By Karen Polster, via Zuky:
The poems at Angel Island are among the most dramatic finds in American literature. The crumbling buildings of the former immigration station in San Francisco were scheduled to be demolished, when bits and pieces of Chinese writing were glimpsed behind the peeling paint. These characters turned out to be poetry, carved into the wooden walls of the station by would be immigrant laborers from China. As a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, these sojourners were detained, sometimes for months, on this island in San Francisco Bay. While they are significant reflections of the economic and labor conditions in California at the turn of the century, these poems turned out to be more than historical relics. They both question and uphold the traditional American ideologies of Equal and Unlimited Opportunity and the Frontier, and they are sterling examples of the refiguring of the self that is at the heart of most immigration tales. They also stand as a foundation of Chinese-American literature, as they look back.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“The dragon out of water is humiliated by ants;
The fierce tiger who is caged is baited by a child . . .
An advantageous position for revenge will surely come one day.”
And sometimes, revenge comes not at the hand of the one oppressed (“humiliated”), but as the natural evolution of the oppressor’s development. A person/society can act ugly so long, it becomes ugly.