A Historical Epic of the Chinese in America
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What role did Frederick Douglass play in advocating for Chinese Americans?
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Michael Luo is an executive editor at The New Yorker, and his background is investigative reporting. He's a journalist steeped in the art of prying out secrets that someone is trying to keep hidden. But his new book takes a turn into history, into the past, in particular, the complicated history of Chinese immigration to America. Michael's book is called Strangers in the Land, Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Now, my grandparents were... Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and had a very typical late 19th century path to Ellis Island, Lower East Side, and onward and onward. And it wasn't until I read Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers where I learned anything about this background.
My grandparents never talked about it, which was, I think, pretty typical. You grew up in a Chinese-American household. was immigration and, as it were, the old country ever talked about?
Not much. Actually, that's a great question. For this book, I had a chance to sit down and talk to my parents. And the book spans nearly 200 years and goes back really to the middle of the 19th century and this wave of Chinese migration that preceded my parents. My parents came post-1965. They were born in mainland China, fled to Taiwan when the communists came, and came to the United States for graduate school. And so their migration was a different migration than the heart of my book. But this history relates to their history. And this post-1965 migration kind of ends my book.
What made you decide to write this book, and what was the hole in the world that needed filling?
Yeah. The moment that set me on the path to this book is something that happened to me in the fall of 2016. It was in some ways a... a typical moment that many Asian Americans have experienced. Um, but it was also felt, it just left a really deep impression on me. It was a Sunday afternoon after church, a group of friends of ours, we were standing on a block on the Upper East Side and an annoyed woman, kind of just annoyed that we were blocking the sidewalk, brushed past and muttered, go back to China. And what happened in this particular moment was, um, I kind of abandoned my daughter in the stroller and went and ran after her. And we kind of had this exchange on the street where she yelled, go back to your effing country. And in the adrenaline-filled moment, I kind of sputtered, I was born in this country. And we went back inside the restaurant. I tweeted about the moment. And it turned into this viral thing. And I ended up writing an open letter to this woman. For the New York Times. For the New York Times.
And it kind of generated almost like a week of conversation about Asian Americans and their place in the kind of – racial milieu of the United States. This was the fall of 2016, just before Trumpism had been elected. You kind of felt this curtain of nativism descending. Obviously, it's been a lot has happened since then. So that moment, what I wrote about in that open letter was about this kind of sense of otherizing that a lot of Asian Americans have experienced, this kind of perpetual foreigner syndrome that a lot of people talk about. And I was thinking about my kids. And I was born in the United States, and my kids are two generations removed from my parents' immigrant experience.
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