A Historical Epic of the Chinese in America

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

Michael Luo is an executive editor at The New Yorker, and his background is investigative reporting.

He's a journalist steeped in the art of prying out secrets that someone is trying to keep hidden.

But his new book takes a turn into history, into the past, in particular the complicated history of Chinese immigration to America.

Michael's book is called Strangers in the Land, Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.

Now, Mike, my grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and had a very typical late 19th century path to

Ellis Island, Lower East Side, and onward and onward.

And it wasn't until I read Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers where I learned anything about this background.

My grandparents never talked about it,

which was, I think, pretty typical.

You grew up in a Chinese-American household.

Was immigration and, as it were, the old country ever talked about?

Not much.

Actually, that's a great question.

For this book, I had a chance to sit down and talk to my parents.

And the book

spans nearly 200 years and goes back really to the middle of the 19th century and this wave of Chinese migration that preceded my parents.

My parents came post-1965.

You know, they were born in mainland China, fled to Taiwan when the communists came and came to the United States for graduate school.

And so their migration was a different migration than the heart of my book.

But this history relates to their history, and this post-1965 migration kind of ends my book.

What made you decide to write this book, and what was the hole in the world that needed filling?

Yeah.

The moment that set me on the path to this book is something that happened to me in the fall of 2016.

It was in some ways

a typical moment that many Asian Americans have experienced, but it was also felt, it just left a really deep impression on me.

It was a Sunday afternoon after church.

A group of friends of ours, we were standing on a block on the Upper East Side, and an annoyed woman, kind of just annoyed that we were blocking the sidewalk, brushed past and muttered, go back to China.

And what happened in this particular moment was

I kind of abandoned my daughter in the stroller and went and ran after her.

And we kind of had this exchange on the street where she yelled, go back to your effing country.

And in the adrenaline-filled moment, I was, I kind of sputtered, I was born in this country.

And we went back and we went inside the restaurant.

I tweeted about the moment

and it turned into this viral thing.

And I ended up writing an open letter to this woman.

For the New York Times.

For the New York Times.

And it kind of generated almost like a week of conversation about Asian Americans and their place in the kind of

racial milieu of the United States.

This was the fall of 2016, just before Trump had been elected.

You kind of felt this curtain of nativism descending.

Obviously, it's been a lot has happened since then.

So that moment, what I wrote about in that open letter was about this kind of sense of otherizing that a lot of Asian Americans have experienced, this kind of perpetual foreigner syndrome that a lot of people talk about.

And I was thinking about my kids.

And I was born in the United States, and my kids are two generations removed from my parents' immigrant experience.

And I felt this kind of sadness inside me about

will they ever feel like they truly belong here in the United States.

And then we had COVID and then the

surge in attacks on Asians during that period and the Atlanta spa attacks particularly that happened in the spring of 2021.

Eight or nine people were killed, I think,

mostly Asian American women.

And it was a white shooter.

And it sparked this kind of moment, an awakening, I think, moment we've since moved on from as a country about anti-Asian violence.

And it was in that period I wrote a piece for The New Yorker about this history.

I'm an educated person.

I'm reasonably conscious of my Asian American identity.

But I didn't know this history that is in this book.

And the thing that really caught my attention was a passage in our history that historians call the driving out, which happened in the 1885, 1886 range, when nearly 200 communities in the American West physically, violently, in many cases, drove out the Chinese from their communities.

And I wrote about this in this piece, and I talked about how this precarity of the Asian American experience is not new.

And that historical exploration from that piece is what set me on, I'm going to write a book about this.

Really?

Yeah.

So, you know, Asian American history is American history, and I want, you know, all the dads who are reading about, you know, World War II to want to read a book about this, who are interested in Civil War literature, to read about this different racial conflagration that was going on during the Civil War, after the Civil War, on the West Coast.

Well, let's get to that.

So now that we're talking about the 1850s, 1860s.

How did the first Chinese immigrants to this country even decide that coming to the U.S.

in particular

was a great idea?

