The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [81]
Q: Is your house one story or two stories?
A: There is an attic.
Q: Are there steps to the attic?
A: Yes.
Q: How many?
A: Twelve.
Q: How do you know?
A: I counted them, because I was told you would ask me questions like these.
Q: Then you were coached in the answers to be given? You rehearsed and memorized the information to make us think you are the son of Wong Hing?
A: No, no, no. I was not coached. I am the true son of Wong Hing, my father, who is now in San Francisco. He told me that you would ask me questions like these and that I was to be prepared to answer in the most minute detail.
In this environment, it was inevitable that some inmates cracked under the strain. Separated from their families, interrogated by hostile strangers, and haunted by the fear of deportation, a few lost all control of their senses. The most traumatized tended to be Chinese women separated from their children. “There are many cases at the Immigration Station now where the Chinese wife of an American-born Chinese citizen is denied admission, while her little infant children are admitted,” J. S. Look told interviewers for the 1924 Los Angeles Survey of Race Relations. To handle depression, panic, or hysteria, immigration authorities threw emotionally troubled émigrés into a special isolation room, a tiny windowless closet three feet square, where they were kept in solitary confinement, sometimes for weeks, until they were able to “calm down.” These brutal immigration practices continued for decades, causing some Chinese women to attempt or commit suicide.15
Forbidden to communicate with the outside world, some educated inmates wrote or carved poetry on the walls of the immigration station, venting their sorrow, frustration, and rage, sometimes speaking of retribution. An immigrant who signed his work as “One from Taishan” wrote, “Wait till the day I become successful and fulfill my wish! I will not speak of love when I level the immigration station.” Another penned the following lines: “Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my sword, I came to America. Who was to know two streams of tears would flow upon arriving here? If there comes a day when I will have attained my ambition and become successful I will certainly behead the barbarians and spare not a single blade of grass.”16
Immigration officials wrote poetry, too, although their verse contained different sentiments from those of the inmates. One inspector composed the following lines of mocking doggerel:
Now poor Wong Fong, he feels quite ill,
As I am told by Ling,
And won’t eat any nice birds’ nests
Nor even will he sing.
So just to make this poor Wong Fong
Feel very good and nice,
I’ve sent him back to China
Where he can eat his mice.
Release from Angel Island did not guarantee the Chinese freedom from further harassment by the Immigration Service, for exclusion-era policies gave immigration officials enormous discretion to seize and detain the Chinese as they wished. As the Chinese would soon learn, all it would take was one crime committed by one Chinese individual to tarnish the entire Chinese American community.
In 1909, a young white girl named Elsie Sigel was murdered in New York, her decomposing body found stuffed in a rusty trunk in her apartment. The chief suspect was William Leon, the owner of a chop suey restaurant in Manhattan who had courted Sigel but was believed to have become jealous when Sigel grew attached to another Chinese man. By the time Sigel’s corpse was discovered, Leon had long vanished, no doubt having fled the city, if not the country. When the authorities