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Good morning.

Our introduction today comes from Thomas Fuller, the San Francisco bureau chief for The New York Times.

Just about every visitor to San Francisco knows Alcatraz. Many fewer know Angel Island, the verdant dot in the Bay where around 175,000 immigrants from China were detained, in some cases for years, during the first part of the 1900s.

Angel Island was an immigration station almost exclusively used for immigrants from China. It was a symbol of the many forms of discrimination that the Chinese endured in America during the early waves of migration, a time when they played such a critical role in the development of the American West, the construction of the railroads being the most famous example.

Isolated in the ghetto of Chinatown for decades, it was not until 1994 — almost a century and a half after Chinese people arrived in large numbers for the Gold Rush — that a Chinese-American, Mabel Teng, was directly elected to citywide office in San Francisco, according to David Lee, a political science lecturer at San Francisco State University.