Angel Island State Park

This guide to Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay begins in 1970, when a park ranger sent to inspect a condemned wooden barracks found its walls covered in Chinese characters, carved by hand decades earlier. It traces the island's years as an immigration station from 1910 to 1940, when Chinese arrivals were detained under exclusion laws and interrogated for weeks or months about their villages and families, and the classical-style poems some of them carved into the walls while they waited. Look closely at the grain of the wood as you move through the dormitory rooms.