New Yorker editor uncovers Chinese American history for the masses
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Michael Luo speaks onstage during the 2022 New Yorker Festival at SVA Theatre in New York City; The cover of his new book, "Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America." Photo: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for The New Yorker/Penguin Random House
A new book on Chinese American history shows how discriminatory exclusion laws, episodes of racial violence and civil rights fights reshaped the U.S. despite it all being unknown to most Americans.
Why it matters: Asian Americans today are among the nation's least visible groups — even as they are the country's fastest growing — and New Yorker executive editor Michael Luo wants to set the record straight about one segment who have always been here.
The big picture: Luo released on Tuesday "Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America" (Doubleday, $35), almost a decade after he wrote an open letter to a woman who told his family to "go back to China."
- He wrote the letter published in the New York Times in 2016 after a "well-dressed woman on (New York's) Upper East Side" yelled the racist insult at Luo, who was with his family and pushing a stroller, on a crowded street.
- Luo was born in Pittsburgh to a Taiwanese American family.
Luo tells Axios that the episode went viral on social media and later pushed him to tackle the book project as the pandemic hit, and he began thinking of all the Chinese Americans who came before him.
- At the New Yorker, he wrote about the history of violence against Chinese Americans following the 2021 mass shooting at several Atlanta-area spas targeting Asian Americans, and got more intrigued.
- "I'm an educated guy who is conscious of his identity as an Asian American. But this, this history going back in the 19th century, I actually wasn't very familiar with it."
Zoom in: Luo then took to the archives and investigated various episodes known among historians but usually overlooked by the general public.
- He learned about the nearly 200 communities in the American West that physically expelled their Chinese neighbors.
- He discovered more details about the 1871 Los Angeles Chinese massacre that claimed the lives of 17 Chinese men and boys.
- He drove into the epic civil rights fight by Chinese American Wong Kim Ark, whose 1898 Supreme Court case set the precedent for birthright citizenship in the U.S. and found tragic developments in Ark's later story.
Zoom out: Luo's "Strangers in the Land" follows a tradition of journalists of color writing strong, broad survey history books about communities of color that are popular and more available than hard-to-find academic versions.
- New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez in 2000 wrote "Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America," making the works of historians Rodolfo Acuña and Antonia Castañeda more accessible to a general public.
- Former "PBS News Hour" correspondent Ray Suarez, influenced by the research of other scholars, released "Latino Americans: The 500-Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation" in the 2010s.
Between the lines: "Strangers in the Land" packs much of what was previously covered by the likes of the late Ronald Takaki and Erika Lee into a powerful and engaging story about Chinese Americans that isn't taught in schools.
- Luo said he knew the task before him was to create a narrative that would reach readers coming out of the nation's anti-AAPI pandemic moment, and as the country sees rollbacks on diversity and inclusion.
- "The Chinese were not just victims. They were protagonists in my book and in the story of America. They pushed America to live up to its ideals," Luo said.
