St. Paul author highlights historic poetry from detained Chinese immigrants in new book

NINA MOINI: You're listening to Minnesota Now. I'm Nina Moini. A new book by a Saint Paul author tells the story of Chinese immigrants applying to enter the US 100 years ago. The young adult novel incorporates the poems that people detained at Angel Island carved into the walls, expressing their anger and longing. MPR's Emily Bright spoke with author Freeman Ng about his book Bridge Across the Sky.

EMILY BRIGHT: Well, let's start by talking about Angel Island because it can be mistakenly referred to as the Ellis Island of the West. But really, it was a very different experience.

FREEMAN NG: Right, that's the most common response I get when I mention Angel Island to people. But actually, it-- well, Ellis Island is all about, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free. Angel Island was all about the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1882, a law was passed prohibiting-- largely prohibiting further immigration from China, the only exceptions being if you were the direct relative of someone who was already living in the United States. And that largely dried up immigration from China for the next 20 years or so.

Well, in 1906, there was the San Francisco earthquake and fire, and it destroyed family and business records so that, suddenly, if you wanted to immigrate into America under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, you could pretend that you were the direct relative of someone already living in the United States. And there were no records that they could use to prove or disprove your story. As a result, the immigration station was set up in order to house detainees while their stories were being checked out through a process where they would be interrogated and their supposed relatives in the States would be interrogated, and they would be asked the same questions about their life together in China. And if their answers matched up, then they would be allowed in. And if their answers didn't match, then they would be rejected.

EMILY BRIGHT: And these were gotcha questions. I mean, our main character is studying very hard so they can agree on the number of rooms in their supposed house.

FREEMAN NG: Right, many of the questions were ones that you could not answer about your own house right now. My father entered the country in 1938 through a similar process, not through Angel Island, but through Seattle. And he had a real story, a legitimate story. His father had lived in San Francisco at the time, but he was the member of the party, a small party of family members who were coming together, who was constantly nagging the rest of the party to memorize their answers because he understood that, even though they had a real story, if they got just one little part of it wrong, they could be sent back.

EMILY BRIGHT: There's so much about language and story in this and the poetry. I mean, this is a novel in verse, and poetry is really important part of this story. Tell me how you decided to make it a novel in verse.

FREEMAN NG: Even though I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area most of my life, and so I learned the story, the history of Angel Island from an early age, even though I had this personal connection with my father, I was never interested in writing the story of the station until I heard about the poems. This interrogation protocol that was set up in order to test people's stories was, I think, a reasonable response to what I feel was an unreasonable law. However, in its execution, the Chinese detainees were treated as if they were criminals already, housed in very poor conditions. And of course, there was the unfair examination system, which led to many of them either not being allowed into the country or being detained for very long periods before they could even answer a single question, in some cases more than a year.

In response to these conditions, the Chinese detainees carved poems into the walls of their barracks. And when I learned about the poems, that's when I decided I needed to write about this story and that I needed to do it in verse. In addition to my own verse narrative, I quote many of the wall poems themselves, and I also have a few of my characters write their own poetry in various styles. So in many ways, the novel is an homage to the power of poetry to express people's lives.

EMILY BRIGHT: Would you read one of those poems that got translated from the barrack walls?

FREEMAN NG: I'd love to. This is one of my favorite ones.

In the quiet of night,

I heard faintly the whistling of wind.

The forms and shadows saddened me.

Upon seeing the landscape,

I composed a poem.

The floating clouds, the fog darkened the sky.

The moon shines faintly as insects chirp.

Grief and bitterness entwined are heaven sent.

The sad person sits alone, leaning by a window.

EMILY BRIGHT: That's really beautiful. I want to talk about our main character. This is a classic coming-of-age story in that he, throughout the course of the novel, gets to decide, both literally and figuratively, who he wants to be. Could you tell me some of the seeds that grew into this character?

FREEMAN NG: I knew from the start that I wanted him not to want to come to America, mostly because that's the default story, the stereotypical story of the immigrant wanting the American dream, where the American dream is primarily an economic one. The question of making more money, attaining wealth, that sort of thing.

EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, this is his father's dream, not his.

FREEMAN NG: Exactly, his father's story is very much the default story of immigration that we tend to think of when we think of people coming to America. But the son once more, and because of that, he's able to find, in my opinion, a more important mission, a more important goal, a more political one-- he becomes more aware of the circumstances that he finds himself in upon coming to America. One of the things that affected this was that I decided to put in a historically unlikely character, but possible, in a Black teenage kitchen worker.

I wanted to portray the fact that there were many other groups in America at that time suffering from discrimination from racial prejudice. So I put the character in, and he struck up a relationship with my protagonist that ended up becoming the heart of the whole story. I had not planned this, but their conflict and its resolution ended up being the primary arc of the whole story.

EMILY BRIGHT: I mean, there's so many rich themes of this book of, how do you take action when your choices have been very limited for you? And I was particularly struck by this idea of the various characters drawing circles around their worlds and saying, these people are like me. Those people are not.

These are my people. They are too different. And those circles get surprisingly complex. Was that something that you want people to take away.

FREEMAN NG: Oh, for sure. I think the primary theme of the book ended up being the need for solidarity across these divisions. The Chinese in my novel are being mistreated, but then they turn around and mistreat other groups that they feel are below them. And it's really only my protagonist at the end who reached out across these lines to the other groups that he finds himself in the same situation with.

EMILY BRIGHT: There are also Chinese people who put themselves in charge of others.

FREEMAN NG: Right, and that's a complex situation too, because, initially, my protagonist sees them as collaborators, as standing for the white jailers who have imprisoned them. And by the end of the book, he comes to realize that their position is much more complicated. They're trying, in part, to shield their people from the wrath of their white jailers, while also speaking for their people as well as they can. It's a tricky position to be in.

EMILY BRIGHT: Well, it's a beautiful story well told. Thank you for talking with me today.

FREEMAN NG: Thank you.

NINA MOINI: That was Saint Paul author Freeman Ng speaking with MPR's Emily Bright about his debut young adult novel, Bridge Across the Sky.