“Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain”
by Russell Freedman
Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2013, 79 pages, Grades 4-6.
Shortly after the birth of Our Lord, the Holy Family was forced to flee into Egypt. Upon hearing from the Magi that there was a newborn king of the Jews, King Herod plotted the massacre of all the male babies, two and under that have been born in the area of Bethlehem. St. Joseph was awakened in a dream and told to take the Blessed Mother and the Infant Jesus and flee Herod’s assassins. So, Our Blessed Savior, having forsaken heaven to redeem us, now was forced to become a refugee. The Holy Family must have endured many of the hardships and sufferings of refugees. In American history, refugees and immigrants coming to the United States have always endured problems. There have been language problems, dietary issues and racial and ethnic resentment. On the East Coast, the most famous immigrant processing center was Ellis Island in New York harbor. On the West Coast there was an equally important but less known processing center. Named Angel Island and situated on an island in San Francisco Bay, this immigration center was the arrival point for most people coming to the United States from Asia. Russell Freedman tells the important story of this center in his powerful book, Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain.
Freedman begins the story by describing the physical beauty of Angel Island. Picturesquely situated in San Francisco harbor, the island must have looked like a place of salvation for many desperate immigrants. And so it was for the time period for building the Transcontinental Railroad. Workers were needed and thousands of industrious Chinese flocked to build the railroad. Since most of the Chinese immigrants were young men, it was only natural for them to either send for their wives or buy a “mail order bride” through a marriage service. Since arranged marriages were common in China, this did not seem odd to the Chinese. But the rising Chinese population soon clashed with the racial prejudices of white Californians. The whites claimed that the Chinese were working for starvation wages and this would ruin the economy. As a result, the Chinese Exclusion Laws were passed in 1882 severely limiting Chinese immigration. Those coming in would now go through a desperate immigration process on Angel Island.
This process could last for months and frequently filled the frightened immigrants with depression and despair. They had to live in severely cramped spaces in the processing buildings and had to pass complicated tests to receive a visa. During these trying months, the immigrants wrote poems of pain on the walls of the processing buildings. They could see California, or Gold Mountain as the state was euphemistically called across the bay, but they had no idea if they would receive a visa or be deported to their home country. The entire process was grueling and brutal leading many to despair. But after months of difficulty, most will get to go to Gold Mountain.
Freedman tells the story of Angel Island with historical accuracy. He lets the history speak for itself which is the sign of a great biographer. Throughout the whole tortured process of American immigration, he allows the reader to experience both the racial prejudices encountered by the immigrants as well as the more uplifting parts of the American character. It is a marvelous book. As Congress attempts to reform the immigration process in 2015, we are well advised to understand what happened on Angel Island. I hope you get a chance to encourage the fourth through sixth graders in your family to read this important book. Russell Freedman is a great writer.
