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Strangers in the land : exclusion, belonging, and the epic story of the Chinese in America
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2025
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Library Journal Review
New Yorker editor Luo debuts with a devastating narrative history of Chinese immigrants who came to the United States between the mid-19th and the mid-20th centuries. Luo describes how thousands of people migrated from China to the U.S., motivated by the Gold Rush. Though the labor of Chinese immigrants was initially welcomed, unfavorable economic conditions in the U.S. later set the stage for anti-Asian hostility and violence. Luo notes that this cycle repeated itself again and again, into the present day. While acceptance of newcomers is proffered when the need is great, fear, greed, and racism are never far behind. Yang narrates Luo's account with a precise, news anchor-style delivery, gravely reporting the facts. Yang allows the troubling information to speak for itself as Luo relates the fallout from laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and describes the horrific lynchings, beatings, and persecution of Chinese Americans. Despite everything, Luo observes that hope can be found in the stories of brave people who spoke out. VERDICT A must-listen for anyone interested in a different lens on U.S. history, similar to Kathleen DuVal's Native Nations and Four Hundred Souls, edited by Ibram X. Kendi.--Matthew Galloway
Booklist Review
Luo's history of the Chinese American immigrant experience emphasizes pockets of belonging amidst a vast landscape of racially motivated exclusion. Beginning in the 1840s, the first major wave of Chinese immigrants entered through San Francisco en route to the gold mines, where they "patiently scratched out earnings" from claims abandoned by white miners. Chinese immigrant labor built the transcontinental railroad, and Chinese entrepreneurs grew the commercial infrastructure of the American West. But, despite the increasingly diverse population and its ideals of liberty and equality in the U.S., Chinese Americans found themselves at the bottom of a racial hierarchy, the victims of both casual violence and legally sanctioned cruelty. In 1882, decades-long efforts to restrict Chinese immigration through "miner's taxes," housing restrictions, and other discriminatory tactics would culminate in the so-called Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant U.S. legislation to target members of a specific nation of origin. Inspired in part by his own unsettling experience of modern-day anti-Asian racism, award-winning New Yorker editor and writer Luo celebrates the vitality and persistence of Chinese Americans while lamenting feelings of precariousness that pervade even today. His chronicle adds a much-needed Asian and Pacific voice to primarily Eurocentric narratives of nineteenth-century immigration.
Kirkus Review
Giving voice to the first Asian Americans. An editor at theNew Yorker, Luo says that the impetus for writing this book was a random encounter on Manhattan's Upper East Side in the fall of 2016, a few weeks before the presidential election. While he was standing outside a restaurant with his family, a woman passed them, then turned around, yelling, "Go back to China!" That incident prompted Luo to write "An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China," which appeared on the front page of theNew York Times, generating an outpouring of reader response. When anti-Asian violence surged across the country in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Luo finally decided to write a narrative history of the Chinese experience in America. Such books of history are, of course, legion, and Luo relies on many of these, in addition to original archival research, to craft his own narrative. What distinguishes it from the others, however, is that Luo's book, though sweeping in scope, is also microscopic when it comes to stories. He writes about, for instance, not only Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (Yale, class of 1854) and later a prominent diplomat, but also many minor characters who have hitherto remained anonymous in the annals of history. Whether it is the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles or the brutal killing of Chinese in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, we now know, thanks to Luo's meticulous digging, the names and stories of some of the survivors of these infamous race riots. Readers interested in American history, not only Chinese American history, will savor these pages. An estimable and vital work of history that honors the Chinese American experience. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.

A TIME MUST-READ BOOK | A NEW YORK TIMES NONFICTION BOOK TO READ THIS SPRING

"A story about aspiration and belonging that is as universal as it is profound."--Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing

"A gift to anyone interested in American history. I couldn't stop turning pages."--Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

"What history should be--richly detailed, authoritative, and compelling."--David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon

Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan­ --Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy.

Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country's history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late-1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals. At the book's heart is a shameful chapter of American history: the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country's first undocumented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled.

In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as "strangers in the land." Only in 1965 did America's gates swing open to people like Luo's parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the "stranger" label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer's style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.
Table of Contents
A Note on Usagexi
Introduction3
Part IArrivals
Chapter 1Gold Mountain13
Chapter 2Indian, Negro, or Chinaman25
Chapter 3The Great Army and the Iron Road38
Chapter 4Colorblind55
Chapter 5Rope! More Rope!65
Part IIPassages
Chapter 6The Cauldron87
Chapter 7Lewd and Immoral Purposes99
Chapter 8Order of Caucasians115
Chapter 9The Chinese Must Go!126
Chapter 10The Mission144
Part IIIAt the Gates
Chapter 11The Chinese Question173
Chapter 12Beyond Debate189
Chapter 13The Gatekeepers206
Chapter 14Transformations218
Part IVOutcasts
Chapter 15Wipe Out the Plague Spots237
Chapter 16White Men, Fall In252
Chapter 17Driven Out278
Chapter 18Contagion301
Chapter 19No Return313
Part VBelonging
Chapter 20The Resistance335
Chapter 21Native Sons355
Chapter 22Ruin and Rebirth368
Chapter 23The Station382
Chapter 24Becoming Chinese American396
Chapter 25Confession415
Epilogue427
Acknowledgments433
Notes439
Index519
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