Ellis Island Stories
H.T. Tsiang
From Immigration to Deportation: 1924-1954
After World War I, rising nativism and xenophobia led to calls to curtail immigration–particularly non-Western and non-Northern European immigration. Quotas were set based on the 1890 census in order to minimize immigration from non-Northern European peoples. People in the Western hemisphere were not part of this quota, however, and continued to immigrate into the United States.
At the same time that the National Origins Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants, the procedures for immigration to the U.S. had also changed. Instead of judging the fitness of would-be immigrants upon their embarkation, people were more and more required to apply for visas through the U.S. consulate in their country of origin. No longer a place to process immigration, Ellis Island became more and more a place for internment pending deportation.
During World War II and its aftermath, Ellis Island housed a number of people deemed undesirable by the U.S. government, including U.S. residents suspected as being Nazis and, after the war, people accused of being communists.
The Story of H.T. Tsiang
H.T. Tsiang was born in the provincial city of Nantong (南通市) in 1899. After graduating from college in 1925, he took a position of secretary to Sun Yat-sen, the first provisional president of China and the head of Kuomintang (the nationalist party). Sun’s untimely death, though, resulted in a power struggle and a purge of leftists. After applying for further study at Stanford University, Tsiang left for California.
Because of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, most Chinese (and, indeed, most Asian) people were forbidden to enter the United States. But there were exceptions, including businesspeople, diplomats and students. In any case, all Asian immigrants disembarking in San Francisco had to be processed through Angel Island and, despite the acceptance letter from Stanford, he was detained at Angel Island for processing.
Eventually, he was released to the mainland and began his studies at Stanford. Tsiang also began editing a left-leaning journal for the Chinese diasporic community. These articles and columns, however, angered conservative Chinese nationalists and, in the end, Tsiang was forced from Stanford University.
However, this meant that Tsiang would have to return to Angel Island, since he was no longer a student, and, therefore, no longer eligible to remain in the United States. His friends, however, arranged for lawyers and the judge ultimately allowed him to remain in the United States as a student. But Tsiang decided to leave California.
In the early twentieth century, anti-Asian sentiment in California was rampant; many of the anti-Chinese and anti-Asian laws in the United States originated in California and there had been considerable violence against Chinese communities over the past seventy years. In addition, there was still considerable animosity from right-wing, Chinese nationalists.
He decided to move to New York. It boasted the second largest concentration of Chinese Americans outside of the West coast. And it was the center of publishing. Tsiang enrolled at Columbia University and moved to a small apartment above a restaurant in Montclair, New Jersey. He completed his first book of (self-published) poetry in 1929. More work was to come, although publishers failed to accept his writing for publication. In 1935, Tsiang finished a novel, “The Hanging in Union Square,” which combines sharp, societal critique with a flair for the absurd.
However, illness kept him from enrolling at Columbia in 1938 and 1939. When his health improved, he enrolled in the New School for Social Research in 1940, but the authorities had already initiated deportation proceedings.
In 1940, he was imprisoned at Ellis Island pending deportation to China. There, he wrote often: on a small desk in the Main Hall with a typewriter, in his room with toilet paper. Some of his writing is poetry, but much of it is correspondence–to writers, to artists, to people in government. The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born and the American Civil Liberties Union got Tsiang a lawyer, and his letters initiated a correspondence with the popular artist, Rockwell Kent, who championed his cause to other artists and writers. Finally, Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana wrote a bill that, while it was being considered, allowed him to stay. In July of 1941, Tsiang was released from Ellis Island and returned to the New School to enroll in theater classes.
His love of theater (and his mixed success in publishing) prompted Tsiang to move to Hollywood, where he began to get work in films and to put on one-man shows to theater audiences. The same anti-Asian legislation that has kept him on the edge of deportation has also created a shortage of Asian American actors in Hollywood, and he landed small parts in “The Keys to the Kingdom,” “Ocean’s 11” and other films and tv shows.
Tsiang’s work has received renewed attention over the last decade, and his poetry and novels have been published.