Curated by It’s That Part™ — Originally published by Faith and Proverbs on .
When I was still a child living in China, we called the Chinese immigrants in America “Gold Mountain Uncles.” When they returned to visit, they stayed in the best hotels and paid for elaborate dinners in large restaurants. To many of us back then, America was heaven. But when my family immigrated to the United States in 1999, I learned that reality was far from our imaginings.
Michael Luo, a journalist and editor of The New Yorker, begins his book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, with language that echoes the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning, the door was open” (1). For many Chinese immigrants, California was “a land of almost unfathomable natural resources, blessed with temperate climes and abundant bays and inlets” (1). And just like the land around the garden of Eden, there was gold. The gold brought people from different continents and cultures, making California the perfect testing ground for the American experiment in multiracial democracy.
Yet if California was Eden, it didn’t take long for the sin of racism to enter the scene. A small fraction of Chinese immigrants in the mid-19th century struck gold and became wealthy, but many more became miners, cooks, servants, and railroad workers. They were met with guile, discrimination, and violence. Luo offers a detailed account of their tragic experience.
America’s Sinful Racism
Unsurprisingly, the sin that plagued the American East Coast expanded to the West as people settled there. Luo writes, “The Chinese Question followed the Negro Question and coincided with the vanquishing of Reconstruction, the spread of Jim Crow, and the subjugation of Native peoples on the western frontier” (7).
In the book’s first half, Luo applies his journalistic craft to methodically record how local, lawless violence against the Chinese in the frontier culminated in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Vitriolic, xenophobic, and ignorant rhetoric about Chinese immigrants filled the halls of Congress and the pages of Luo’s book. “For the first time in history,” he notes, “the United States had closed its gates on a people based on their race” (204).
After the law passed, the treatment of Chinese immigrants took an even darker turn. The heart of Luo’s book lies in five chapters retelling how the racial majority across the nation used violence and legal ambiguity to expel the Chinese population from their cities, a blemish in our history that remains unknown to many.
Despite the violence and injustice, Chinese immigrants mined the gold, built the most treacherous stretch of America’s transcontinental railroad, and took on hard labor in frontier towns. But their contribution isn’t just the labor they provided. “They were protagonists in the story of America. They pressed their adopted homeland to live up to its stated ideals” (7).
Most notably, as a generation of native-born Chinese came of age, they began to insist on the rights enshrined in the Constitution. For example, in 1898, the San Francisco–born Wong Kim Ark won a Supreme Court case confirming that, because of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship of those born in the United States couldn’t be denied. Doing so, wrote Justice Horace Gray, would be “to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States” (368).
According to this line of reasoning, justice for the Chinese was worthwhile when injustice also threatened the status of white citizens. That’s a consistent theme throughout this book: a people group’s acceptability often depends heavily on their relationship with and assimilability to the racial majority.
Racism Today
Though Americans have been fighting for years to embody their nation’s ideals, racism still rears its ugly head. The idea for this book came to Luo in 2016, when a woman on a Manhattan street told him, “Go back to China!” He laments, “The precarity of the Asian American experience has never fully subsided. Throughout American history, we have been told to go back to where we came from” (9). If racism is among America’s earliest besetting sins, how does it still affect us today?
There are painful stories from a century of Chinese immigrants, but Luo’s narrative abruptly ends with the establishment of a new immigration regime in 1965. Readers are left to connect the stories in his book with today’s reality. They can find parallels between the expulsion of Chinese immigrants and the recent deportation of undocumented immigrants, or between the ambiguous status of native-born Chinese in the 1890s and the Dreamers today. Wong Kim Ark’s 1898 Supreme Court case will no doubt become the focal point of the birthright citizenship battle raging in the court right now.
It may seem like there’s truly nothing new under the sun, but much has changed. Racism against Asian Americans today has taken a more subtle form. As Luo admits, “Overt discrimination against Chinese and other Asian immigrants is no longer legally sanctioned, and violent expulsions of Chinese are a matter of history, but for many Asian Americans a sense of belonging remains elusive” (435). A sense of “psychic homelessness” is still palpable, but it manifests itself differently among various groups.
For example, Luo’s parents came to the United States in 1967 as graduate students from Taiwan. They were different from the uneducated laborers from southern China 160 years ago, or from the immigrants from northern China today, or from the many generations of native-born Chinese Americans. Chinese Americans have become the “model minority,” a problematic designation that the book only briefly addresses. As much as I appreciate Luo’s account, it’d be helpful to more thoroughly address current experiences with racism, rather than leaving readers to do it themselves.
Why Not More?
One bright spot shone through this book for me. Along with his critiques, Luo highlights the way some white Christians act toward their Chinese neighbors. Many taught them English, provided legal aid, shared the gospel with them, and even spoke up for them in Congress. As a Chinese-American pastor, I wish even more had joined the effort.
Wong Kim Ark’s 1898 Supreme Court case will no doubt become the focal point of the birthright citizenship battle raging in the court right now.
The stories Luo records come from the same century as Robert Morrison, Hudson Taylor, and the China Inland Mission. Western missionaries were being martyred in the Boxer Rebellion at the same time that Chinese laborers were being deported from California. Why were so many willing to venture overseas to save the souls of China, yet so few at home spoke up for their Chinese neighbors? How much have we changed since then? If one day America and China go to war and a new wave of racism washes over us, will my white brothers and sisters in Christ speak up for me?
Strangers in the Land is a sober reminder that Christians have the resources to overcome racism as long as we’re willing to be sure our behavior–in our homes and in the public square–aligns with our doctrine.
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Originally sourced via trusted media partner. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/strangers-land-exclusion-belonging/
