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Asharq Al-Awsat
2 days ago
- General
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Immigration Has Always Been Complex
The story of Chinese Americans really gets going with one of the great early episodes of globalization. The discovery of gold in California in 1848, brought tens of thousands of fortune seekers from around the world, including some from China. What happened next is the sort of history that many schools, states and the Trump administration have lately deemed dangerous and divisive. Chinese people and their descendants helped to build the country while also enduring generations of abuse. But you can't paint a complete picture of America without this story, and the New Yorker journalist Michael Luo tells it persuasively in 'Strangers in the Land,' a granular account of Chinese migration to the United States. In an evenhanded style that yields neither a woke polemic nor a sanitized past, he traces the lives of immigrants to a country that actively drew them in and then tried to push them out. Luo, a former investigative reporter for The New York Times, relentlessly accumulates facts from old newspapers, court records and immigration cases. Parts of the story are hard to uncover, even though the outlines are well known. School children can tell you, for example, that in the 1860s the builders of the first transcontinental railroad recruited Chinese men to lay tracks through the snowy Sierra Nevadas. They outworked everyone else during this high point of America's national development. But not even the finest scholars can figure out who most of these hammer-swinging people were. While railroad bosses took pride in them, they couldn't tell the foreigners apart, and didn't write most of their names on the payroll. Despite such obstacles, Luo finds an incredible number of characters. Although he describes the book as 'the biography of a people,' it succeeds through its little biographies of individuals — a range of quirky and fascinating figures, both Chinese and white, who drive the narrative. We follow entrepreneurs like the 'Chinese courtesan' Ah Toy, an immigrant to San Francisco who sold prospectors the chance to 'gaze on her countenance' and saved enough gold dust to go into business as a madam. On the other side of the country, we meet Yung Wing, the first Chinese student at Yale. By the time this enthusiast for America returned to China, he had almost forgotten his native language. Then the Chinese government, eager for Western knowledge and technology, sent Yung back in the 1870s with dozens more students in tow. Americans welcomed the scholars into their homes — until China cut short Yung's mission, fearing the students had grown too comfortable with the local customs and religion. I read this book while covering the early moves of the second Trump administration and also while reporting in China, and kept finding parallels to current events. In the 19th century, American capitalists welcomed Chinese laborers — the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington said, 'It would be all the better for us and the State if there should be a half million come over' — but many politicians described their arrival as an 'invasion.' Some constituents assumed that Chinese migration was a form of slavery. Chinese workers were stereotyped as 'coolies,' controlled by the Chinese bosses who contracted out their work. Luo casts doubt on this idea, but reports that Chinese laborers were sometimes used against their white counterparts. When Massachusetts shoemakers went on strike in 1870, for instance, their boss sent an aide to California to round up Chinese replacements. Opponents of Chinese migration claimed to be taking a progressive stance for free labor. Those opponents transformed the country's concept of border security. In early American history there was no class of people called 'illegal immigrants,' because few laws governed movement to the United States. That changed specifically for the Chinese. By the mid-1880s, only certain kinds of people — merchants, teachers and students — were allowed to disembark from the ships. Even they were barred from citizenship. As a junior at Yale, Yung had become a citizen in the 1850s, but in the harsher legal climate of 1898 the State Department decided his citizenship was invalid. Critics said the flow of Chinese migrants abetted human trafficking. Enticed by promises of marriage, some women, especially in the 1860s and '70s, were lured into signing contracts in China and brought to San Francisco for prostitution. And some white citizens tried to help the victims: In 1870, Otis Gibson, a missionary, established a home to which entrapped young women could flee. Yet California authorities eventually decided to fight human trafficking by passing laws that made it hard for Asian women to come at all, threatening to send them back from the San Francisco docks after they'd traveled thousands of miles. If husbands didn't come to pick them up, they were presumed to be prostitutes. A US Supreme Court justice ultimately intervened in favor of the women, ruling that a state could not legislate immigration. Through it all, Chinese arrivals persisted in making a home in their adopted country. In 1885 white residents of Humboldt County, Calif., rioted to expel their entire Chinese community ('Wipe Out the Plague Spots,' the local newspaper urged). It's one of many riots and murders that this book recounts in excruciating detail. After it was over, a local business directory proudly advertised Humboldt as 'the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.' But it wasn't true: Some Chinese people remained with the support of white residents; a jack-of-all-trades named Charley Moon, who survived the pogrom, was still living in Humboldt upon his death in 1943. The Chinese American population did not grow significantly until Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the old rules and made it possible for Chinese Americans to begin bringing over their relatives. But descendants of the earlier arrivals are among us today. Luo's book recounts the family story of Connie Young Yu, a historian from California. Her ancestors include a railroad worker from the 1860s, a woman who was separated from her children by immigration authorities in 1924 and a veteran of World War II. Although parts of Luo's story have been told in other books, such as Mae Ngai's 'The Chinese Question,' Erika Lee's 'The Making of Asian America' and Gordon H. Chang's 'Ghosts of Gold Mountain,' this account introduces many fascinating details. If there's any weakness to Luo's work, it's contained within that strength: He offers us so many characters that it can be hard to keep track, but readers who do are rewarded with a view on the full complexity of American immigration. *The New York Times
South China Morning Post
3 days ago
- General
- South China Morning Post
Book review: Chinese exclusion and mistreatment in 19th and 20th century America explored
The history of Chinese immigrants in America has always been about much more than one ethnic group. Advertisement As Michael Luo's Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America shows, understanding America's efforts to keep Chinese labourers out, and the violence enacted against those who got in, is essential to understanding the evolution of America's immigration system as we know it today. That is because restrictions against Chinese immigrants represented the first major flex in the modern era of the US federal government's power to control its borders. Chinese labourers were the first group to be barred from the entire country based on national origin, and lawsuits involving this group were often major tests of constitutional liberties – most notably the Supreme Court case of Wong Kim Ark in 1898, which established the right to birthright citizenship. Wong Kim Ark was born in California in 1873 to Chinese parents. After Wong was denied re-entry into the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that he was a US citizen by virtue of birth. Photo: SCMPost Time and time again, the treatment of this minority group served as a test of America's ability to live up to its own ideals of equality.
San Francisco Chronicle
4 days ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Book Review: Michael Luo tells the harrowing story of Chinese exclusion in America
The history of Chinese immigrants in America has always been about much more than one particular ethnic group. As Michael Luo's 'Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America' demonstrates, understanding America's efforts to keep Chinese laborers out, and the violence enacted against those who stayed in, is essential to understanding the evolution of America's immigration system as we know it today. That's because restrictions against Chinese immigrants represented the first major flex in the modern era of the federal government's power to control its borders. Chinese laborers were the first group to be barred from the entire country based on national origin, and lawsuits involving this group were often major tests of constitutional liberties — most notably the Supreme Court case of Wong Kim Ark in 1898, which established the right to birthright citizenship. Time and time again, the treatment of this minority group served as a test of America's ability to live up to its own ideals of equality. As Massachusetts Sen. George Frisbie Hoar noted when he spoke out against the exclusionary legislation of the 1880s: 'We go boasting of our democracy, and our superiority, and our strength. The flag bears the stars of hope to all nations. A hundred thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed.... The self-evident truth becomes a self-evident lie.' Luo's book covers over a century of history, from the 1840s to 1965. Immigration from China was largely unfettered at first, and Chinese laborers were essential to building the transcontinental railroad system — a truly epic part of the story, with thrilling descriptions of how men dangled in baskets off 2,000-foot precipices and set off charges that blasted open whole mountains. One witness wrote: 'When the debris had ceased to fall, the echoes were still reporting among the distant hills.' However, unemployment crises in the 1870s led white workers to jump on Chinese labor as the ultimate economic scapegoat. Chinese workers faced near-constant hate and harassment, ranging from the daily humiliation of stone-throwing children to outright massacres by angry mobs. Luo spends chapter after chapter meticulously documenting the disturbing details of 19th-century pogroms and race riots against Chinese communities in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and Seattle. Despite the ugly violence, Luo also takes care to document the actions of good men and women who stood up to the mob. Take Charles Andrew Huntington, a 73-year-old reverend in Eureka, California, who helped stop a massacre against Chinese residents in 1885. He lectured an enraged crowd: 'If Chinamen have no character, white men ought to have some.' Fanatics still ran every Chinese person out of town. A Chinese Christian, Charley Way Lum, had stopped by Huntington's house to pray before he left, when men burst in and put a rope around his neck. Another minister, C.E. Rich, intervened: 'If you hang him, you'll hang him over my dead body.' Lum escaped on a ship to San Francisco. Anti-Chinese sentiment enjoyed widespread popularity among both parties and played a major role in national politics, as it was considered key to winning the electoral votes of the West Coast. Starting with the Page Act of 1875, Congress started passing Chinese exclusion laws that grew more draconian every year. The Page Act targeted Chinese women, several years earlier than Chinese men, due