Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America - Softcover

Luo, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798217070114

Verlag: Random House Large Print Publishing, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

From New Yorker editor and writer Michael Luo, a vivid, urgent history of two centuries of Chinese exclusion and the birth of anti-Asian feeling in America.

In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act—a measure barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty years—Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as a people “residing apart by themselves.” They were, Field concluded, “strangers in the land.” Today, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, yet this label still hovers over Asian Americans.

In Strangers in the Land, Luo traces anti-Asian feeling in America to the first wave of immigrants from China in the mid-nineteenth-century: laborers who traveled to California in search of gold and railroad work. Their communities almost immediately faced mobs of white vigilantes who drove them from their workplaces and homes. In his rich, character-driven history, Luo tells stories like that of Denis Kearney, the sandlot demagogue who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement, and of activists who fought back, like Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar and newspaperman Wong Chin Foo.

After the halt on immigration in 1889, the Chinese-American community who remained struggled to survive and thrive on the margins of American life. In 1965, when LBJ's Immigration and Nationality Act forbade discrimination by national origin, America opened its doors wide to families like those of Luo's parents, but he finds that the centuries of exclusion of Chinese-Americans left a legacy: many Asians are still treated, and feel, like outsiders today. 

Strangers in the Land is a sweeping narrative of a forgotten chapter in American history, and a reminder that America’s present reflects its exclusionary past.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHAEL LUO is the editor of newyorker.com and writes regularly for the magazine on politics, media, and religion. He joined The New Yorker in 2016 as an investigations editor. Before that, he spent thirteen years at The New York Times, where he led a team of investigative reporters and was an editor on the newspaper’s race team. He is a recipient of a George Polk Award and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists. He is the son of Chinese-American immigrants.

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Chapter 1

Gold Mountain

Huie Kin grew up in Wing Ning, a tiny village of about seventy people, all from the same clan, tucked away in the hills of Taishan, an impoverished, mountainous county in the Pearl River Delta. At one end of the village was a bamboo grove; on the other was a fishpond; housewives gossiped at the communal well, near the entrance to the village. Huie’s house was a sturdy brick construction with a thatched roof. He lived in one room with his father and the family cow. His mother slept in the other room. They shared a compound with another family, separated by a courtyard. Because the space was so cramped, Huie’s two brothers stayed in the village shrine at night; his two sisters spent their nights at a home for unmarried girls. Rice fields surrounded the village. During harvest season, the men worked in the fields, while the women tended to the home. At the age of eleven, Huie started attending the village school but dropped out after a few years.

One day, a member of Huie’s clan returned from America with stories of gold found in riverbeds. Huie grew obsessed with traveling to Gold Mountain, as the faraway land was called. He and three cousins vowed to go to America together. To Huie’s surprise, his father readily agreed to their plan—he had also heard the tales of people who had returned from abroad with gold in their pockets. Huie’s father borrowed the money for his son’s passage from a wealthy neighbor, using their family farm as security on the loan. On a spring day in 1868, the cousins left their village before daybreak, each with just a bedroll and a bamboo basket carrying their belongings. Huie was in his early teens. His mother packed them biscuits for their journey. They caught a small boat to Hong Kong. While waiting for their ship to America to depart, Huie idled in Hong Kong, spending his days on the waterfront, where he saw his first Europeans, “strange people, with fiery hair and blue-grey eyes.” Finally, they set sail for America on a large ship with three heavy masts and billowing sails.

