Strangers in the land : exclusion, belonging, and the epic story of the Chinese in America / Michael Luo.
| Author/creator | Luo, Michael author. |
| Format | Book |
| Edition | First Doubleday hardcover edition. |
| Publication | New York : Doubleday, 2025. |
| Copyright Date | ©2025 |
| Description | x, 542 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits, facsimiles ; 25 cm |
| Subjects |
| Portion of title | Exclusion, belonging, and the epic story of the Chinese in America |
| Physical medium | monochrome |
| Physical medium | illustration |
| Physical medium | portrait |
| Physical medium | facsimile |
| Contents | Introduction -- Part I. Arrivals. Gold Mountain -- Indian, Negro, or Chinaman -- The great army and the iron road -- Colorblind -- Rope! More rope! -- Part II. Passages. The cauldron -- Lewd and immoral purposes -- Order of Caucasians -- The Chinese must go! -- The mission -- Part III. At the gates. The Chinese question -- Beyond debate -- The gatekeepers -- Transformations -- Part IV. Outcasts. Wipe out the plague spots -- White men, fall in -- Driven out -- Contagion -- No return -- Part V. Belonging. The resistance -- Native sons -- Ruin and rebirth -- The station -- Becoming Chinese American -- Confession -- Epilogue. |
| Abstract | "From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more-than-century-long struggle to belong. Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan--Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers, marking the first time the United States barred a people from entering the country based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy. Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country's history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late 1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals. At the book's heart is a shameful chapter of American history: the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country's first undocumented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled. In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as 'strangers in the land.' Only in 1965 did America's gates swing open to people like Luo's parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the 'stranger' label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer's style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story" -- Dust jacket. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 439-518) and index. |
| Issued in other form | Online version: Luo, Michael. Strangers in the land. New York : Doubleday, 2025 9780385548588 |
| Genre/form | Informational works. |
| Genre/form | Documents d'information. |
| LCCN | 2024026731 |
| ISBN | 9780385548571 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 0385548575 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | (electronic book) |
| Stock number | Random House Inc, Attn Order Entry 400 Hahn rd, Westminster, MD, USA, 21157 SAN 201-3975 |