Transcription
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I'm Daniel Quan. I'm standing in front of the wharf area at the immigration station. Originally, in 1910, this wharf would have gone out 200 to 250 feet into the bay. We've recreated that area, and in its place, we've put a world map here that shows almost 90 different places where people came from around the world.
This is the view that immigrants would have seen walking off that pier and along the wharf. This was an administration building; it was a huge two-story white structure that covered this entire open area in front of you and ran all the way back up to the barracks that you see in the background. We were sitting at a place where the steps would have been to walk up to the front porch of that building.
We've engraved a number of words that we found in the poetry—words that reflect the hopes and fears of the different immigrants that passed through here. The area that we're standing in represents the original location of the interrogation rooms. We've got a solitary seat over here where an immigrant would sit and be interrogated. There are two seats on the other side of a more polished nature, and those represent where the interrogation officer and the interpreters were sitting.
You can see that it's been engraved with certificates of identity from a number of different people that have come through the island. We're standing at the upper level of the administration building, so the terrace here represents one of three dining rooms that were present at the immigration station. The Asian dining room is to my right, where I'm standing is the European dining room, and in front of me is the staff dining room.
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As we were doing research on this project, one of the things we wanted to try to do was actually uncover more of the poetry. One of the ways to do that was to strip the paint away from the walls. You can see from the different colors on all these patches; each one of these represents a different layer of paint. When we got down to the very bare wood, you can see some of it still has the original black calligraphy in it.
Right above the stripped letters, you can see some other characters right here. The reason why you can actually see them is that they had been filled over the years with putty. The putty would dry and shrink, and so it would shrink away from the carving, allowing you to start seeing the indentation of where the carvings were.
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Behind this glass barrier is a very deteriorated section of the walls, and you can see that it's really dry rotted and fallen away. You see the sort of ghosted writing right here, which actually represents a poem that was in this broken-out section. There were a significant number of carvings on this section of the wall.
These are typical audio stations that we have here, where we've taken poems that are on the wall and lit them so that you can see the carvings. That representative carving is again shown here with an English translation. You have the opportunity to listen to an English or a Chinese version of the poem.
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We're now standing in the Asian men's barracks on the second floor. This is one of the rooms that has been historically recreated, and as you can see around me, it's pretty crowded. There's barely enough room to get in and out of the bunks; they are stacked three high. You can see that there are a number of different pieces of clothing all over.
You can see behind me that these chandeliers are bare light bulbs. The original four-light chandeliers were actually removed in 1910 because the immigration officials said that the men were swinging from the chandeliers and hanging their laundry from it, creating a fire hazard. The bunks were supplied without mattresses because immigration officials said that Chinese men were not used to sleeping on mattresses, so therefore they didn't need to provide them.
This is the men's game room on the second floor, and as you can see, it's populated with dominoes, Chinese checkers, and mahjong. There's a ping pong table that was also a popular activity at the time. Obviously, there are books and Chinese instruments; there were a number of people that did play.
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We're standing in the women's day room on the first floor of the detention barracks. This was a room where the women were free to gather during the day. They would be able to knit, read, or sew. This was where most of the people spent their time.
We've just walked from the women's day room into the women's dormitory. There are a lot of personal effects that the women were allowed to bring with them, and you can see that people were represented from China, Japan, Korea, and the likes. Also on display in this room are a series of suitcases, each one representing somebody from a different country.
We've got a woman from China who has brought a number of personal items and one of her best churs. This one in here represents a woman from Africa, and you can tell by the print in the dress; those are the types of materials that were prevalent at the time.
This gives you a brief look at a possible setup of what the bunks looked like. If you can imagine this room filled with these bunks, this would be a situation that would be fairly intolerable. Notice the laundry hanging from the upper reaches over here, suitcases all on the floor.
We'd also have to say that young children were staying with their mothers here as well, so you can imagine the kinds of sounds and activity that were going on during a day.
In this wing is the European men's dormitory. You can hear there's an audio soundscape of it, and the soundscape basically lets you hear conversations from many different people from different countries. If you listen closely, you can make out the different languages.
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Foreign speech.
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Foreign.