A vast majority of Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth century would originate from just four counties, the Siyi, in the western part of the Pearl River Delta: Taishan, where a quarter of the population would ultimately leave for overseas; Kaiping; Enping; and Xinhui. The inhabitants of the Four Counties were mostly farmers, though the land was hilly and rocky. The climate was temperate all year round. The mountains that surrounded the Siyi on three sides meant its people were isolated from the rest of the country. Why this parcel of China, no bigger than the state of Connecticut, drove so much emigration to America remains the subject of some debate. When the people of Siyi began making their way to America, it was a time of upheaval in their homeland. The population of Guangdong had surged in the first half of the nineteenth century, making land increasingly scarce. Political tumult was also roiling China. The worst unrest came from the Taiping Rebellion, which killed at least ten million people between 1851 and 1864. In Guangdong province, an insurgency by a secret society, who became known as the “red turbans,” and a savage conflict between the native Punti population and the Hakka, a minority group, contributed to the turmoil. Yet these explanations alone seem inadequate. Other regions of China experienced greater economic privations that did not lead to widespread migration. The timing and geography of the political disturbances do not correspond neatly with the exodus overseas. A decisive factor seems to have been that the inhabitants of the Pearl River Delta were unusually familiar with the West. Some of the earliest Chinese writings about the United States, dating back to the early nineteenth century, came from the region. Guangzhou, the provincial capital (known then as Canton), had a long history as an important trading port and was a frequent destination for American merchants and missionaries. Hong Kong, a hub of trade and commerce, was just a few days’ journey away by boat.

Most of the vessels crisscrossing the Pacific early in the gold rush were cargo ships that lacked passenger quarters. Shipmasters stuffed the Chinese sojourners into overcrowded holds that lacked sanitation; food and water were usually meager. In 1854, a ship arrived in San Francisco harbor with a hundred dead Chinese passengers, a fifth of those on board. One captain contracted to carry Chinese to America aboard his ship, the Santa Teresa, encountered an epic storm. He rushed to lower the sails and seal all the openings to the hold where the Chinese were confined, so that the ship would not sink if it capsized. The ship lay helpless to the waves and the wind. After several days of this, the storm began to subside. A terrible odor, screaming, and wailing came from belowdecks. “The Chinese were scared, thirsty and hungry from the ordeal of several days of living in an inferno of darkness and agony, not knowing where they were and what would happen to them,” an account later said. Several people had died. The crew commenced feeding the Chinese rice, a process that took several hours. The dead below the hatches were brought up by the Chinese themselves, and after a prayer was read, they were slid into the sea. “There can be no excuse before God or man for the terrible mortality which has occurred on some of the vessels containing Chinese passengers,” William Speer, a Presbyterian missionary who cared for many Chinese after they disembarked in San Francisco, later wrote. During Huie Kin’s trip, his eldest cousin, Huie Ngou, the leader of their band of travelers, suddenly became feverish and struggled to breathe. He passed out and later died; his body was wrapped in a sheet and lowered into the ocean. Huie and his other cousins stood for hours staring out into the inky blackness of the sea, overwhelmed by grief. When the fog lifted, on a cool September morning, and they finally sighted land, Huie later wrote that the feeling was indescribable: “To be actually at the ‘Golden Gate’ of the land of our dreams!”

The individual stories of the earliest Chinese arrivals in America have mostly slipped through historians’ grasps. In 1878, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle set out to investigate how the “Mongolian octopus developed and fastened its tentacles upon the city.” The reporter’s first stop was the offices of the Sam Yup Company, one of the mutual aid associations that looked after the interests of Chinese immigrants, on Dupont Street, in the city’s Chinese quarter. (Sam Yup is the Cantonese romanization for Sanyi, the three counties that surround Guangzhou.) Interviews with an official there who spoke good English, as well as other “leading Chinamen,” yielded the account of the merchant Chum Ming, who they said had come to America in 1847.

On February 2, 1848, a pioneering merchant named Charles V. Gillespie arrived in San Francisco aboard the American brigantine Eagle. Several years earlier, in 1841, Gillespie had become the first American resident in Hong Kong. He traveled frequently between Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau, and had made a trip to California the year before to sell Chinese goods. On this trip, he brought with him a cargo of silk handkerchiefs, velvet slippers, rhubarb, and tea. Two Chinese men and one woman accompanied Gillespie. He later described them as “the first Chinese who came here.” After the discovery of gold, the two men went off to the mines; Gillespie himself became a gold dealer, choosing to remain in America. The Chinese woman, who went by the name Maria Seise, stayed on as a servant with his family for more than thirty years, joining the Trinity Episcopal Church and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Large Print Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798217070114
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 890
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland