05-04-2025
The Epic Immigrant Saga Waiting to Be Told
A few weeks ago, I posted a preview of Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, Michael Luo's moving, eloquent and meticulously researched history of immigration. In a way, Luo's book, which officially publishes on April 29, is a companion to Edward Wong's poignant At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China, which I've also featured in a column.
While Luo's book examines nearly 200 years of Chinese immigration into the US — with a mesmerizing focus on the turbulent, often genocidal late 19th century in California and the Pacific states — Wong follows his father's epic journey from coastal China and Hong Kong in World War II up to Manchuria during the Korean War and then westward to the home of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which was being welded into the People's Republic, and where Han majority of the rest of the country was a privileged minority. Together, the books provide a stereoscopic view of Chinese identity — the experience of migrants to a distant continent of promise and hostility, and of Chinese in China itself as the nation settled into its territorial bounds and ambitions.
