Michael Luo tells the harrowing story of Chinese exclusion in America

“Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America” by Michael Luo (Doubleday)

The history of Chinese immigrants in America is about far more than one ethnic group. As Michael Luo’s “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America” shows, the U.S. campaign to bar Chinese laborers – and the violence against those who remained—is key to understanding America’s immigration system today.

Restrictions against Chinese immigrants marked the first major exercise of federal border control. They were the first group banned based on national origin, and their legal battles tested constitutional liberties – most notably “United States v. Wong Kim Ark” in 1898, which secured the right to birthright citizenship.

Luo traces more than a century of history, from the 1840s to 1965. Early Chinese immigrants helped build the transcontinental railroad, performing breathtaking feats – dangling in baskets from cliffs to blast through rock. Yet by the 1870s, white laborers facing unemployment scapegoated them, unleashing decades of hate and harassment. Luo documents with chilling detail the pogroms and massacres in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and Seattle.

But he also highlights those who stood against the violence. In 1885, Reverend Charles Andrew Huntington of Eureka, California, tried to stop a lynching, declaring, “If Chinamen have no character, white men ought to have some.” Though his intervention failed to stop the town’s purge, another minister saved Charley Way Lum from a lynch mob that same night.

Anti-Chinese politics spanned both parties and shaped national policy. The Page Act of 1875 targeted Chinese women under the pretext they were sex workers. The Geary Act of 1892 required all Chinese people in the U.S. to register or face deportation. Only during World War II, when China became a U.S. ally, did restrictions begin to ease.

One weakness of the book is its heavy emphasis on victimization, leaving limited space for Chinese-American agency. Still, some compelling figures emerge: Yung Wing, a Yale graduate who promoted education; Joseph Tape, who fought for his daughter’s right to attend public school; and Mamie Louise Leung, the first Asian-American reporter at a major newspaper.

That Chinese-Americans endured, despite legal exclusion and violence, speaks to remarkable resilience. In one telling story, coal miner Lao Chung survived an 1885 shooting in Wyoming and worked for decades – with the bullet still lodged in his back. SHARON LURYE, MDT/AP