Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION 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.

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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

In Strangers in the Land, award-winning journalist Michael Luo 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. Federal lawmakers enacted legislation aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. The Chinese became the country’s earliest 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 style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is a revelatory and unforgettable American story.