Asian immigrants to California in the early 1900s were kept in a detention center, which has been renovated and turned into a museum showing this part of our history. DP
By Matt O'Brien, Contra Costa Times
ANGEL ISLAND — Don Lee was 11 years old and recovering from seasickness when the SS President Coolidge anchored in the Bay in the summer of 1939.
The boy had spent weeks in the luxury liner's steerage on the voyage from Hong Kong, struggling to sleep beside the rumbling of the ship's engine.
Growing up in a village of a dozen houses in southern China, everything here was new to him. The machinery. The food, especially the stench of milk and cheese. The strange languages.
Later, he would grow to enjoy the United States, learning English in its public schools, obtaining an engineering degree from UC Berkeley, serving in the Army and raising a family here.
But those first weeks, he said, were an unpleasant, sometimes frightening detour. Immigration officials boarded the Coolidge, separated Lee from his grandfather and ferried the boy and several dozen other immigrants to Angel Island.
He landed on a wharf on the island's secluded northeast corner, walked past a row of palm trees and entered a big white administration building where men quizzed him about the most intricate details of his village life.
"If you can visualize, there's an officer there," Lee said. "He's in full uniform. Then, there's the secretary sitting next to him, typing it down, and there's an interpreter. There's a guard. It's pretty intimidating, I'd say, for most people."
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