Detained Chinese immigrants carved their anguish into a wall a century ago. Those words inspired a ballet

Oakland Ballet Company takes on a harrowing chapter of US-Chinese history with a piece about Angel Island, ‘the Ellis Island of the west’One sunny March day on Angel Island, a hilly landmass in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, a dancer with a 40-ft braid attached to her head glided across a narrow concrete walkway. The audience sat on chairs in front of a long wooden building: a former detention center where – from 1910 to 1940 – half a million people, the majority Chinese, were held for months, even years, in prison-like conditions.Sometimes called “the Ellis Island of the west”, Angel Island’s immigration station is the unlikely setting, and inspiration, for an ambitious new work by the Oakland Ballet Company. It’s based on the people from 80 countries who were confined to the the island’s detention center, which was the result of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist laws designed to keep Asian people out of the United States. In response, the detainees carved over 200 poems onto the walls expressing their anguish and rage. Continue reading...

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