Who Are We America? or A Belly of Discontent
I never wrote about Angel Island. Well, that’s not true, I wrote one line and it was this: I went to Angel Island State Park for the 4th of July holiday.
That’s as far as I got. I never wrote about standing in the barracks building in the North Garrison with its thin windows, cracking pale yellow walls, and creaky floor. I never wrote about how it was so quiet you could hear our history of detainment emanating from the walls. I didn’t capture the way it whispered a pattern into my brain that reminded me, we have done this before — we have made a habit of choosing people to keep out of the promise of America. We did it then. We are doing it now.
I didn’t write about the despair that hung in the air, or the way you could feel the mass of broken dreams piled on the metal cots stacked hundreds to a room where more than 175,000 Chinese lived and slept and wept for weeks, months, and even years trying to get into America.
I didn’t write about the poetry. How it was carved into every wall and is still visible over 100 years later. How it expresses in words the unnamable. The anxiety, the fear, the grief of containment. I didn’t name how this moved me. I didn’t name all the ways it connected me to the soul of another across place and time.
My belly is so full of discontent it is
difficult to relax.
I can only worry silently to myself
At times I gaze at the cloud-and-fog-
Enshrouded mountain-front.
It only deepens my sadness. — Anonymous
I never wrote about how being in the rooms with the poetry of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, awoke in me a kinship that goes beyond any boundary of color, creed or nationality. I forgot to write how this reminded me of the poem that is America. The one that says, “Give us the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Yet where I stood was the Immigration Station across from the Golden Gate, nicknamed, “the Guardian of the Western Gate.” The one whose job it was to keep people out. Those people.
Who are we America?
This is the question I’ve long had, and have now finally written.
We are who we’ve always been. If we don’t see and remember our history, we can’t recreate a future. If we don’t have voices brave enough to carve this history into our walls, we will never become anything else.
I used to admire the land of the Flowery
Flag as a country of abundance.
I immediately raised money and started my
journey.
For over a month, I have experienced enough wind and waves.
Now on an extended sojourn in jail, I am
subject to the ordeals of prison life.
I look up and see Oakland so close by.
I wish to go back to my motherland to carry
the farmer’s hoe.
Discontent fills my belly and it is difficult for
me to sleep.
I just write these few lines to express what is
on my mind. — Anonymous
What history are we carving into our walls now?
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