What was compelling them to come to the United States?

Was it the gold rush?

What was it?

Yeah, the gold rush is where this really begins.

It's not exactly clear what exactly was the chain of events specifically of when people in southeastern China and the Pearl River Delta heard about the gold rush and started to come en masse to the United States.

There is this, maybe apocryphal, but it's kind of part of the lore that was passed down in the Chinese community.

There was a story about a merchant

who was here

apparently 1847-ish.

His name was Chung Ming, who had arrived in America around 1847.

And he was among the people who went into the Sierra Nevada foothills with the gold rush.

This would have been really early for a Chinese merchant to be in the United States, but that's how the story goes.

And he wrote a letter to a friend back home named Cheng Yum, a fellow villager from the Sanyi district of Guangdong Province about the gold to be had in the minefields.

And the story goes that Cheng Yum told others about Cheng Ming's good fortune and set off across the Pacific himself.

There is a more verifiable fact about a ship that arrived in Hong Kong on Christmas Day in 1848 that contained gold dust from California.

The Hudson Bay Company, which was a fur trading concern, had requested that British experts in China evaluate it.

We also know that there were copies of a

Hawaiian newspaper from Honolulu with news about the gold rush.

And so this might have been how word spread.

And it was a very specific region in China where people were coming from.

This was in the Pearl River Delta.

You know, in any kind of story of migration, there's a push and pull.

There was

unrest in China.

There was the Taiping Rebellion that was going on around this time where millions of people were killed.

Within Guangdong Province, there were some internecine conflicts that were going on.

But there's also Canton, as it was called back then, or as it's known today, Guangzhou, was an important trading port, and there was a lot of exposure to the West.

And, you know, that some of these stories that I looked into for this book of this 19th-century migration, these people were coming from southern China as teenagers, 13, 14, 15.

I have a 16-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old daughter.

I cannot imagine.

I could not even conceive of the possibility of either of them getting on a boat

in steerage weeks on the ocean.

You're worried about them getting on the subway.

Exactly.

And the idea that they were 13-year-olds, 14-year-old boys

who are sailing across the ocean and landing on these shores and making a living is just pretty extraordinary.

I'm speaking with Michael Luo about his new book, Strangers in the Land.

We'll continue in a moment.

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The welcome initially was not hostile.

It was relatively welcoming for economic reasons.

Yeah, so

the other big part of the story that people know about is the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.

And that came about a decade later after that initial push.

But yes,

there was a business class of people who welcomed Chinese arrivals because of what they saw that they could do for the state economically.

That initial welcome, I think,

was relatively short-lived.

Like, you started.

It's a cynical even.

Yeah, yeah.

And you started to see there are horrific stories in the minefields about

violence against Chinese in the 1850s, 1860s.

Things really start to accelerate in the 1870s.

And that relates to economics.

I mean, there's also all the other factors that relate to bigotry in the United States.

It relates to religion.

It relates to race.

Well, one thing you do in an astonishing way, and it's part of the tension of reading this book,

we begin to see a tension in this history between immigration favored by business interests to keep labor costs down.

And then a populist or a nativist movement that comes along and blames the immigrants for being paid less.

And it has resonances of what we're seeing now in this country.

Totally.

Yeah.

There's a figure named Dennis Carney, who was a demagogue-like figure who started to do these speeches, these rallies in San Francisco.

This is mid-1870s.

This is a time when San Francisco was basically a cauldron of unemployed white working men, as they were called.

And he would draw thousands and he would end his speeches with this rallying cry, the Chinese must go.

And he started a party called the Working Men's Party that had basically two principles.

It was against kind of corporate power and the robber barons of that era, and it was a very anti-Chinese in its orientation.

That was really at the heart of what the Working Men's Party was.

And you write that one of the great defenders of Chinese arrivals, Chinese immigrants, is Frederick Douglass.

Yes.

I mean, it was in the late 1860s, there was a treaty that was passed in 1868 called the Burlingame Treaty that kind of opened up immigration between the two countries.

