Bridge Across the Sky

Gr 9 Up–Digital artist, writer, and poet Ng’s verse novel illuminates the immigration process for Chinese immigrants to the United States in the 1920s after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Tai Go, 17, has no desire to immigrate to the United States, but he obediently goes with his father and grandfather. They make it across the ocean safely and are questioned and detained in California at Angel Island, an immigration station in the San Francisco Bay. The three have paper identities, posing as people they are not, to get into the country, and endure months of harsh and cruel detainment. It is during this incarceration that Tai Go meets new friends, sees a girl he likes, and becomes a member of the Resistance, a group of detainees who protest how they are being treated—and discovers the poetry of fellow Chinese who were detained before him. He is surprised how the poetry of those who he will never meet moves him.