Strangers in the Land
I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.
Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a woman screamed “Go back to China” at them— twice. The only response Luo had was “I was born in this country!” It was a few weeks before Donald Trump was elected on a platform that rested in part on the nativist ideology that has been a consistent and ugly undercurrent in American politics. Strangers in the Land tells the story of the long history of anti-Asian racism which is the background for that encounter and the anti-Asian violence that swept the country during the COVID pandemic. Luo begins with the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the California gold rush of 1848 end ends with his own family’s immigration to the United States thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Luo’s prose is clear, even elegant. His accounts of historical events are vivid, and rooted in the broader context of the time. He makes historical links between the Chinese experience in American and the Civil War, the end of slavery, the larger question of nativism, the labor movement, China’s changing role in international politics, and the Cold War. At the same time, he has a good eye for the telling detail.
But despite Luo’s mastery of his craft, Strangers in the Land was a difficult book to read. His accounts of attacks on Chinese miners and railroad workers by their white counterparts, of violence against Chinese residents in small towns throughout the Western and Pacific regions of the United States, and the destruction of urban Chinatowns by enraged mobs were both new to me and all too familiar. I was reminded over and over of attacks on Black Americans: the Reconstruction, the Red Summer of 1919, the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. The repeated destruction of Chinese owned businesses made me think of the destruction of the Black Wall Street in the Tulsa race riots in 1921. Anti-immigrant rhetoric by politicians and rabble-rousers in the past could have come from a present day political rally.
It left me ashamed. And determined to learn more. It’s the reason I am trying to read my way through the heritage months this year. It is important to grapple with the tension between acknowledging our country’s mistakes and appreciating the things we have done well—a condition that social psychologist Dolly Chugh describes as being a “gritty patriot.” I’ve said it before. I’ll doubtless say it again. History can be hard.
