A Vast History Began With One Sidewalk Encounter

Photo of Michael Luo by Elinor Carruci. Background illustration by Cici via Adobe Stock

Journalist Michael Luo is an American success story. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, the Harvard-educated Luo has climbed the career ladder of journalism to one of its most prestigious posts—he’s an executive editor of the New Yorker, in charge of the magazine’s online operation.

So it felt almost like an ambush on a rainy Sunday in October 2016, when Luo stood after church with a group of Asian American friends on an Upper East Side sidewalk and had an encounter that assaulted his sense of place in the world. He still remembers the moment: “A white woman who was really annoyed that we were blocking the sidewalk brushed past us, and muttered, like, ‘Go back to China,’ he recalls. “I confronted her, and she’s like, ‘Go back to your fucking country,’ and I was yelling, ‘I was born in this country!’ I remember this feeling of adrenaline, and then as I was pushing my youngest daughter in her stroller, I had this feeling of soberness and sadness.” Luo thought about his two young daughters and their future in America and wondered: Will they ever truly belong?

Luo documented the moment in a viral piece for the New York Times, where he worked at the time. Eventually it impelled him to write his new book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, April 29), a harrowing examination of anti-Chinese sentiment in American history. Luo ran an investigations team at the Times, and he brings his research and reporting chops to this account of violent resistance to Chinese immigration in 19th- and 20th-century America. From Chinese immigrants driven from their homes to mob violence and outright massacres, it’s a somber recreation of an era with implications for this country’s current immigration struggles. Luo answered some questions about his book by telephone; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Chinese immigration to this country began in earnest in the mid-19th century. Why did so many Chinese citizens want to leave their country?

In the 19th century there was political unrest in China, notably the Taiping rebellion, that eventually killed millions of people. A lot of folks in Guangdong province, where many of the immigrants came from, had connections to the west, including proximity to American missionaries and merchants. But the story of the numbers really started with the Gold Rush and then the building of the railroads.

Chinese gold miners sought their fortunes alongside white miners, and there was competition between those groups early on. But trouble really began when white railroad workers became convinced that they were losing jobs to Chinese laborers working the railroads and in the coal mines owned by the railroads. Eventually, some of the worst violence against Chinese immigrants was fomented by labor groups. Talk about that chemistry.

In the 1870s, an economic downturn closed a lot of businesses and left thousands of people out of work. There was this perception that Chinese immigrants were taking jobs and driving down wages. A populist figure in San Francisco named Denis Kearney started to hold rallies full of white laborers, and he would end rallies with this exclamation: “The Chinese must go!” But it wasn’t exclusively white laborers. There were white supremacist–type groups, and small business owners, and, in some cases, prominent civic leaders. I think that’s important, because you see some parallels with the MAGA movement today.

The move to expel the Chinese spread like wildfire all over the west. Immigrants were driven from their neighborhoods, attacked, shot, and in some cases murdered. Perhaps the worst incident was in 1885 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where a dispute between white miners and Chinese miners working for the Union Pacific Railroad exploded. White miners killed at least 28 Chinese residents, burned down the Chinese quarter, and drove all the Chinese out of Rock Springs. Several who died were burnt to death. Why did that incident blow up so horribly?

There is a bit of a mystery as to whether this attack was just a spur-of-the-moment incident. The sparking incident was a fight that took place in one of the mines, where white miners came upon Chinese miners who they believed were in their work area. That fight eventually led to the mob attack. But there are little clues that this had been planned. One anecdote I found in the archives was in a memoir by a guy named Andrew Bugas, who remembered that the night before the riot, somebody came to his cabin with a rifle and told his cousin to get ready and to make sure that he was armed. And then the man said, “We’re all going to go hunting and shoot all the Chinamen we see.”

Despite these horrific events—and despite the fact that Congress passed a series of laws severely restricting Chinese immigration—the Chinese community kept growing. Some managed to gain admission and remain in America, and eventually native-born Chinese Americans grew up and took their place in society. Finally, immigration restrictions were relaxed, and today Chinese Americans are considered a “model minority.” How did the Chinese American community persevere?

There were predictions from the anti-Chinese movement leaders and thinkers that the Chinese population would essentially die out in the United States. It never happened. Chinese Americans demonstrated a kind of resilience. You started to see people exercise their rights and articulate and claim the principles that supposedly define America. The population started to grow again, and finally, in 1943, the exclusion laws were lifted.

What are your takeaways from this chapter in American history?

One question I began the book with was, What explained this bigotry and violence toward the Chinese? Was it economics? Was it race? Was it religion? I came away thinking it was all of these things. I use the term “white supremacy” very cautiously, because I feel that in some cases it can be used reflexively and it’s lost a little bit of meaning. But it’s undeniable that race was a big part of what happened. I think human nature has trouble with people who are different.

In your acknowledgments, you write of your American daughters: “May they find belonging.” Is that achievable?

This question about belonging is a psychological one—it’s a feeling, it’s an emotion. The note I end the book on is that the sense of belonging remains elusive. The surge in reports of violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic is just a reminder of the precarity of Asian American existence in America. People argue that focusing on this kind of history and this kind of sentiment is backward-looking and not really relevant today, but I think they miss what history teaches about the Asian immigrant experience.

Mary Ann Gwinn is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist in Seattle

Home

A Vast History Began With One Sidewalk Encounter