Island was self-published in 1980 with partial funding from the Zellerbach Family Fund and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, as well as the assistance of the San Francisco Study Center and Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco under the publisher's name--HOC DOI, which stands for "History of Chinese Detained on Island." It went into a second printing in 1983 and was republished by the University of Washington Press in 1991.

In this revised edition sixty-nine poems in the main text have been combined with the sixty-six poems in the appendix into one section. Chinese poems that had been found on the walls of the immigration stations at Ellis Island in New York and at Victoria Island in Canada are also included. Charles Egan, David Chuenyan Lai, Marlon K. Hom, and Ellen Yeung helped with the new translations and corrected any errors in the poems based on "Poetry and Inscriptions," the research team's report. The historical introduction is rewritten to include the new research that has been done since Island was first published, excerpts of oral histories are replaced with twenty full profiles and stories drawn from our oral history collection and the immigration files at NARA-SF (National Archives at San Francisco). Unlike the first edition of Island, this revised edition uses the real names of our interviewees and includes photographs of them. Volunteers pored over twenty-seven rolls of microfilm that had been scanned by Ancestry.com in an effort to determine the actual detention time, exclusions, and appeals for Chinese applicants at Angel Island (see tables 1 and 2 in the appendix). The bibliography is updated, a map showing the emigrant districts in Guangdong has been added, as well as a glossary of Chinese names and terms mentioned in the book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Bilingual text in English and Chinese.