In many U.S. history classes, the poems carved into the wooden barrack walls of Angel Island Immigration Station—the San Francisco Bay facility where hundreds of thousands of newcomers from Asia were interrogated, and often turned away, between 1910 and 1940—receive little, if any, attention. But in Round Rock High School’s Asian American ethnic studies course, instructor Ann Nguyen devotes an entire class period to the writings of Chinese immigrants detained in the center. On a morning in October, her students split into small groups to analyze them. After some discussion, each group presented a tableau interpreting its assigned poems. One student, wearing a navy-blue T-shirt, read a detainee’s words aloud while her classmates acted out a scene. “America has power,” she read, “but not justice.” Those…
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