Confronting an uncomfortable chapter

Michael Luo’s Strangers in the Land (Doubleday, 560 pp.)is a daring and, at times, brutally honest narrative of Chinese immigration to America. It’s a story of exclusion, perseverance, and, ultimately, a painful and complicated sense of belonging. The veteran journalist fuses archival research with personal reflection, producing an urgent and humanizing historical work on race and immigration.

Luo begins by capturing a country at its founding moment: “In the beginning, the door was open.” But, as he notes, the openness was selective, and as tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived on America’s Pacific shores, that door began to slam shut. The Chinese were welcomed initially, even celebrated. Yet soon, they became targets of barbaric violence and explicit exclusion. Chinese newcomers were often portrayed as a “coolie race” and incapable of assimilating “with our people,” as Justice Stephen Field infamously ruled in 1889. Much to his credit, Luo refuses to let the Chinese be cast merely as victims. “They were protagonists in the story of America,” he writes, challenging readers to view their struggle not as a peripheral tale but as central to the nation’s identity. This framing is crucial: The Chinese did not just endure; they resisted, adapted, and, against unbelievable odds, shaped the country.

One of Luo’s greatest strengths lies in his sharp storytelling. He reconstructs the treacherous Pacific crossings, where shipmasters “stuffed the Chinese sojourners into overcrowded holds that lacked sanitation.” Food and water, he adds, “were usually meager.” He evokes the dusty mining camps where Chinese miners patiently scratched out earnings of “two or three dollars a day,” relegated to the most unforgiving claims that white prospectors had abandoned. He brings to life moments of communal solidarity, like when “three hundred of them had gathered at the Canton restaurant on Jackson Street” to organize and defend themselves. These scenes are full of tension and existential-like angst. On the occasion at Jackson Street, they appointed Selim E. Woodworth as their adviser. A former U.S. Navy officer and state senator, Woodworth was a rare ally who used his political influence to support Chinese immigrants during a time when few others would.

Luo also explores the larger political betrayals: the construction of exclusionary laws, the invention of a racial hierarchy that classified Chinese as neither black nor white, and the deeply hypocritical manipulation of America’s “free labor” ideology to justify Chinese exclusion. Luo writes: “They twisted the principle of ‘free labor,’ an ideology that took shape in response to slavery, into a weapon of racial oppression, condemning all Chinese as ‘coolie’ laborers.” The author rightly underscores that white workers were not passive tools of elite manipulation but often active participants in upholding racial hierarchies.

The analysis, however, leans heavily on present-day frameworks, sometimes projecting contemporary values onto a very different historical moment. Although America in the 19th century was deeply flawed, it was not uniquely so. Many nations were grappling with migration and identity amid the pressures of industrial change. Luo somewhat glosses over this fact. Moreover, his attempt to draw a direct line from the violence of the 1800s to modern-day America feels exaggerated. His portrayal of the United States today is simplistic, depicting a nation still gripped by the same hatreds, with insufficient focus on what has changed.

Nevertheless, Luo’s prose is both elegant and accessible. He writes with the heart of someone intimately aware of the stakes, yet, for the most part, maintains the discipline of a historian who refuses to embellish or overreach. His exploration of the “stranger” label, which was first imposed during the era of exclusion and still haunts some Asian Americans today, represents one of the book’s most resonant throughlines. Perhaps the book’s most compelling insight comes when Luo reminds us that, throughout American history, “we have been told to go back to where we came from.” That line distills the emotional weight of the book.

By tracing how exclusionary systems were built, legitimized, and enforced, Luo shows that these are not closed chapters. They are, for many, open wounds, resurfacing with each new wave of fear and economic anxiety. The book arrives at a rather sensitive time, with tensions between the U.S. and China escalating. While Strangers in the Land is not a work of geopolitics and does not attempt to be one, it may influence how readers interpret those tensions, either as a call for deeper historical understanding or, unintentionally, as reinforcement of the outsider narrative that some Asian Americans still struggle with. By forensically analyzing the foundational trauma of Chinese exclusion, Luo compels readers to confront the past instead of easily turning away or compartmentalizing it.

Strangers in the Land is well worth reading. It is a work that demands reflection not just on the past, but on the soul of America itself. Luo forces readers to confront uncomfortable truths—and in doing so, offers a deeply humane vision of what a genuine reckoning might look like. He gives too little attention to the progress America has made and at times paints the present with too broad a brush, but the historical narrative he unearths is fascinating. Strangers in the Land may overreach in parts, but it remains a compelling and necessary account of an overlooked chapter in American history.