The opening epigraph for New Yorker reporter and editor Michael Luo’s debut book, Strangers in the Land comes from Charles Yu’s novel, Interior Chinatown. “We keep falling out of the story, even though we’ve been here for 200 years.”
Luo is trying to write Chinese Americans back into the story with this history of the Chinese in America from the Gold Rush to the 60s. He wanted to create, he jokes, the sort of history book you could give your dad for Father’s Day or his birthday rather than yet another tome about World War II. The book explores the persistence and resistance of Chinese immigrants and citizens in the face of legal and physical attacks.
You may not know much of this history, which covers events like the killing of eighteen Chinese men in Los Angeles in 1871, in one of the largest mass lynchings in American history, or white miners who killed more than two dozen Chinese residents of Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885 and burned down the quarter where they lived (last summer a memorial was erected there to mark the 140th anniversary of the massacre).
There are also stories of people like Denis Kearney, who often spoke to hundreds of people at an outdoor area near San Francisco City Hall known as the Sandlot, often ending his speeches with, “The Chinese must go!”
Along with the breathtaking racism and violence, the book goes into the ways the Chinese, as Luo writes, “pressed their adopted homeland to live up to its stated ideals.”
A well-known example of insisting on Constitutional rights is the San Francisco-born Wong Kim Ark. In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed his American citizenship. Luo writes, “Justice Horace Gray’s opinion for the majority was dense with explication of common-law doctrine and legal precedents, but he pointed to another important factor: “To hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
In other words, the citizenship status of hundreds of thousands of first-generation white Americans would be endangered, an unacceptable outcome.”
Strangers in the Land begins in San Francisco with the Gold Rush, when Chinese came and people around the world came. At first, the reception of the Chinese was generally positive, and the first chapter of the book has a description of a welcome ceremony for them in 1850 in San Francisco. Also, the population of mostly men, were recruited to build railroads. Luo writes of how although Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad company, publicly railed against the Chinese, in private he and his wife, Jane Stanford had a different relationship, with his wife trying to adopt a teenager who worked as a gardener for them, and when Jane Stanford had a lung infection, a Chinese herbalist treated her and she recovered.
But with an economic downturn in the 1870s, some politicians, newspaper editors and people like Kearney wanted to pin the blame on the Chinese and stoke fear about their presence in America.
Luo grew up in Pittsburgh, which he says made him a fan of the Steelers and the Pirates. His family was one of the few Chinese ones in the area, and he didn’t know a lot of this history himself before he started work on this book in 2021.
The idea came several years before that. Luo was waiting with his family to go to a restaurant in Manhattan. A white woman walked by, and annoyed that her way was blocked, muttered something about going back to China. Luo, so upset that he left his daughter in her stroller on the sidewalk to follow her, told her he was born in the country. She yelled at him “go back to your fucking country.”
At the time, Luo worked for the New York Times, and he wrote an open letter to her that was published online there. So many people read and shared it that the Times published it on the front page of the print newspaper, an extraordinary thing for a digital piece.
The viral reaction made Luo realize there was a hunger for acknowledgement from Asian Americans.
An investigative reporter, Luo started doing research in the summer of 2021, including spending a month in San Francisco with his family. Luo follows the meticulous motto of investigative reporter Robert Caro, beloved author of The Power Broker and a series of books about Lydon B. Johnson’s time in the Senate, to “Turn every page.” At the beginning of the pandemic, more archives were digitized, and Luo took advantage of that, as well as looking at online newspapers. He visited the California Historical Society and the University of California’s Bancroft Library and traveled around the state, going to the Huntington Library and towns in the Sierra foothills of California.
Luo found sources in some unexpected places. The Presbyterian Church sent missionaries to San Francisco to try and convert the Chinese. Luo visited the Presbyterian Historical Society of America in Philadelphia, photographed the documents, and converted them to PDFs, allowing him to spend months pouring over them. He found boxes of letters from William Speer, a missionary, full of descriptions of San Francisco and his encounters with Chinese people there. Speer is a significant character in the second chapter of his book, which covers the trial of a white man who killed Chinese miners. Speer was an interpreter at the trial where the California Supreme Court found that Chinese testimony was inadmissible against white defendants.
That Luo has made the research so compelling, focusing on the stories and the characters he found, while not making the reader feel like, “Will this be on the test?” is a testament to his writing. Each chapter of the book reads like a magazine story with a central character. One such character is Gene Tong, an English-speaking herbalist who was shot in the face and then strung up in Los Angeles in 1871. Luo writes that a reporter went to the apartment and found, “There were broken chairs and tables; Tong’s supplies of herbal medicine were strewn all over the floor. The couple’s poodle was found whimpering under a counter, with a broken leg.”
Going through articles, classified ads and memoirs, Luo has assembled these kinds of details that humanize the people he writes about. Strangers in the Land shows the Chinese as individuals rather than a mass of faceless victims. Rather than one person, the protagonists of the book are the Chinese immigrants who came to the country, persevered, and now number about five and a half million.
