Author(s) :

Robert Kong.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

Between 1910 and 1940, Chinese immigrants detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station carved poems into the walls of their barracks, creating one of the few surviving first-person records of the Chinese exclusion era. Scholars have interpreted these poems as expressions of suffering, homesickness, dignity, and collective identity. Drawing on selected poems in Charles Egan’s Voices of Angel Island, this paper examines how terms associated with crime and blame (罪/咎), loyalty and integrity (忠/节), filial piety, and learning and governance (学问/经纶) may be interpreted through a Confucian moral framework. Rather than claiming that the poets consciously articulated a systematic Confucian philosophy, the paper argues that this vocabulary supports a reading of the poems as moral critiques of the United States exclusion and detention system and, more tentatively, of the social and political conditions surrounding migration from China.