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.
