Beating the INS

The Chinese immigrant's "interview" with the Bureau of Immigration on Angel Island in the 1920s.

An organized group of Chinese detainees calling itself the "Self-Governing Association" served as a link in a communication system between the Angel Island Immigration Station and the San Francisco Chinese community. Most of these activities concerned coaching messages addressed to individual detainees, 47 and communications in the reverse direction were sometimes accomplished.

The communications system depended upon the cooperation of Chinese employees at the station. The largely Chinese kitchen help would visit San Francisco's Chinatown on their days off. There they picked up coaching messages at certain stores, which they smuggled into the station for small fees. Various methods were then used to deliver the messages from the kitchen to the intended recipient. Most often they were passed at mealtimes to the table closest to the kitchen where the association's officers sat. A waiter, for example, would serve an added dish of food and say ga choi (Cantonese for "added dish") or some similar phrase. This would be a signal to look for a hidden message which another could later deliver to the addressee. The association's officers also had a mutual understanding that if a guard were to detect the presence of a message, they would prevent its confiscation so that it could not be used as material evidence to jeopardize someone's entry to the country.

In 1928 one such incident made newspaper headlines. A matron escorting the Chinese women into the dining room saw a girl pick up a folded piece of paper which had been dropped by one of the men filing out of the dining room. Suspecting it to be a coaching message, she snatched the paper from the girl, but the men quickly turned, seized the matron, and destroyed the physical evidence.48

The Chinese association enjoyed the support of the detainees because it filled a need and fostered a sense of unity among the disparate individuals sharing only one common goal--entering the United States--who were thrown together thousands of miles from their native China. This explains why, despite the one-way traffic (most Chinese went through the station only once) and highly transient population in the dormitory, the association was able to maintain itself for three decades until 1952 or so when Chinese arrivals were no longer detained en masse for hearings.

The immigrant's hearing on his application for admission was the main reason for his detainment at the Angel Island barracks, and sometime after he arrived, he received a summons to appear for this session. During the early years at the center this waiting period could stretch into months, which became the cause of many complaints.49 By the mid-1920's, however, the delay averaged about two or three weeks. The immigrant's success in hurdling the hearing barrier determined whether the applicant would be admitted to the U.S. or face deportation back to China, and thus it was an important event which could shape the direction of one's entire life.

Regardless of the validity of the Chinese arrival's claim for entry, he expected to be interrogated intensively, and in anticipation, the applicant studied coaching information during the weeks and months preceding his transpacific voyage so as to commit to memory facts pertinent to his family, home life, and native village. The required information was often extremely detailed, and the coaching papers might be a booklet with several dozen pages. This was particularly true in cases where the applicant and his witnesses claimed relationships which were fictitious. Coaching papers were frequently taken aboard ship for review and thrown overboard or destroyed as the ship approached the American harbor.

by H.M. Lai from California History, spring 1978

photo courtesy National Archive

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