STRANGERS IN THE LAND

Giving voice to the first Asian Americans.

An editor at the New Yorker, Luo says that the impetus for writing this book was a random encounter on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the fall of 2016, a few weeks before the presidential election. While he was standing outside a restaurant with his family, a woman passed them, then turned around, yelling, “Go back to China!” That incident prompted Luo to write “An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China,” which appeared on the front page of the New York Times, generating an outpouring of reader response. When anti-Asian violence surged across the country in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Luo finally decided to write a narrative history of the Chinese experience in America. Such books of history are, of course, legion, and Luo relies on many of these, in addition to original archival research, to craft his own narrative. What distinguishes it from the others, however, is that Luo’s book, though sweeping in scope, is also microscopic when it comes to stories. He writes about, for instance, not only Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (Yale, class of 1854) and later a prominent diplomat, but also many minor characters who have hitherto remained anonymous in the annals of history. Whether it is the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles or the brutal killing of Chinese in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, we now know, thanks to Luo’s meticulous digging, the names and stories of some of the survivors of these infamous race riots. Readers interested in American history, not only Chinese American history, will savor these pages.

An estimable and vital work of history that honors the Chinese American experience.