Today, Angel Island State Park is mostly known to Bay Area locals for its exceptional views, and as a beautiful place to hike and camp. But this year, after a three-year closure and a $60 million restoration, the historic barracks got renewed attention with a grand reopening as part of the Angel Island Immigration Station museum.
Interpretive exhibits now feature luggage and furniture from the early 20th century, re-creations of bunks in the Chinese men’s and women’s dorms, and photographs of picture brides detained on their way to new lives in America. Visitors can listen to audio panels that play the wall poems in English and Chinese.
Rosa Wong-Chie, a graduate student in San Francisco, attended the immigration station’s February reopening. There, she met a woman whose mother was a picture bride who came through Angel Island when she was 18.
“There was a picture of the woman - her name’s Lena - as a baby on her mother’s lap,’’ Wong-Chie said. “When her mother passed away a while ago, she inherited a suitcase.’’ The suitcase had her mother’s belongings when she immigrated to the United States. “It’s unbelievable to have such a knowledge of what happened to her family.’’
Like San Francisco, New York has also been a longtime port of entry for the Chinese. It, too, got a significant new cultural addition this year when the Museum of Chinese in America opened the doors to its new home in September. The intimate, light-filled space is situated in a former machinist’s shop on the border between Chinatown and SoHo, and was designed by Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
The museum had its beginnings in 1980 as the New York Chinatown History Project, an organization co-founded by Charles Lai and John Kuo Wei Tchen to document the oral histories of older generations of Chinese-Americans in the community. It was also active in collecting photos and other artifacts for research and educational purposes. Its old location on Mulberry Street now serves as its archives.
