Strangers in the Land

From New Yorker Executive Editor and writer Michael Luo, an urgent, deeply felt history of the Chinese in America and their more than century-long struggle to belong.

In 1889, while upholding the latest in a series of exclusionary laws targeting Chinese immigrants, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as “impossible to assimilate with our people” and “strangers in the land.” Today, there are twenty-four million people of Asian descent in the United States, and yet, as Luo observes in his riveting, sorrowful narrative, the question of belonging still trails them.

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 the Chinese arrivals, but as their numbers grew on the Pacific coast, sentiment shifted and horrific episodes of racial violence erupted. A prolonged economic downturn that commenced in the mid-eighteen-seventies and idled legions of white working men helped create the conditions for what came next: federal legislation aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country. It marked the first time the United States barred a people from immigrating based on their race. Violence soon crested. Luo documents the driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West, a shameful and little-known chapter of American history.

Luo follows the Chinese in America as they persisted amidst suspicion and as a native-born population took shape. Finally, in 1965, America’s gates swung open to people like his parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Strangers in the Land is an epic history of exclusion, belonging, and the complications of America’s multiracial democracy.