Angel Island Performance

I feel like I haven't blogged in FOREVERS so I thought I would do some tonight.

One things I really wanted to blog about was my experience at Angel Island. About a couple of weeks ago there was a celebration at Angel Island. I think it had been open for 100 years. Anyways for those of you who don't know what Angel Island is, it's kinda a smaller scaled Ellis (sp?) Island. Angel Island was the limbo between being an immigrant and being admitted into the United States. A lot of immigrants weren't allowed to enter into the U.S, especially because of the exclusion act. I'm not all that great with history, but people were allowed to enter into the U.S under certain circumstances. Angel Island basically (I think) was kind of created in order to verify that people were who they said they were. Immigrants went through super freakishly detailed interrogrations where they had to prove they were the son of blank, the wife of blank etc.

Anyways what started off as me just helping out my cousin's fiance, turned into a really great learning experience. The Angel Island celebration included a lot of speakers, performances and book signings. I had agreed to volunteer as an actor, to do a reinactment of a lady named Leung Shee who was being interrogated/investigated. My character (who was a real person on file) was coming over to the U.S as a merchant's wife, but later they suspected that I had been a madame for prostitution houses. Anyways in order to semi do this performance well I asked a lot of questions and really tried to understand this whole Angel Island business. I spoke to my dad, read some books, read some wiki. These people would be asked really nit picky questions about how many people lived in their village and things that no normal person would naturally be able to recall. These people sometimes had to wait in the barracks for weeks, months before coming in front of a guard dude to be questioned. It's sooo crazy to think about what they had to go through, what my grandfather went through. My grandfather was a paper son meaning he bought a fake name pretending to be the son of someone who was already in the U.S in order to come here. He studied his butt off in order to convince them that he was and of course he passed otherwise I wouldn't be here. But can you imagine the pressure? One wrong answer and you would be sent back to China or whatever country you came from.

I always say history bores me, but if you give it a chance it can be really interesting. Anyways...I performed that day as Leung Shee. I honestly am not sure if I accurately portrayed this woman, the point was more for it to be a dramatic I think...but the experience for myself was really rewarding. What was great was after 2 girls came up to me and asked me if I could elaborate ane explain what had happened to my character. These girls were genuinely interested and that mde me happy. They even told me that I was a really good actress, which was sweet. If anything my favorite thing about acting has always been to entertain people, to allow them to enjoy themselves as they get lost in the performance. I'm glad I was able to do that for these girls and have them experience a snippet of what it possibly could have been like for an immigrant at Angel Island.