But, he says, he only found out about Angel Island's immigration history as a college student at the University of California, Berkeley. Lee, a second-generation Chinese immigrant, is from the San Francisco Bay Area. The world-premiere performance takes place tonight, at San Francisco's Presidio Theatre. The quartet will perform the work with the vocal ensemble Volti on the island on Oct. "Seeing these poems here in this context is pretty shocking," says Charlton Lee, a violist with the Del Sol Quartet, the San Francisco-based group that commissioned Angel Island. Now, a Chinese-American composer based in New York has teamed up with a string quartet and vocal ensemble from San Francisco to bring to life, through music, the struggles of those immigrants. authorities detained hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants there between 19, under harsh conditions. Now a California state park, Angel Island has a history as an immigration hub far less familiar than that of New York's Ellis Island. The roughly hundred-year-old verses tell a little-known story of what happened to many Chinese immigrants when they tried to get into the country at a time when they were not welcome here. But if you look carefully, thousands of Chinese characters start to emerge from the dingy layers of green and yellow paint.
It's easy to miss the poems carved into the walls of the immigration station on Angel Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.
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