It was around this time that Frederick Douglass was barnstorming around northern cities doing paid lectures.

And it was in 1867 that he first tested out a speech in Boston on America's composite nationality.

Douglas called on America to live up to its mission of serving as a, as he called it, a perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family.

And he was saying that America was unique.

He said, all the way from black to white with intermediate shades, which in the apocalyptic vision no man can number.

And he was saying that we had a chance to be a

model for the world.

And then he talked about the Chinese, and he explicitly talked about this, quote, new race that is making its appearance within our borders and claiming attention.

And he predicted that at some point in the future, the Chinese population would number in the millions.

And he

just urged Americans, his fellow Americans, to embrace these new arrivals.

And he has this kind of stirring admonition for Americans about Chinese immigration.

Do you ask if I favor such immigration?

I answer, I would.

And then he's asking this kind of series of rhetorical questions.

Would you have them naturalized and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship?

I would.

Would you allow them to vote?

I would.

Would you allow them to hold office?

I would.

And he talks about how this comes from his belief in basic human rights, 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.

And

his hope was for the Chinese to feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.

It really is inspirational.

I don't get too much into this in the book, but there actually is a little bit of a rivalry tension between black Americans and Chinese.

And like there is this aspect of

some black Americans were kind of saying, well, we're actually higher on the hierarchy.

We're Christian.

We're actually American.

We're, you know, we're born here, you know, go back generations.

These are foreigners.

They're heathens.

There is an aspect of that, but Frederick Douglass.

No, he has a clarion voice and a very rare voice defending the Chinese.

But Michael, it must affect you a lot to be writing this book and publishing this book at the very moment where the discussion about immigration is, to say the least, unbelievably heated, when the President of the United States makes it, I think you could fairly say, his very first priority to minimize immigration to this country.

There must be an emotional resonance for you as a writer and as a journalist, as a storyteller, and as a human being

to experience those things all at once.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Totally.

When I hear these things,

there are just so many resonances with this history.

And

from the kind of populist reaction to immigration, there's a lot of similarities to the kind of combination of working class labor, small business owner, this kind of nimbus, I call it, of outrage came from not just laborers, but from this kind of also small business owners.

And so I see the same in the MAGA movement.

And the way politicians,

craven politicians,

talk about immigrants today is it could be just torn from the 19th century.

And the thing I think about, when I think about what history can tell us about this moment, is it's actually hard when

foreign people

who speak a different language, look different, you know,

come to a society and it's hard work to

not be suspicious,

to reach out, to think about them as human beings with families, aspirations, stories.

The book is called Strangers in the Land, and I drew that from a Supreme Court decision that upheld one of the Chinese exclusion laws, where the Supreme Court Justice, Justice Field, who wrote this opinion, referred to the Chinese as strangers in the land.

And he kind of talked about how they, by his perception, refused to assimilate, couldn't assimilate with the American people.

So in that opinion, it's a derogatory expression.

The Chinese themselves actually, interestingly early on, referred to themselves as strangers.

Yeah.

And I'm not exactly sure of how the translation worked, but I found actually in one of those 1849, 1850 period when they were welcomed in San Francisco, they were looking for a white American to be kind of their champion for them.

And they said to this person they asked, we need a champion.

We are strangers in the land.

So that's interesting.

The thing I say in the book, though, and the thing that I'm interested in trying to convey in the book is the Chinese were strangers then.

Asian Americans are in some ways continue to be strangers, but the stranger label applies to many immigrant groups through history, including right now.

And I do think that

the stranger label is still there.

Michael Luo, thank you so much.

Thanks so much for having me, David.

Michael Luo is the author of Strangers in the Land.

He's also an executive editor at The New Yorker and oversees our website.

You can find his work at NewYorker.com, and of course, you can always subscribe to the magazine there as well, newyorker.com.

I'm David Remnick and that's our program for this week.

Thanks for joining us.

See you next time.

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