In recent years, there’s been a stark uptick in the level of violence and hate crimes that Asian Americans have experienced, but the “precarity of the Asian American experience is not new,” Michael Luo tells David Remnick. Luo is a longtime New Yorker editor, and the author of a new book about the Chinese American experience. He looks at how tensions over labor—with native-born workers often blaming immigrants for their exploitation by business interests—intersected with racial and religious prejudice, culminating in episodes of extraordinary violence and laws that denied immigrants civil rights and excluded new arrivals from Asia. “The way politicians, craven politicians, talk about immigrants today could be just torn from the nineteenth century,” he points out. “I do think that the ‘stranger’ label is still there.” But Luo also uncovers the extraordinary support of Chinese Americans from Frederick Douglass, who argued extensively for the immigrants’ political participation and civil rights. “Asian American history is American history,” Luo says. “I want all the dads who are reading about World War Two, . . . who are interested in Civil War literature, to read about this different racial conflagration.” Luo’s book is “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.”
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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.
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