By Andrew Graybill

The idea for Michael Luo's book originated on a rainy evening in the fall of 2016. As he recalls in the introduction, he and a group of family and friends were standing outside a Manhattan restaurant when a woman passed by and hissed, "go back to China!" Once he recovered from the slight, Mr. Luo caught up to the woman, who repeated her admonition, this time adding a vulgarity for emphasis. "Because I could think of nothing else," he writes, "I said, 'I was born in this country!'" Although he knew firsthand "the feeling of disconnection that often comes with being Asian American," this unsettling encounter led him to wonder if his own children, "two generations removed from the immigrant experiences of my parents, would ever feel like they truly belonged in this country." "Strangers in the Land" is Mr. Luo's exploration of the historical roots of this dilemma.

Chinese people -- initially, almost all of them men -- first came to the United States in the mid-19th century, drawn, like so many others, by the California Gold Rush. Most of the immigrants hailed from the counties of the Pearl River Delta, which at the time suffered from land scarcity and social unrest. Many of the newcomers found work in the mines, some took jobs on farms and in factories, and still others established laundries and restaurants. After the Civil War, they proved indispensable in building the transcontinental railroad. While the American West was home to the majority of Chinese, sizable communities developed elsewhere throughout the country, in places such as Boston, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. By 1880, there were more than 100,000 people of Chinese descent living in the U.S.

They were not warmly welcomed by white Americans. For one thing, by virtue of their obvious differences, the Chinese were thought by many to be unassimilable. As a senator from Oregon fulminated during an 1870 debate over naturalization, "Mongolians, no matter how long they may stay in the United States, will never lose their identity as a peculiar and separate people. They will never amalgamate with persons of European descent."

Of even greater concern was the belief that, because the Chinese were paid low wages, they undercut what their white counterparts could command. Labor organizers were thus among the most virulent anti-Chinese agitators. Denis Kearney, the Irish-born leader of the Workingmen's Party of California, declared in 1877 that "we intend to try and vote the Chinamen out, to frighten him out, and if this won't do, to kill him out."

Violence against the Chinese began almost as soon as they arrived on American shores. In 1849, near what is now Yosemite National Park, a group of Chinese were driven from the goldfields by a mob of white miners. A riot in Los Angeles in 1871 left 18 Chinese dead. But the most notorious episode came at a coal camp in Rock Springs, Wyo., in 1885, when white laborers, incensed by the presence of strike-breaking Chinese miners, slaughtered some 28 Chinese and razed their encampment. After weighing the evidence against the alleged perpetrators, a grand jury declined to indict them. News of the pogrom inspired mass expulsions of Chinese from the Pacific Northwest shortly thereafter, with the mayor of Tacoma urging a "speedy and final solution" to the so-called Chinese question.

Much of this story -- and especially the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which for the first time restricted immigration on the basis of race -- will be familiar to scholars and general audiences alike. Some readers might wish that the author had devoted more time to the 20th century, when, after a period of additional constraints, wartime exigency led to a loosening of such targeted immigration controls in 1943, which were lifted altogether when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Likewise, left mostly unexplored is the paradox of Chinese status as a "model minority," whereby a group once reviled has become so successful that, as various lawsuits have asserted, Chinese and other Asian applicants face discrimination in admissions at some of the nation's most selective educational institutions.

The strength of the book is found in the stories that Mr. Luo, a writer and editor at the New Yorker, uses to illustrate the human costs of such bigotry and caprice. Yung Wing arrived in America as a child and in 1854 became the first Chinese graduate of Yale College. As a diplomat, he shuttled back and forth between China and the U.S. Despite his naturalization, Yung's citizenship was revoked in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act. He finally returned to the country in 1902 but died in poverty a decade later in Connecticut.

Though he was born in America, Wong Kim Ark fared little better. Returning from a trip to China in 1895, he was detained by U.S. immigration and held for several months despite presenting documentation, "signed by three white witnesses, certifying that he was 'well known' to them and had been born in the city and county of San Francisco" and that his father was a local merchant. The Supreme Court eventually "enshrined Wong's place in America, but it did not end his troubles with immigration officials." In the end, he chose to return to China, where he lived until his death in 1936. As Mr. Luo writes, "the country to which he ostensibly belonged never stopped treating him with suspicion."

The 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States," helped pave the way for diverse populations to find inclusion here, from the Scandinavians who arrived around the turn of the 20th century, to the Vietnamese who fled their country in the 1970s to the Central Americans of recent years. And yet for some Americans, at least, citizenship is not the same as belonging. Michael Luo's important study reminds us that without such indemnities, any group -- but particularly the most vulnerable among us -- could find itself excluded or expelled.

Mr. Graybill is a professor of history at Southern Methodist University.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 30, 2025 11:02 ET (15:02 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.