Strangers in the Land
By
Michael Luo
Read by
Eric Yang
Release:
04/29/2025
Release:
07/08/2025
Runtime:
17h 21m
Runtime:
17h 21m
Quantity:
The violent, terrible history of Chinese exclusion and xenophobia is told with feeling and expansive research. Michael Luo’s excellent recovery of this vital story is critical in this difficult time.
Gordon H. Chang, Professor, Department of History and Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities, Stanford University, and author of Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad
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.
A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK | A NEW YORK TIMES NONFICTION BOOK TO READ THIS SPRING
"A story about aspiration and belonging that is as universal as it is profound.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing
"A gift to anyone interested in American history. I couldn't stop turning pages."—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown
"What history should be--richly detailed, authoritative, and compelling."—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon
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 from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people 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.
A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK | A NEW YORK TIMES NONFICTION BOOK TO READ THIS SPRING
"A story about aspiration and belonging that is as universal as it is profound.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing
"A gift to anyone interested in American history. I couldn't stop turning pages."—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown
"What history should be--richly detailed, authoritative, and compelling."—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon
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 from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people 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.
Release:
2025-04-29
2025-07-08
Runtime:
Runtime:
17h 21m
17h 21m
Format:
audio
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
1.2 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9798217066131
9798217288441
Praise