Angel Island by Erika Lee & Judy Yung

Author:Erika Lee & Judy Yung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

Kim Ok Yun’s passport photo, 1926. (Scan by Vincent Chin. National Archives, Pacific Regional Branch.)

In his appeal on behalf of the students, Frank Ainsworth argued that students coming from China were not required to have passports, but this point was soon discounted in a telegram from the Immigration Bureau that stated, “Exempt Section Six Chinese, all others should carry passports.” Playing on the patriotic fervor of a country at war, Ainsworth reminded the U.S. government that Koreans were political refugees no different from “those Hungarians like Lajos Kossuth [or] those patriotic Poles like Tadeusz Kosciuszko who, after their countries were captured by a stronger nation, fled to the United States where they were welcomed.” In fact, he added, these Koreans may be safely admitted as “alien friends and not alien enemies,” because they had all agreed in writing to join the U.S. armed forces if so required. This time, Commissioner White recommended that the department sustain all of the appeals, but the secretary of labor, for unknown reasons, would only admit eight of the fourteen students.

Korean students stopped coming after 1918 because of the new passport requirements. Not until Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred all Asian immigrants but exempted students with proper documents and a visa from the American consulate, were 300 more Korean students, men and women, able to come. Among them were Kim Ok Yun in 1926 and Choi Kyung Sik in 1925.

When Kim Ok Yun arrived in San Francisco from Shanghai on the President Pierce, she came armed with a Section Six student visa issued by the American consulate at Shanghai and a letter of acceptance from the San Francisco National Training School. The visa indicated that she was a graduate of the Yei Sin Baptist Missionary School in Masan, Korea, and a naturalized Chinese citizen. According to her sister Shinn Kang-ae, who had immigrated as a picture bride in 1914 and was living in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the time, Ok Yun had been an undercover agent in the anti-Japanese resistence movement in Korea.

In 1919, she was in the Mansei movement,44 and the Japanese would not give her a passport, so during the night she disguised herself as an old Chinese woman and escaped to China. My sister prepared for English and studied in China for three years before coming to the U.S. She had a Chinese passport. She dressed as a Chinese and passed undetected when the Japanese officials went aboard the ship to rout out the Koreans. When she arrived, the immigration authorities locked her up for one week. They said she had something inside sick and we had to make a $100 deposit.45

Ok Yum was found to have hookworm. After a brief interview, the BSI decided to admit her as a bona fide student on the condition that she be treated for the hookworm. The Korean National Association deposited $100 for her medical treatment and she was subsequently cured and released from the island twelve days later. For the next seven years, Ok Yum lived with her sister’s family in Chinatown while she attended college.

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