STRANGERS IN THE LAND

When Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field described Chinese immigrants as "strangers in the land" in the second half of the 19th century, he gave voice to a sentiment that would resound across generations.

The same prejudice and xenophobia emboldened Donald Trump to colloquialize the COVID-19 virus as the "Chinese virus" and "kung flu." It's this persistent othering that drove a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes in the last year. The recent spate of attacks has generated unprecedented attention, but anti-Asian racism is nothing new. Asian Americans have been telling us about it for decades. In 2016, weeks before the presidential election, Michael Luo, then an editor at the New York Times, had a stark encounter with the kind of bigotry that Field voiced, when a woman told him and his family, as they stood on the sidewalk, to "go back to fucking China." The slurs were familiar to him as an Asian American. But the encounter triggered anew the sensation of alienation in the country where he was born. When his tweets about the experience (hashtag: #thisis2016), and the accompanying Times article published on A1, went viral, there was an outpouring of support, of commiseration, and, perhaps most importantly, of voices like his. In the last four years, Luo, who is now the editor of The New Yorker's website, has used his platform to continue to write about and inspect the experience of Asian Americans. In STRANGERS IN THE LAND: THE PURGING OF CHINESE FROM AMERICA, Luo proposes to write a narrative history of a forgotten chapter in American history, when Chinese immigrants flocked the United States but were ultimately driven out of communities up and down the West Coast. America, in the middle of the 19th century, was engaged in an epic struggle over race. Largely forgotten in this defining period of American history, however, is the virulent racism Chinese immigrants endured on the other side of the country. The story of the Chinese in America - the first Asian Americans - spans the California gold rush, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the law's repeal in the 1940s, and ultimately the liberalization of America's immigration laws in 1965. Luo will trace the history of a people violently rebuffed at nearly every turn and their determination to resist. Weaving together stories passed down through generations shared with him by families, the scattered remnants of records and documents that survived the destruction of Chinatowns across the country, and elements of his own family' history, what he proposes is ambitious and necessary. His initial research has uncovered troves of material that he believes can flesh out this untold history, and he is confident that there is even more to be found. Michael's piece in the Times was read by over a million people, and a subsequent video generated 27 million views on Facebook alone. He's continued to build a large following at The New Yorker, where he has written regularly on these issues, including a well-received piece he wrote recently here. While there have been a number of academic works exploring the history of the Chinese in America, to date there hasn't been a book in the vein of Isabel Wilkerson's THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, or CASTE, or Patrick Radden Keefe's SAY NOTHING. STRANGERS IN THE LAND promises to be that work.