Maxine Hong Kingston on Angel Island Poems, + More

We're all looking forward to hearing Marlon Hom's Lit&Lunch on the Angel Island immigrant poetry in just one week. As always, if you can make it, RSVP with us on Facebook.
The more I've been learning about Angel Island in anticipation of this Lit&Lunch, the more intrigued I've become by these works. For instance, I never realized that Maxine Hong Kingston references these poems in China Men, which you can see right here:

He read the walls, which were covered with poems. Those who could write protested this jailing, this wooden house (wood rhyming with house), the unfair laws, the emperor too weak to help them. They wrote about fog and being lonely and afraid. . . .

The poems at Angel Island are among the most dramatic finds in American literature. The crumbling buildings of the former immigration station in San Francisco were scheduled to be demolished, when bits and pieces of Chinese writing were glimpsed behind the peeling paint. These characters turned out to be poetry, carved into the wooden walls of the station by would be immigrant laborers from China. As a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, these sojourners were detained, sometimes for months, on this island in San Francisco Bay. While they are significant reflections of the economic and labor conditions in California at the turn of the century, these poems turned out to be more than historical relics. They both question and uphold the traditional American ideologies of Equal and Unlimited Opportunity and the Frontier, and they are sterling examples of the refiguring of the self that is at the heart of most immigration tales. They also stand as a foundation of Chinese-American literature, as they look back