Strangers in the Land

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9798217070114 Author(s): Michael Luo Format: Paperback Year: 2025 Publisher: Diversified Publishing Pages: 928

Description: From New Yorker editor and writer Michael Luo, a vivid, urgent history of two centuries of Chinese exclusion and the birth of anti-Asian feeling in America.In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion ActA?a measure barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty yearsA?Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as a people A?residing apart by themselves.A? They were, Field concluded, A?strangers in the land.A? Today, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, yet this label still hovers over Asian Americans.In Strangers in the Land, Luo traces anti-Asian feeling in America to the first wave of immigrants from China in the mid-nineteenth-century: laborers who traveled to California in search of gold and railroad work. Their communities almost immediately faced mobs of white vigilantes who drove them from their workplaces and homes. In his rich, character-driven history, Luo tells stories like that of Denis Kearney, the sandlot demagogue who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement, and of activists who fought back, like Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar and newspaperman Wong Chin Foo.After the halt on immigration in 1889, the Chinese-American community who remained struggled to survive and thrive on the margins of American life. In 1965, when LBJ's Immigration and Nationality Act forbade discrimination by national origin, America opened its doors wide to families like those of Luo's parents, but he finds that the centuries of exclusion of Chinese-Americans left a legacy: many Asians are still treated, and feel, like outsiders today.A‚ Strangers in the Land is a sweeping narrative of a forgotten chapter in American history, and a reminder that AmericaA?s present reflects its exclusionary pas