STRANGERS IN THE LAND: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, by Michael Luo
The story of Chinese Americans really gets going with one of the great early episodes of globalization. The discovery of gold in California in 1848, brought tens of thousands of fortune seekers from around the world, including some from China.
What happened next is the sort of history that many schools, states and the Trump administration have lately deemed dangerous and divisive. Chinese people and their descendants helped to build the country while also enduring generations of abuse.
But you can’t paint a complete picture of America without this story, and the New Yorker journalist Michael Luo tells it persuasively in “Strangers in the Land,” a granular account of Chinese migration to the United States. In an evenhanded style that yields neither a woke polemic nor a sanitized past, he traces the lives of immigrants to a country that actively drew them in and then tried to push them out.
Luo, a former investigative reporter for The New York Times, relentlessly accumulates facts from old newspapers, court records and immigration cases. Parts of the story are hard to uncover, even though the outlines are well known. School children can tell you, for example, that in the 1860s the builders of the first transcontinental railroad recruited Chinese men to lay tracks through the snowy Sierra Nevadas. They outworked everyone else during this high point of America’s national development. But not even the finest scholars can figure out who most of these hammer-swinging people were. While railroad bosses took pride in them, they couldn’t tell the foreigners apart, and didn’t write most of their names on the payroll.
Despite such obstacles, Luo finds an incredible number of characters. Although he describes the book as “the biography of a people,” it succeeds through its little biographies of individuals — a range of quirky and fascinating figures, both Chinese and white, who drive the narrative. We follow entrepreneurs like the “Chinese courtesan” Ah Toy, an immigrant to San Francisco who sold sex-starved prospectors the chance to “gaze on her countenance” and saved enough gold dust to go into business as a madam.
On the other side of the country, we meet Yung Wing, the first Chinese student at Yale. By the time this enthusiast for America returned to China, he had almost forgotten his native language. Then the Chinese government, eager for Western knowledge and technology, sent Yung back in the 1870s with dozens more students in tow. Americans welcomed the scholars into their homes — until China cut short Yung’s mission, fearing the students had grown too comfortable with the local customs and religion.
I read this book while covering the early moves of the second Trump administration and also while reporting in China, and kept finding parallels to current events. In the 19th century, American capitalists welcomed Chinese laborers — the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington said, “It would be all the better for us and the State if there should be a half million come over” — but many politicians described their arrival as an “invasion.”
Some constituents assumed that Chinese migration was a form of slavery. Chinese workers were stereotyped as “coolies,” controlled by the Chinese bosses who contracted out their work. Luo casts doubt on this idea, but reports that Chinese laborers were sometimes used against their white counterparts. When Massachusetts shoemakers went on strike in 1870, for instance, their boss sent an aide to California to round up Chinese replacements. Opponents of Chinese migration claimed to be taking a progressive stance for free labor.
Those opponents transformed the country’s concept of border security. In early American history there was no class of people called “illegal immigrants,” because few laws governed movement to the United States. That changed specifically for the Chinese. By the mid-1880s, only certain kinds of people — merchants, teachers and students — were allowed to disembark from the ships. Even they were barred from citizenship. As a junior at Yale, Yung had become a citizen in the 1850s, but in the harsher legal climate of 1898 the State Department decided his citizenship was invalid.
Critics said the flow of Chinese migrants abetted human trafficking. Enticed by promises of marriage, some women, especially in the 1860s and ’70s, were lured into signing contracts in China and brought to San Francisco for prostitution.
And some white citizens tried to help the victims: In 1870, Otis Gibson, a missionary, established a home to which entrapped young women could flee. Yet California authorities eventually decided to fight human trafficking by passing laws that made it hard for Asian women to come at all, threatening to send them back from the San Francisco docks after they’d traveled thousands of miles. If husbands didn’t come to pick them up, they were presumed to be prostitutes. A U.S. Supreme Court justice ultimately intervened in favor of the women, ruling that a state could not legislate immigration.
Through it all, Chinese arrivals persisted in making a home in their adopted country. In 1885 white residents of Humboldt County, Calif., rioted to expel their entire Chinese community (“Wipe Out the Plague Spots,” the local newspaper urged). It’s one of many riots and murders that this book recounts in excruciating detail. After it was over, a local business directory proudly advertised Humboldt as “the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.” But it wasn’t true: Some Chinese people remained with the support of white residents; a jack-of-all-trades named Charley Moon, who survived the pogrom, was still living in Humboldt upon his death in 1943.
The Chinese American population did not grow significantly until Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the old rules and made it possible for Chinese Americans to begin bringing over their relatives. But descendants of the earlier arrivals are among us today. Luo’s book recounts the family story of Connie Young Yu, a historian from California. Her ancestors include a railroad worker from the 1860s, a woman who was separated from her children by immigration authorities in 1924 and a veteran of World War II.
Although parts of Luo’s story have been told in other books, such as Mae Ngai’s “The Chinese Question,” Erika Lee’s “The Making of Asian America” and Gordon H. Chang’s “Ghosts of Gold Mountain,” this account introduces many fascinating details. If there’s any weakness to Luo’s work, it’s contained within that strength: He offers us so many characters that it can be hard to keep track, but readers who do are rewarded with a view on the full complexity of American immigration.
We hear from Wong Chin Foo, an exuberant, self-described “missionary from China,” who staged a public debate in a Chicago theater in 1879. Extolling the industriousness of the Chinese, he refuted the claims of a white sailor who had formed a negative opinion during a port call in Shanghai.
Other characters in this book seem to debate with themselves. In the 1870s, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field reasoned that the recently passed 14th Amendment, guaranteeing “equal protection of the laws” to “any person,” applied to immigrants. Years later, in an 1889 decision, Justice Field called the Chinese “strangers in the land” and wrote that the federal government had the right to expel them to resist “foreign aggression,” as if immigration were an act of war.
Then there is Frederick Douglass. Fresh from the fight against slavery, he proclaimed that “a new race is making its appearance within our borders, and claiming attention.” He said the Chinese newcomers had “the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race; but belongs alike to all and to all alike.”
Not everyone agreed that there was a “right of migration” then, and the concept is definitely out of style now. But as “Strangers in the Land” reminds us, immigrants have always found some way to get here.
STRANGERS IN THE LAND: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America | By Michael Luo | Doubleday | 542 pp. | $35