather and ferried the boy and several dozen other immigrants to Angel Island.

He landed on a wharf on the island's secluded northeast corner, walked past a row of palm trees and entered a big, white administration building, where men quizzed him about the most intricate details of his village life.
“If you can visualize, there's an officer there,â€