"During the time they spent on the island, as little as a few days, as long as three years, [immigrants] carved and ink-brushed their concerns onto the walls of their barracks. One hundred thirty-five calligraphic poems survived, first discovered by a Federal park ranger after Angel Island was abandoned in 1940. Together with the interviews, the poems – angry, heroic, wrenchingly forlorn, despairing, provocative, resistant – convey, as no secondhand or thirdhand account could ever do, what it was like to be Chinese and to be on Angel Island."
– "New York Times"