to the widespread prejudice that most of them were sex workers. Anti-Chinese fervor culminated in the 1892 Geary Act, which required every Chinese person in the U.S. to register with the government or be deported. Immigration restrictions began to ease only when China became an ally in World War II – showing how much the vagaries of the shifting geopolitical winds can blow back on people at home. One shortcoming of the book is that Luo devotes so many pages to documenting what was done to Chinese immigrants that there's comparatively little time spent on what they did for themselves, on who they were as individuals beyond victimhood. A few compelling portraits do stand out: men like Yung Wing, an avid football player and Yale graduate who devoted his life to helping boys from China receive a Western education; Joseph Tape, who fought for his daughter's right to enter public school in San Francisco; and Mamie Louise Leung of Los Angeles, the first Asian-American reporter to work at a major newspaper. The fact that Chinese-Americans remained in the United States at all, despite widespread prejudice and the whole force of federal immigration law working to keep them out at every turn, speaks to the incredible tenacity of the community. One anecdote encapsulates this determined spirit: a Chinese coal miner, Lao Chung, was shot during an 1885 attack in Rock Springs, Wyoming. He survived and continued working for decades, the bullet still lodged in his back. — ___
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Book Review: Michael Luo tells the harrowing story of Chinese exclusion in America
The history of Chinese immigrants in America has always been about much more than one particular ethnic group. As Michael Luo's 'Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America' demonstrates, understanding America's efforts to keep Chinese laborers out, and the violence enacted against those who stayed in, is essential to understanding the evolution of America's immigration system as we know it today. That's because restrictions against Chinese immigrants represented the first major flex in the modern era of the federal government's power to control its borders. Chinese laborers were the first group to be barred from the entire country based on national origin, and lawsuits involving this group were often major tests of constitutional liberties — most notably the Supreme Court case of Wong Kim Ark in 1898, which established the right to birthright citizenship. Time and time again, the treatment of this minority group served as a test of America's ability to live up to its own ideals of equality. As Massachusetts Sen. George Frisbie Hoar noted when he spoke out against the exclusionary legislation of the 1880s: 'We go boasting of our democracy, and our superiority, and our strength. The flag bears the stars of hope to all nations. A hundred thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed.... The self-evident truth becomes a self-evident lie.' Luo's book covers over a century of history, from the 1840s to 1965. Immigration from China was largely unfettered at first, and Chinese laborers were essential to building the transcontinental railroad system — a truly epic part of the story, with thrilling descriptions of how men dangled in baskets off 2,000-foot precipices and set off charges that blasted open whole mountains. One witness wrote: 'When the debris had ceased to fall, the echoes were still reporting among the distant hills.' However, unemployment crises in the 1870s led white workers to jump on Chinese labor as the ultimate economic scapegoat. Chinese workers faced near-constant hate and harassment, ranging from the daily humiliation of stone-throwing children to outright massacres by angry mobs. Luo spends chapter after chapter meticulously documenting the disturbing details of 19th-century pogroms and race riots against Chinese communities in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and Seattle. Despite the ugly violence, Luo also takes care to document the actions of good men and women who stood up to the mob. Take Charles Andrew Huntington, a 73-year-old reverend in Eureka, California, who helped stop a massacre against Chinese residents in 1885. He lectured an enraged crowd: 'If Chinamen have no character, white men ought to have some.' Fanatics still ran every Chinese person out of town. A Chinese Christian, Charley Way Lum, had stopped by Huntington's house to pray before he left, when men burst in and put a rope around his neck. Another minister, C.E. Rich, intervened: 'If you hang him, you'll hang him over my dead body.' Lum escaped on a ship to San Francisco. Anti-Chinese sentiment enjoyed widespread popularity among both parties and played a major role in national politics, as it was considered key to winning the electoral votes of the West Coast. Starting with the Page Act of 1875, Congress started passing Chinese exclusion laws that grew more draconian every year. The Page Act targeted Chinese women, several years earlier than Chinese men, due to the widespread prejudice that most of them were sex workers. Anti-Chinese fervor culminated in the 1892 Geary Act, which required every Chinese person in the U.S. to register with the government or be deported. Immigration restrictions began to ease only when China became an ally in World War II – showing how much the vagaries of the shifting geopolitical winds can blow back on people at home. One shortcoming of the book is that Luo devotes so many pages to documenting what was done to Chinese immigrants that there's comparatively little time spent on what they did for themselves, on who they were as individuals beyond victimhood. A few compelling portraits do stand out: men like Yung Wing, an avid football player and Yale graduate who devoted his life to helping boys from China receive a Western education; Joseph Tape, who fought for his daughter's right to enter public school in San Francisco; and Mamie Louise Leung of Los Angeles, the first Asian-American reporter to work at a major newspaper. The fact that Chinese-Americans remained in the United States at all, despite widespread prejudice and the whole force of federal immigration law working to keep them out at every turn, speaks to the incredible tenacity of the community. One anecdote encapsulates this determined spirit: a Chinese coal miner, Lao Chung, was shot during an 1885 attack in Rock Springs, Wyoming. He survived and continued working for decades, the bullet still lodged in his back. — Luo was a national writer at The Associated Press from 2001-03 but has not met the reviewer, who joined in 2022. ___ AP book reviews:
