An Epic Set in Xenophobic Limbo: Huang Ruo’s Angel Island

By
Justin Davidson,
New York Magazine’s architecture and classical-music critic  
since 2007 and was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2002.

From Huang Ruo’s Angel Island, at BAM.
Photo: Ellen Qbertplaya/B) Ellen Qbertplaya

You can count on suffering to supply stage music with heft, and Huang Ruo’s choral drama Angel Island mined a mother lode of the stuff in its inaugural run at BAM this past week. Equal parts requiem, oratorio, and manifesto, Angel Island tells the collective story of Chinese immigrants held at a notorious detention center in San Francisco Bay. The center’s 30-year lifespan, from 1910 to 1940, coincided with a period in American history when prejudice and fear dominated immigration policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its update a decade later, the Geary Act, ensured that those who did arrive, especially from China, faced imprisonment, harassment, and summary deportation. Some detainees carved poems in their cells’ wooden walls, and Ruo interspersed those verses, sung by an ensemble, with spoken sections narrating a dismal history of discrimination.

Ruo, who was born in China in 1976 and came to this country in his late teens to study at Oberlin and Juilliard, identifies with his predecessors’ ordeals. Relative privilege is a weak defense against homesickness and isolation, so he knows exactly how to handle the text’s pileup of pain and shame, the rough-hewn poems that mix laments (“Here several hundreds of my countrymen are like fish caught in a net”), metaphors of desolation (“The ocean encircles a lone peak / Rough terrain surrounds this prison”), and rage (“Alas, such tyranny of the White Race!”). The work has a lot of moving parts, starting with the excellent Choir of Trinity Wall Street and the Del Sol string quartet, which lays down an undertow of slow-moving harmony. Bill Morrison, an archaeologist of antique film who squeezes maximal poetry out of documentary footage, provided the visual matrix. The choreographer Rena Butler set off the stillness of captivity against the restless churn of the surf. And the director Matthew Ozawa assembled all those separate media into a persuasive package.

But rather than juice the story with agitated music, Ruo overlays it with reverent chorales. One syllable of the inmates’ graffitied verses might get stretched out over bits of snaking melody sung in close harmony. The music never gets very loud or very soft, fast, or high: The mood is politely mournful, the pace a frequently funereal trudge. In its reliance on nimble singers and the invented ritual, Angel Island owes much to Meredith Monk’s blend of song, dance, theater, and ceremony but lacks her whimsy and wit. As a musical memorial, it joins a line of stylistically varied but soberly ambitious choral works like John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls (commemorating 9/11) and Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw, which enshrine acts of monstrous violence in music of monumental tragedy.

That’s rarefied company to want to join. Ruo, who is working on a new opera commissioned by the Met for a future season, may have too fine a brushstroke and too even a musical temperament to let ferocity ring. In Angel Island, the emotional power builds quietly, then levels off, letting the focus dissipate. That’s especially true of the narrative sections, including one passage from Henry Josiah West’s 1873 book-length xenophobic rant The Chinese Invasion: Revealing the Habits, Manners and Customs of the Chinese. “The Chinese in California are the advance guard of numberless legions that will, if no check is applied, one day overthrow the present republic of the United States,” West warned. “Those now here are corrupting the morals and undermining the framework of our social structure.” Those lines, which sound so bleakly contemporary today, would have been enough to make the point that racists will always be with us and too often they will be in charge. But Ruo has the narrator read out the book’s entire introduction over the somber clanging of mildly dissonant chords, sapping the score of momentum and focus. Even Ken Burns would have abridged that text.

Perhaps it’s misplaced to crave an arc, a powerful a sense of thrust, or any of the traditional attributes of music drama. Some minimalist operas depend on a sense of suspended animation, on the immediacy of a perpetual now. Ruo’s is an homage to those who traveled far and would have kept on walking and working and building and living, if not for their shackles. It’s a drama about going nowhere. Yet that fact doesn’t change the experience of a piece that can sometimes be moving but that, in the end, feels fundamentally static.

An Epic Set in Xenophobic Limbo: Huang Ruo’s Angel Island