Writing on the walls of an immigrant detention center inspired Denver poet Teow Lim Goh. This was the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, where Chinese people coming to America were detained and interrogated in the early 1900s.
As they waited, the detainees wrote poetry on the walls. The poems in the men's barracks are still there, but the women's were destroyed in a fire. In her debut collection of poetry, "Islanders," Goh imagines what what the poems in the women's barracks may have been.
Goh spoke with Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner.
Read a poem from "Islanders":
"The Walls Speak" The year I turned fourteen, I scrubbed the floors, At night, by candlelight, dreaming of a faraway land * Here the fog obscures The sea spins a song I wait for my turn to enter At night, by candlelight, * On the walls I see poems, laments of lost women I read their stories * Each time ready to etch my words my hands tremble * At night I lie awake. THE WALLS SPEAK from ISLANDERS by Teow Lim Goh. Copyright © 2016 by Teow Lim Gogh. Published by Conundrum Press, a Division of Samizdat Publishing Group, LLC. Reprinted with permission. |
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