Winnipeg Free Press
4 days ago
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Book Review: Michael Luo tells the harrowing story of Chinese exclusion in America
The history of Chinese immigrants in America has always been about much more than one particular ethnic group. As Michael Luo's 'Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America' demonstrates, understanding America's efforts to keep Chinese laborers out, and the violence enacted against those who stayed in, is essential to understanding the evolution of America's immigration system as we know it today. That's because restrictions against Chinese immigrants represented the first major flex in the modern era of the federal government's power to control its borders. Chinese laborers were the first group to be barred from the entire country based on national origin, and lawsuits involving this group were often major tests of constitutional liberties — most notably the Supreme Court case of Wong Kim Ark in 1898, which established the right to birthright citizenship. Time and time again, the treatment of this minority group served as a test of America's ability to live up to its own ideals of equality. As Massachusetts Sen. George Frisbie Hoar noted when he spoke out against the exclusionary legislation of the 1880s: 'We go boasting of our democracy, and our superiority, and our strength. The flag bears the stars of hope to all nations. A hundred thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed…. The self-evident truth becomes a self-evident lie.' Luo's book covers over a century of history, from the 1840s to 1965. Immigration from China was largely unfettered at first, and Chinese laborers were essential to building the transcontinental railroad system — a truly epic part of the story, with thrilling descriptions of how men dangled in baskets off 2,000-foot precipices and set off charges that blasted open whole mountains. One witness wrote: 'When the debris had ceased to fall, the echoes were still reporting among the distant hills.' However, unemployment crises in the 1870s led white workers to jump on Chinese labor as the ultimate economic scapegoat. Chinese workers faced near-constant hate and harassment, ranging from the daily humiliation of stone-throwing children to outright massacres by angry mobs. Luo spends chapter after chapter meticulously documenting the disturbing details of 19th-century pogroms and race riots against Chinese communities in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and Seattle. Despite the ugly violence, Luo also takes care to document the actions of good men and women who stood up to the mob. Take Charles Andrew Huntington, a 73-year-old reverend in Eureka, California, who helped stop a massacre against Chinese residents in 1885. He lectured an enraged crowd: 'If Chinamen have no character, white men ought to have some.' Fanatics still ran every Chinese person out of town. A Chinese Christian, Charley Way Lum, had stopped by Huntington's house to pray before he left, when men burst in and put a rope around his neck. Another minister, C.E. Rich, intervened: 'If you hang him, you'll hang him over my dead body.' Lum escaped on a ship to San Francisco. Anti-Chinese sentiment enjoyed widespread popularity among both parties and played a major role in national politics, as it was considered key to winning the electoral votes of the West Coast. Starting with the Page Act of 1875, Congress started passing Chinese exclusion laws that grew more draconian every year. The Page Act targeted Chinese women, several years earlier than Chinese men, due to the widespread prejudice that most of them were sex workers. Anti-Chinese fervor culminated in the 1892 Geary Act, which required every Chinese person in the U.S. to register with the government or be deported. Immigration restrictions began to ease only when China became an ally in World War II – showing how much the vagaries of the shifting geopolitical winds can blow back on people at home. One shortcoming of the book is that Luo devotes so many pages to documenting what was done to Chinese immigrants that there's comparatively little time spent on what they did for themselves, on who they were as individuals beyond victimhood. A few compelling portraits do stand out: men like Yung Wing, an avid football player and Yale graduate who devoted his life to helping boys from China receive a Western education; Joseph Tape, who fought for his daughter's right to enter public school in San Francisco; and Mamie Louise Leung of Los Angeles, the first Asian-American reporter to work at a major newspaper. The fact that Chinese-Americans remained in the United States at all, despite widespread prejudice and the whole force of federal immigration law working to keep them out at every turn, speaks to the incredible tenacity of the community. One anecdote encapsulates this determined spirit: a Chinese coal miner, Lao Chung, was shot during an 1885 attack in Rock Springs, Wyoming. He survived and continued working for decades, the bullet still lodged in his back. — Luo was a national writer at The Associated Press from 2001-03 but has not met the reviewer, who joined in 2022. ___ AP book reviews:
