CANR
WORK TITLE: Strangers in the Land
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1976, in Pittsburgh, PA; married; wife’s name Wenny; children: Madeleine, Vivienne.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A., 1998.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Associated Press, staff writer, worked for two years; Newsday, police reporter; Los Angeles Times, reporter; New York Times, investigative reporter and metropolitan desk reporter, beginning 2003; New Yorker, executive editor.
AWARDS:T.W. Wang Award for Excellence for his journalism, 2000; George Polk Award, 2002; Livingston Award, 2002.
WRITINGS
Contributor to Harvard Crimson.
SIDELIGHTS
Michael Luo is an American journalist who grew up in upstate New York and Michigan. He graduated from Harvard University and became a journalist. Luo has worked as a staff writer with the Associated Press, as a police reporter with Newsday, as a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, on the metropolitan desk with the New York Times, and as the executive editor with the New Yorker.
In an interview in Christianity Today, Luo talked with Paul Glader about his choice to pursue journalism as a career. Luo admitted: “I have always loved to read and write, so when I thought about potential careers in high school, being able to make a living writing was something I thought about. That’s why I joined the school newspaper at Harvard. I also wound up starting a magazine there.” Luo continued: “Having become a Christian in college, though, after growing up not religious, I tried to sort out my career plans with a kingdom perspective. For me, an influential verse has been, ‘What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ Journalism was a career in which I could pursue justice and mercy. Some people are drawn to journalism because of the words. I was more attracted to what the words could do.”
Luo published Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America in 2025. Luo was moved to write this book on the stories of some of the first Asian-born settlers to the United States after he was told by a random person on the streets of New York City that he and his family should go back to China. He further committed to writing the book during the surge of anti-Asian violence in the United States during the Covid-19 global pandemic, wishing to give a voice to early Asian immigrants. Luo drew from immigrant experiences in their own words, as well as archival research. While he reveals successes—such as the first Chinese Yale graduate back in 1854—he also shows the darker side of their experiences, such as the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles and a series of killings in 1885 in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Steve Inskeep remarked that “although parts of Luo’s story have been told in other books, such as Mae Ngai’s The Chinese Question, Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America, and Gordon H. Chang’s Ghosts of Gold Mountain, this account introduces many fascinating details. If there’s any weakness to Luo’s work, it’s contained within that strength: He offers us so many characters that it can be hard to keep track, but readers who do are rewarded with a view on the full complexity of American immigration.” Booklist contributor Brendan Driscoll commented that Luo’s “chronicle adds a much-needed Asian and Pacific voice to primarily Eurocentric narratives of nineteenth-century immigration.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor suggested that “readers interested in American history, not only Chinese American history, will savor these pages.” The same critic called the book “an estimable and vital work of history that honors the Chinese American experience.” In a review in Library Journal, Joshua Wallace said that Strangers in the Land comes “highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of Chinese Americans or immigration law in the United States.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2025, Brendan Driscoll, review of Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, p. 25.
Christianity Today, December 1, 2013, Paul Glader, “All the Faith That’s Fit to Print,” p. 50.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2025, review of review of Strangers in the Land.
Library Journal, March 1, 2025, Joshua Wallace, review of Strangers in the Land, p. 109.
New York Times Book Review, June 8, 2025, Steve Inskeep, review of Strangers in the Land, p. 22.
ONLINE
Museum of Chinese in America website, https://www.mocanyc.org/ (April 29, 2025), “MOCA Talks with Michael Luo.”
Michael Luo
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Appearance hide
Text
Small
Standard
Large
Width
Standard
Wide
Color (beta)
Automatic
Light
Dark
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michael Luo
羅明瀚
Luo in 2018
Born 1976 (age 48–49)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Alma mater Harvard University (BA)
Occupations
Journalistwritereditor
Notable work Strangers in the Land (2025)
Awards George Polk Award (2002) Livingston Award (2002)
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 羅明瀚
Simplified Chinese 罗明瀚
Transcriptions
Michael M. Luo (Chinese: 羅明瀚; born 1976)[1] is an American journalist currently serving as executive editor of The New Yorker and its website, newyorker.com.[2] Previously, he wrote for The New York Times as an investigative reporter.[3]
Early life and education
Luo was born into a Taiwanese American family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1976.[4][5] His parents were waishengren who had fled mainland China during the Great Retreat .[6] His father was raised in Tainan, Taiwan, and immigrated to the United States in 1967 to study for a doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Chicago. Luo's mother came to the U.S. to earn a master's degree in accounting at Western Illinois University. His paternal grandfather was a Kuomintang general in the National Revolutionary Army who disappeared in 1948. Their ancestral home was in Hunan.[7]
Luo spent his early childhood in upstate New York, and then attended high school in Michigan.[8] He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in government in 1998. As an undergraduate at Harvard College, he wrote for The Harvard Crimson.[9]
Career
Luo was a staff writer for two years for the Associated Press, where he wrote narrative feature stories, while also working at Newsday a police reporter on Long Island.[3][4] Luo reported for the Los Angeles Times before moving to The New York Times.[3] In 2002, Luo received a George Polk Award for Criminal Justice Reporting and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists "for a series of articles on three poor, [disabled] African Americans in Alabama who were in prison for killing a baby that probably never existed."[3] His story resulted in the release of two of the three prisoners, while the third remained in prison on a separate charge.[3] In 2000, Luo won a T.W. Wang Award for Excellence for his journalism on Chinese-American topics.[4]
In September 2003, Luo joined the metropolitan desk The New York Times.[3][4] According to the Times, Luo "has written about economics and the recession as a national correspondent; covered the 2008 presidential campaign and the 2010 midterm elections; and done stints in Washington and in the Baghdad bureau."[3] Luo wrote a piece in October 2016 that went viral about a woman who accosted him on the street for being a Chinese American.[10]
Luo went on to edit investigations at The New Yorker, and was eventually promoted to manage the magazine's entire digital presence.
On April 29, 2025, Luo released a debut nonfiction book, Strangers in the Land, about the history of the Chinese in America.[11]
Personal life
Luo resides on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his wife, Wenny. They have two daughters, Madeleine and Vivienne.[12]
En 中
Search
What can we help you find?
MOCA TALKS with Michael Luo – Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
Date: Tuesday, April 29 | Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Location: Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013
General Admission: $5 | Free for MOCA Members
VIP Admission: $35 – Includes an autographed book, reserved seating, early check-in at 6:30 PM, and access to a post-conversation reception
Reserve Tickets
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to a compelling conversation with Michael Luo, Executive Editor of The New Yorker and author of the highly anticipated book Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, April 29, 2025). In this deeply researched narrative, Luo explores the long and fraught history of Chinese immigrants in America, tracing their century-long struggle for belonging, the origins of anti-Asian hate, and the creation of the modern immigration surveillance system.
Drawing from over two dozen archives, Chinese-language sources, and interviews with descendants, Luo unveils an epic history of exclusion and resilience, placing Chinese American history within the broader context of America’s multiracial democracy. Written in the tradition of The Warmth of Other Suns, with the depth and nuance of a New Yorker writer, Strangers in the Land is a character-driven examination of race in America—one that situates Chinese American experiences alongside other pivotal moments in the nation’s post–Civil War history. At its core, this book is more than just the story of the Chinese in America; it is the story of all immigrant communities who have been seen as outsiders. It is the story of our diverse democracy.
Moderating this discussion is Min Jin Lee, acclaimed author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Lee is a recipient of the Manhae Prize for Literature and holds fiction fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
About Michael Luo
Michael Luo is an executive editor at The New Yorker and writes regularly for the magazine on politics, religion, and Asian American issues. Before joining the magazine in 2016, he spent thirteen years at The New York Times as a national correspondent, metro reporter, and investigative reporter and editor. He is a recipient of a George Polk Award and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists. He is a second-generation Chinese American and lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
About Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” Lee is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. From South Korea, Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Lee served as the Editor of Best American Short Stories 2023. Lee’s essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and The Times of London. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition.
About Strangers in the Land
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America is an urgent, deeply felt narrative history of a more than century-long struggle to belong; the creation of the modern immigration surveillance apparatus; and the origins of anti-Asian hate in America. Drawing on more than two dozen archives from across the country, Chinese-language sources, and interviews with descendants, Luo tells the story of a people who, beginning with the gold rush in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan, or Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed the Chinese arrivals, but as their numbers grew on the Pacific coast, sentiment towards them shifted, and horrific episodes of racial violence erupted. A prolonged economic downturn that commenced in the mid-1870s and idled legions of white working men helped create the conditions for what came next: federal legislation aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people from entering the country based on their race. Violence soon crested. Chinese residents were driven out from towns across the American West, a shameful and little-known chapter of American history.
Yet the Chinese in America persisted amidst suspicion, casual injustices, and legal persecution. The Chinese weren’t simply the victims of barbarous violence and repression. They were protagonists in the story of America. They continually pressed their adopted homeland to live up to its stated ideals. Finally, in 1965, lawmakers passed an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws and America’s gates swung open, enabling people like Luo’s own parents, who were born in mainland China and fled to Taiwan during the Communist takeover, to immigrate to this country. Nevertheless, even that legislation was made possible only because of proponents’ mistaken impression that it would do little to alter the nation’s demographics. Understanding this reality is necessary for understanding the cleavages over immigration that continue to inflame this country.
[Full Transcript of the Talk]
How the story began
Min Jin Lee: 2016, walk with me. Tell me how this story began.
Michael Luo: Okay, well. I mean, maybe people have heard this story. This was the fall of 2016, October, it was a Sunday after church, and some of us were on the sidewalk on the Upper East Side, and we were kind of deciding where to go to lunch. Actually, some of the folks who were with me were here today.
Min Jin Lee: You could raise your hand because you’re the primary witness.
Michael Luo: And I had my younger daughter in a stroller, and there was a woman who brushed past us who was aggravated that, We were in the way, and she just looked like a typical…
Min Jin Lee: Aggravated. I think that’s kind of mild.
Michael Luo: Yeah, she was a typical looked like a typical Upper East Side person, and just then, as she was brushing past, she muttered: “Go back to China.”
Min Jin Lee: No, I think there was an F word in there
Michael Luo: Yeah, that came after. So then, in the moment, even though it was after church, I did not turn the other cheek. My adrenaline was flowing, and I abandoned my daughter in the stroller and ran down the street
Min Jin Lee: That was you, yeah. Oh, it was you, sorry.
Michael Luo: Dad ran down the street to confront her, and in this sort of exchange, we were yelling back and forth. She’s like, “Go back to your f**king country.” And in the moment, I just didn’t know, you’re trying to think of a retort, and I said “I was born in this country” just like yelling.
Min Jin Lee: Good one. Good one.
Michael Luo: It was so pathetic. It was so pathetic.
Min Jin Lee: I would have ripped her a new one. Get ahead.
Michael Luo: This was the kind of heyday of Twitter, and so, afterwards in the restaurant, I was kind of shaking, and I kind of tweeted. I was kind of live-tweeting my feelings about it, and I kind of described what happened. I used the hashtag “this is 2016,” and it became this kind of viral moment that I should go back and look and see how many millions of retweets and quote tweets there were, but just to give you a sense of how big it was. Bill de Blasio tweeted back at me, and he said something along the lines of, I have to go back and go research it, but it was something along like “Mike, you’re welcome in New York anytime,” or something like that.
Min Jin Lee: Good One. [Laughs]
Michael Luo: He was trying to demonstrate his bona fides, and so anyway, so what happened was I was part of a team of people at the New York Times who wrote about race in America. And I was an editor, and so I didn’t write that usually, but some folks on the team like Rachel Swarns. I’m not sure if she’s here tonight.
Min Jin Lee: Are you here, Rachel?
Michael Luo: And Mark Lacy.
Min Jin Lee: Where’s Mark?
Michael Luo: I don’t know if Mark’s here. [Sees Mark both Min Jin Lee and Michael Luo point him out] Mark’s here.
Min Jin Lee: So this is his fault.
Michael Luo: Mark is the managing of the New York Times now and he was the deputy or national editor at the time and he just
encouraged me to write something about this and the innovative thing/the smart thing that Mark suggested was to write it as an open letter to this woman and so I wrote this very quickly [Min Jin Lee holds up letter]. Yes, it’s there. Are you going to have me read from it?
Min Jin Lee: Yes. No. You know what? I just want you to read six sentences.
Michael Luo: Right.
Min Jin Lee: Because it kind of broke me, and for those of you who haven’t read it in all these years, could you share this with us?
Michael Luo: So yeah. [Reading from letter] “Walking home later a pang of sadness welled up inside me. You had on a nice raincoat. Your iPhone was a 6 Plus. [Laughter] You could have been a fellow parent in one of my daughters’ schools. You seemed well normal, but you had these feelings in you, and the reality is so do a lot of people in this country right now. Maybe you don’t know this but the insults you hurled at my family get to the heart of the Asian-American experience. It’s this persistent sense of otherness that a lot of us struggle with every day, that no matter what we do, how successful we are, what friends we make, we don’t belong. We’re foreign. We’re not American.”
Min Jin Lee: Thank you, that’s 2016, and that piece became insanely viral.
Michael Luo: Yeah. So the other big thing that was really amazing was that we published this, and it was highly read, and the editors in the New York Times. The following day, there’s a page-one meeting where you decide what’s on the front page. I was actually at the page one meeting as an editor who’s kind of pitching stories for the front page, and there was a discussion about actually putting that open letter on the front page of the New York Times, and I kind of recused myself, you know. It’s your decision. It’s your call.
Min Jin Lee: Did you want that or not?
Michael Luo: Well, I didn’t even think we were going to publish it, actually, in the print newspaper. And so anyway, the thing was that they made the decision to publish on the front page. But we’re in a digital-first era. Mark is probably looking at me, and he’s like, “What is he talking about? Print.” But it was a big deal to publish this piece, this open letter, this form on the front page of the newspaper. And there was a week-long conversation that followed, where we had people send in videos of direct to camera videos of their own experiences with this. And so hundreds of people across the country sent in videos of and we turned that into a thing. It became such a big thing that I just remember I was at Barnes & Noble and I was with one of my daughters and somebody said to me “Are you Michael Luo?” [Laughter] And they had seen that video and it was like I was an actor [Laughter] and so what I say in the book and how I explain how this, obviously this is 2016, and so I didn’t start working on this book until 2021, but what happened was I was suddenly kind of the face of Asian America. I was on all these panels. I was on Morning Joe, I think. I was on TV and the thing about–
Min Jin Lee: You’re a model, you’re a model.
Michael Luo: Yeah, so the thing about it was, actually, I just remember he’s not here tonight. I don’t think so. But Galani Cobb, who is a historian by training staff writer at the New Yorker, became my colleague at the New Yorker because I went to the New Yorker a couple of weeks or a month or so later. He speaks in these full paragraphs, so it was a panel on race, and I went after Galani and Galani who’s a historian by training, so steeped in the history of the Black experience in the American Civil War–
Min Jin Lee: He’s also from Queens.
Michael Luo: Yes, and he was just so steeped in his articulation of the black experience in America from history, and I was just a guy who had this thing happen to me, and I just realized that I actually wasn’t, you know, deeply familiar with this history.
Min Jin Lee: What did you major in? I don’t actually know that.
Michael Luo: I was a government concentrator at Harvard, and I regret it. I wish I were a history major or history and literature, if I had to do it again. That’s what I would do. Anyways, so that was actually the seed of the book, but then it didn’t come into fruition until 2021.
Writing a History Book
Min Jin Lee: But you know, when a racist incident occurs to us, there are many responses, right? And you decided that you’re going to write a history book. It’s not that normal. Just saying. I was just curious because none of us have– Well, actually, I’ve read the book, it’s really good. I recommend it, but not that many people have had a chance to read it in full, and I really want you to. This book is so good, and I want you to read it in chapters because each chapter almost functions not just as a historical narrative or just thematically, even though the book is structured in a beautiful way, but it’s also really just stories about people; you got the killer New York Times review today, dude. I’m going to quote one sentence, “despite such obstacles [the obstacles being that it’s really difficult to find information about Asian-Americans] this specifically Luo [that’s him] finds an incredible number of characters. Although he describes a book as “the biography of the people,” it succeeds through its little biographies of individuals, a range of quirky and fascinating figures, both Chinese and white, who drive the narrative.” I think that if you can approach this book chapter by chapter, and I think there are 25 chapters.
Michael Luo: Maybe 26, I think the epilogue is 26.
Min Jin Lee: Okay, 26. Well, he wrote it.
Michael Luo: [Laughs] I just had to double-check. I just remember I didn’t like the lack of symmetry at the end.
Min Jin Lee: No, I have it, so that’s why I could tell. So if you look at each of the chapters, you will meet all these unbelievable characters. Throughout tonight, we don’t have very much time because I really want to make space for you to ask questions. I have tiny like two paragraph cuttings of the book in which you can hear the voices that Michael was able to pull from all these archives and I thought that it’s so meaningful, especially in this building, to hear the voices of the Chinese so I hope that when I ask the questions and I’m going to pass him the book and he’s going to read little sections like we can actually feel these ghosts around us who haunt us and who actually must be resisting the fact that we have had all these beautiful dreams to come to this country; all the betrayals that the Chinese have suffered, and yet the resistance of the Chinese to actually continue and become Americans.
Michael Luo: Yeah, I mean, I love that aspect of their review because that is exactly what I was trying to do and what I think one of the things I bring in the book, any time, as you said, is that there aren’t many voices. The way history works is that it’s powerful who write history and the powerless who are left out, and so it takes work to look for those voices, look for those characters. Anytime I sensed or saw, like in a newspaper article, a manuscript, an unpublished manuscript, an unpublished memoir, or anytime there was a sense of a chance to have a character, a protagonist, I just glommed on to that and tried to build around that. It was built around characters and scenes.
The Rock Springs Massacre
Min Jin Lee: This one tiny section, it’s going to be one paragraph, but this one sentence that I wanted you to hear because it really resonates, I think, with our current experience. Maybe you can set this up for us. Here you go. It’s right here. It’s one paragraph.
Michael Luo: Okay, you just want me to read where you–
Min Jin Lee: And then explain it to us.
Michael Luo: Okay, so they demanded to know, “What do you Chinese men mean by working here? You have no business working here.” Leo tried to reason with the men and offered to leave if they were in the wrong place. “We Chinese men do not want any trouble,” he said. “But the white miners set upon them.” A half dozen men surrounded Leo Carong. One miner bashed him in the head with a shovel, leaving a gash on Leo’s forehead that cut straight to the bone. Another man attacked Leo Lungming, leaving him with deep wounds in the head, chest, and right knee. So I need to explain that now?
Min Jin Lee: Yeah, because I want you to remember the lines: we Chinese men don’t want any trouble, right?
Michael Luo: Yeah.
Min Jin Lee: Right.
Michel Luo: Yeah, so this is drawn from the chapter about the Rock Springs Massacre, which is, you know, one of the most horrific acts of racial terror in American history. It was 28 Chinese miners who were killed by white miners, and the New Yorker excerpted this chapter. I’m really proud of the chapter because it’s such a seminal moment in history, and the thing about it is, there have been some books written about it, but no one’s really kind of told this as a story.
Min Jin Lee: So, tell us where Rock Springs is?
Michael Luo: So, Rock Springs is in Wyoming.
Min Jin Lee: Somebody got points over there. It’s Jennifer Lee, just got the answer. Yes, you are in Jeopardy. Okay. Go ahead.
Michael Luo: Yeah. Back then, it was a territory. It was the Wyoming territory, and it was a town really built by the railroad. As the railroad was heading across the country, at that point west, these kinds of towns would spring up along the way, and the thing that Rock Springs had was coal, and they really needed coal, and so these mines were dug, and this kind of town grew up. And the Chinese came as workers.
Who worked harder
Min Jin Lee: Well, you have these European miners, right? And then you have these Chinese miners brought in. I wonder who’s paid less. I wonder who worked harder.
Michael Luo: Yes, so the deal is actually complicated. So like this is the connection of American labor with the Chinese and with Chinese exclusion. There was unrest among the white laborers in Rock Springs, and they were upset. They wanted higher wages and and basically, before the massacre happened, several years before, there was a point when the white miners went on strike, and the company brought in Chinese miners, and then they were the ones who were mostly retained. Only a certain number of white miners were brought back. What happened in this particular moment is that it’s a little bit unclear whether this was an intentional act or –
Min Jin Lee: Intentional act by whom?
Michael Luo: By these white miners who set upon the Chinese miners. So what happened was there was a room, as they call it, underground, and these white miners came and what they claimed was that these Chinese miners were in the room that was properly theirs, so–
Min Jin Lee: Also, you get paid for how much coal you get out. So you want to be in a room in which you get the most amount of coal because you get paid more money. So you’re fighting for what has the most exploitative power
Michael Luo: Right.
Michael Luo: So, according to the white miners, these Chinese miners were doing this in this place that they were supposed to be. But there are these really eerie clues, including one that I found where there was a memoir written by a white miner who remembered the night before a miner came in and said to his cousin. Do you have a gun? And he gave him a gun. He’s like, you know, basically the tone of it was get ready for tomorrow because like we’re going to need you kind of thing and so that is kind of this clue that maybe it was actually a premeditated act.
Min Jin Lee: Well, I mean, I’m quoting you, and it says, “The minor spilled out onto the streets. A cry went up, ‘Vengeance on the Chinese.’” Where’s the ambiguity?
Michael Luo: Yeah, no. The question is whether it was a pre-planned attack or a–
Min Jin Lee: Vengeance on the Chinese.
Michael Luo: Yeah, So after this event, where they were set upon, there was this melee. The white miners walked out of the mine and then they gathered in this kind of union hall, a night of labor hall, and that’s where they decided to basically attack the Chinese corner
and burn it down.
Riots in Chinatown
Min Jin Lee: Yeah, I was so struck by this. It said, “The mob took a vote and decided that the Chinese residents would be expelled. A group of 75 armed men began making their way toward Chinatown. When they encountered a group of Chinese workers along the railroad tracks, the rioters fired wildly at them. The mob then halted just outside the Chinese quarter. A committee of three men delivered an ultimatum that residents had an hour to pack up their belongings. Barely a half hour had elapsed, however, when rioters invaded Chinatown.” I was wondering if you could read just this section here, and then it would end on the next page. It’s about a paragraph and a half.
Michael Luo: Okay. “The violence coursed through town like a river, drawing in men, women, and children. One female resident, whose home was near the plank bridge, pointed a revolver at the terrified Chinese men fleeing past her and fired three shots in quick succession, felling two of them. This was likely Mrs. Osborne, the owner of a laundry town, who was later celebrated for killing two Chinese men. Another woman who had an infant in her arms, but she still managed to knock down a Chinese man running by. When her baby wailed, she spanked him before turning to pummel the Chinese man some more. The rioters began setting fire to the buildings of the Chinese encampment. Dense black smoke billowed over the quarter. Frightened residents dashed outside with blankets covering their heads. The bodies of dead Chinese lay everywhere. Riders tossed corpses into the burning buildings. The smell of burning flesh was accurate. A gusting wind led to fears that the conflagration would spread to the rest of the town. Riders suspended their torch in the Chinese huts, but more than 40 homes burned to the ground. Miners usually stored the black powder they used in their homes. When the licking flames reached a crest, the sky would flash with a powerful explosion. A group of riers descended upon a dugout belonging to a laundryman, Ali, who had barricaded himself inside. The members of the mob fired through the window a single shot rang out from inside the building. He was armed. Attackers broke through the roof, and a brief scuffle followed. Afterward, Ali lay dead on the floor with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. A female rider stomped on his body. Another looted bundle of laundry he had laid out for delivery. Akun took shelter in a cellar. When he emerged at about 8:00 in the evening, several white men spotted him. When the men opened fire, Akun ran. In his panic, he dropped about $1,600 in gold that he had been carrying. He made his way to a railroad section east of a railroad section house east of town, where a white resident gave him bread and water and allowed him to rest before he started walking towards Evanston. Several Chinese residents approached the Reverend Timothy Thorway, who lived near Chinatown with his wife and two daughters. In the evenings, the Thoraways taught English to Chinese miners. The frightened Chinese residents asked if they could hide inside their home, but the family advised them that it wouldn’t be safe and sent them away. One minor named China Joe, who worked in the number three mine, hid in a large oven for three days before sneaking out in the middle of the night and fleeing to Green River. A Chinese clerk who worked in the company’s general store survived by hiding in the cellar for a week.”
Min Jin Lee: Wyoming. I believe 28 people were murdered. I believe that–
Michael Luo: It could be more.
Min Jin Lee: It could be more. That’s right, and 15 were injured. I read that 78 Chinese homes were burned down, resulting in property damage of about $150,000, which would be about $5 million in today’s dollars. Now, tell me what the judicial consequences were
because there were witnesses.
Michael Luo: Yeah, so the men were arrested, but it was basically kind of a sham. They stopped at a bar on the way to jail and basically no white residents would testify against their, you know, fellow neighbors.
Min Jin Lee: But tell us why that’s really important, because if you have Chinese testimony at that time, it’s inadmissible, right?
Michael Luo: That’s in California, which passed a law that Chinese testimony was inadmissible. The thing that happened here was actually, it’s a little bit unclear. It’s not clear if they generally tried to get Chinese witnesses. Later, the prosecutors said that one of the consoles was supposed to help them get Chinese witnesses, but the console said that he never heard from anybody, and so it doesn’t really look like they made a real effort. So they were acquitted very quickly, and actually it was the thoroughways that I read: they testified that they saw that the Chinese were setting fire to the buildings themselves, and this was kind of like a big kind of turning point in the grand jury proceedings, and so they basically–
Min Jin Lee: I believe that fire is called gaslighting.
Michael Luo: Yeah, so they were acquitted, and they were treated as kind of conquering heroes when they came back to town.
Stop Woke Act
Min Jin Lee: The reason why we’re dwelling on this thing that happened in 1885, right, and I would like to connect it with today in terms of, I don’t know if you guys know, about HB7, which is a law in Florida. It’s called the Stop Woke Act, and this kind of law is in about 20 different states right now in this country today, in which we are not allowed to teach or discuss things that would make the white majority uncomfortable in which it might perpetuate the idea that people could be inherently racist. It has recently been challenged. It has gone up to the 11th Circuit Court, and the federal courts have said parts of this are unconstitutional for higher education as well as for certain employers because it would violate the First Amendment. However, for secondary schools, high school, elementary school, and junior high schools, this still applies, and educators have to navigate how do we teach this history that happened in 1885 to today. I was just curious, something terrible happened to you in front of your family. Everybody in this room at some point has encountered these kinds of stupid remarks. We have eaten our bitterness.
Michael Luo: Yeah.
Min Jin Lee: And yet, it may not be able to be shared. I was curious. Like you have done the homework. You have created a beautiful work of literature. It should be shared. What do you think?
Michael Luo: I mean, actually, the New York Times’s book review, there’s a line that reviews. I think he meant it as a compliment, he said. He kind of noted my kind of tone in the book and said it was not written as an anti-woke polemic and also not sanitizing history. I take that as a compliment because I kind of quibble a little bit with the idea of an anti-woke polemic, so sometimes journalists who write history are maybe criticized or knocked by historians because they’re like, “Oh, he’s not making an argument. He’s telling a story.” I think Rick Atinson, great former Washington Post journalist, who just came out with a new book on the American Revolution, was asked about this recently, and he said, I like that. It’s true. I tell stories. I think in the book, I am trying to tell a story. But the arc of the book, or the thing about it, is I’m not the first person to have written a Chinese American history. The most comparable book that probably comes to mind is Irish Chang’s book The Chinese in America, which was published around 2000 or 2001. Extraordinary book. I had actually never read it before I wrote my book.
Min Jin Lee: Her Nanking Massacre book is also brilliant.
Michael Luo: It’s incredible. So I actually, I mean, as an aside, encourage folks to read it, and I was a little puzzled why it wasn’t more widely read; in one, it could be because soon after she wrote the book, she committed suicide. It’s like this incredible, tragic story. It’s a little bit of a mystery. Some people speculate that all the kinds of ugly stuff that she was immersed in writing about, from the Nanking massacre to the experience of the Chinese in America, might have kind of been too much. But Irish Chang’s book is more like a kind of larger overview of the Chinese in America. My elevator pitch of the book was that it’s a narrative history of Chinese exclusion. And I was trying to understand what happens when all these people from a distant land who look different and have a different religion arrive on American shores. And what happened on the West Coast in the 19th century was kind of almost unprecedented up to that point, an experiment in multi-racial democracy, had people from Black Americans, Indigenous people, Californios (they were the Mexican residents who became American citizens).
A country could do this to a people and kind of conclude you together that we’re going to exclude these people and kind of oppress these people. You know, the thing about it is, the answer race, is it economics, is it religion, is it human nature? The thing about it is I think it’s all of these things, and that’s why these kinds of bills are kind of silly.
Min Jin Lee: Well, they are silly and yet they’re incredibly popular. Over 20 states are trying to pass them, and they are targeting things that are true. You have almost 500 footnotes in this book. This book looks thick.
Michael Luo: It looks very thick because there are 40,000 words of endnotes.
Min Jin Lee: Right. The endnotes are just–
Michael Luo: So 60,000 words and 40,000 words of endnotes. Just keep that in mind. So it’s like a really fat part of it that’s that.
Min Jin Lee: And the chapters are really short. I do think that if you approach it, just reading a chapter at a time, it flies. Also, there’s so much that you don’t know in that level of detail. I did actually study Asian-American history when I was in college, and I knew about these things, but I thought that you had done so much great archival research, which made it so much more interesting and fun to read. I want to ask you what you think about this, and I know we have to open for questions, and I really want to hear from you. You guys are standing. Standing questions get priority.
Michael Luo: I will say on the readability thing, and maybe I’ll embarrass my dad, who’s here. The first person who read the entire book was my dad. I would go to my parents’ house every summer, and they live near Princeton. I had my book exist at that point in these printouts, and it’s just a pile of printouts. And one day, he just took the first chapter of the printout and started reading it. And then, he read the next one. And then the next one. And then he finished the whole book. English is not his language
Min Jin Lee: But he got a PhD here.
Michale Luo: He is a pioneer.
Min Jin Lee: That was a little sketch there, Mike.
Michael Luo: He is an engineer, but he read the whole book. That was the first time I knew that I had done something right in the way that I wrote the book and structured it
Min Jin Lee: See, the filial roots are so strong.
Family Association
Min Jin Lee: Well, I’m proud of you, too, Mike. So, this is something that Asian-Americans say about our history. They often say that it’s a sad history, and they don’t want to be sad. They don’t want to be depressed. It’s interesting that you are saying all these things because, you know, do kids want to hear about the Rock Springs massacre? Do they want to hear about the Los Angeles lynchings? The largest mass lynchings in America happened to the Chinese. I was recently at the legacy sites in Alabama and there were actually some mentions of this. However, I think when we think of lynchings, we think about the terrible persecution that enslaved people and post-Jim Crow blacks in this country have suffered. But the mass lynching in Los Angeles is insane and the chapter in this is amazing. However, it’s not just sad. It’s not just about being hated. For me, I thought this was incredible because there were so many things that the Chinese have done to endure it and yet become empowered. So, can we talk a little bit about Wong Kim Ark, because this law that basically Huiguan–am I saying that right? This is like family association, is it?
Michael Luo: Oh yeah. Huiguan, yeah.
Min Jin Lee: Thank you. My Chinese is not so good. Huiguan actually supported this lawsuit and this law affects everybody, not just the Chinese. So, can you tell us about i?
Michael Luo: Yeah, so it’s birthright citizenship. In the 14th Amendment, it says that if you’re born, I can’t quote it exactly, in the United States of America and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, you’re a citizen. This was part of the 14th Amendment. Actually, it was another case called Lukeen Ali. It was like a teenage boy.
Min Jin Lee: No, but hang on. Tell us about this little boy. He was born in America, right? Kind of like Melania’s child. He was born in America.
Michael Luo: Well, so no. So there was another case of a Chinese boy that came before this. This one went all the way to the Supreme Court. Wong Kim Ark, I am proud of just the way that you’re able to kind of tweeze together a narrative of a life from just these scattered immigration documents that have aspects of his story in it. He was born in 1870. His dad was a merchant. They lived upstairs from their store that they had. He was born above that store. He went back to China a few times. He got married in China. Before he went back the last time before the test case that came about, he made sure to get some affidavits from people who remembered him.
Min Jin Lee: He had his papers together.
Michael Luo: Yeah. So, to attest that he was a natural-born American. And what happened was there was great interest at the time among certain people to test this principle of birthright citizenship. There was a guy named George Collins. He sounds like a little bit of a cook, but actually he was a very shrewd legal scholar who started writing these articles in legal reviews that made the case that this clause that if you’re born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, you’re an American citizen. He was trying to argue that Chinese, even if they were born in America, were not subject to the jurisdiction thereof because their parents were Chinese subjects, so he tried to make this case. There was some discussion, I think, at the time. The immigration was enforced by these customs inspectors and there was discussion and coordination with the attorney general of the United States at the time who agreed that they wanted to establish a test case for this. So it went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Min Jin Lee: It’s the law today.
Micahel Luo: Yeah, and then, the really interesting part of the decision, the justification for the decision. One of the things that was really of concern was that there were millions of natural-born white American, European immigrants, descendants of European immigrants who would be threatened if this was not upheld. That was beyond the pale. That’s part of the decision if you read that. And so anyways, the final thing I’ll say about Wong which is amazing, and I didn’t know this part, is that this didn’t end his trouble with immigration. Like, after a few years that he was the subject of one of the most famous Supreme Court decisions today, he was in actually working near in El Paso, Texas. He had crossed the border from Mexico and there was a Chinese inspector down there who was really zealous. There was real worry about people violating the exclusion law, crossing the border. They arrested Wong Kim Ark. They knew actually that he was the subject of this famous case, but they detained him for, I think, a week or so. They made him pay this $300 bond. And then even after that, his sons, who were American citizens because the children of American citizens, even if they’re born abroad, are American citizens. They were hassled and detained on Angel Island when they tried to come back in. One of them was sent back to China and was not able to enter the country. So it’s a pretty incredible saga and then he eventually returned to China and died in China.
Procedurality
Min Jin Lee: So, I really want to talk about this one word that comes up in Michael’s book, and it’s this word precarity. You wrote, “In examining the history of the Chinese in America, I’ve come to realize the precariousness of the Asian-American experience has never fully subsided. Throughout American history, we have been told to go back to where we came from. This precarity, and I was just wondering after having written this incredible tome, you’ve done all the research, you’ve told the stories, you’ve made it relatable to students, all of us, right? And where do you think this procarity lies for you now? Do you feel personally stronger? Do you feel like that act has transformed you? Do you feel like if you read this book, you’re going to feel like “Oh, I know when to fight. I know when not to fight.”
Michael Luo: Well, I think procarity is a good way to think about it because I think multiple things can be true about the Asian-American experience, you know, because the post-1965 immigration wave prioritized people with skills and people like my parents who came for graduate school. There are a lot of Asian-Americans, Chinese Americans, who are highly educated and professional and have enjoyed enormous success. That obscures other aspects of the Asian-American experience. The fact that Asian-Americans have the greatest level of income inequality of any other group in New York City.
Min Jin Lee: One out of four Asian-Americans are brother and sisters living in poverty in New York City.
Michale Luo: Yeah. Exactly.
Michael Luo: And the thing that I think procarity is a really useful word because it just helps you understand. I started working on it after the Atlanta spa attacks in the spring of 2021. I signed the contract for the book in the summer of 2021 and it came out from that moment. I probably still really viscerally remember that moment of what it was like to walk on the street as an Asian-American. That kind of fear that you had, and that moment has subsided, you know. It’s not exactly clear where we are right now, but that visceral fear has definitely subsided.
Min Jin Lee: You feel that it’s subsided.
Michael Luo: I mean that in that I remember when I go play tennis. I see a friend of mine here, Dino, with whom I play tennis at 9:00 at night on the Upper East Side. We played from 9 to 11:00 p.m. and during that period, I wasn’t sure if it was safe to go home. I texted my wife before I left the tennis bubble, just so she knows and I don’t do that anymore. That’s what I mean. But what is going on right now is there’s kind of this bipartisan balacosity about the threat posed by communist China, and you know, as my family fled communist China and went to Taiwan when the communists came. My grandfather on my father’s side was a Kuomintang. A general who was killed by the communists disappeared, to a certain degree, there, I understand some of the worry about the Chinese threat of their military-economic juggernaut.
Min Jin Lee: There’s also 1.3 billion Chinese.
Michael Luo: Yeah, but every time that you hear this kind of Democrat Republican lawmakers just railing about communist China, that just kind of adds to the tinder of racial suspicion. I feel that. And so the procarity is just a good word because you might feel comfortable, you might feel like this bigotry and violence of the 19th century doesn’t apply to you any longer. But that sense of belonging, you know, that aligns with what I wrote in that open letter was I wondered whether my kids, who were born in the US, don’t speak Chinese particularly well, sadly. They’re working on it.
Min Jin Lee: He just totally embarrassed you in front of all these people. I protest.
Michael Luo: Two generations removed from my parents’ immigrant experience, if they would ever feel they belonged. That was the thing that I wrote about in that letter and that is the question I think that still persists today for Asian-Americans.
Michael Luo strolls through midtown Manhattan to a sushi lunch, musing about his latest apartment renovations and the New York Knicks. But when conversation turns to his work these days--reporting for The New York Times on loopholes in current gun laws--Luo turns serious.
"My wife would much prefer it if I covered something else," says Luo. "It has certainly led to some apprehension." While working on a story about mental illness and guns, he had to notify his editor where he was going and when he left--similar to his reporting protocols while briefly working in The New York Times's Baghdad bureau.
Yet it's this kind of serious journalism that has earned Luo, 37, the George Polk Award for criminal justice reporting, the Livingston Award for Young Journalists while at the Associated Press, and a job at The New York Times, where he has worked since 2003. He has covered everything from the last two presidential campaigns to Hurricane Katrina to the war in Iraq. Recently, Luo has zeroed in on the gun industry and the wide availability of firearms-earning him a Pulitzer nomination and frequent spots on the paper's front page.
Luo became a Christian as an undergraduate at Harvard University, and today attends Redeemer Presbyterian with his wife and daughter. He recently spoke with Paul Glacier, a journalism professor at The Kings College and former staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, about his faith and his work
Whet do fellow Christians most often misunderstand about journalism, particularly news reporting?
Their misunderstandings [aren't] so different from the misunderstandings that non-Christians have. Newspapers, including The New York Times, haven't done the best job in this period of profound skepticism of explaining what we do. It's just assumed that people know basic principles, like the fact that the editorial page and the news department are separate, or that opinion columnists are different from reporters. In a period of such political polarization, [explaining ourselves] is essential.
Many Christians consider The New York Times hostile toward evangelical faith, is that a fair assessment?
Most evangelicals--and non-evangelicals--would be surprised by the lengths reporters and editors go to fairly report the news. We agonize almost daily over individual sentences, even phrases, in articles and headlines, web summary lines and captions, to make sure they are fair and unbiased. Do we always succeed? No, but the effort is almost always there.
On the other hand, sometimes you can't know what you don't know. A lot of reporters and editors at The Times don't know any evangelicals, have never set foot in a church, and have world views that are far removed from evangelicals'.... They might not know that evangelical is a theological orientation, not necessarily a political one; that there's a difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism; that plenty of evangelicals do not believe the earth was created in six 24-hour days; that not all evangelicals believe in the Rapture. Ignorance can lead to inaccurate and misleading characterizations. And yes, it can lead to bias seeping through in the way Christians are depicted.
How to fix this? In many ways, this is a newsroom diversity issue.... Back in 2005, the paper convened an internal committee to examine ways we could improve our credibility among readers. We addressed our blind spot on religion in a final report ... which suggested we look to hire talented journalists "who happen to have military experience, who know rural America firsthand, who are at home in different faiths."
As a reporter who publicly identifies as a Christian, ere you alone at The Times?
The Times is like a lot of other cosmopolitan institutions: filled with highly educated people, many of whom went to elite colleges. Often, there is a dearth of Christians in these types of places, and The Times is no exception. I don't know about the faiths of all of my colleagues, but I'm definitely not alone. I know of a handful of Christians in the newsroom, people whose faith looks like mine, including people who would really surprise outsiders.
Why did you pursue reporting and journalism?
I have always loved to read and write, so when I thought about potential careers in high school, being able to make a living writing was something I thought about. That's why I joined the school newspaper at Harvard. I also wound up starting a magazine there.
Having become a Christian in college, though, after growing up not religious, I tried to sort out my career plans with a kingdom perspective. For me, an influential verse has been, "What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." Journalism was a career in which I could pursue justice and mercy. Some people are drawn to journalism because of the words. I was more attracted to what the words could do.
How does your faith affect your work?
First, all reporters bring their backgrounds to their jobs, which helps them to cover certain stories better than others....I did cover the religion beat for a year at The Times, but even when I haven't, I've always stumbled upon stories related to faith. When I was covering the war in Iraq, for example, I wrote about the plight of Iraqi Christians; when I covered the 2008 presidential campaign, I wrote about Hillary Clinton's faith.
Being a Christian also gives me a certain fluency. It has helped me build rapport with all manner of people, from the mother of a murder victim to people attending the Values Voter Summit.
Most important, though, my faith has animated why I do what I do. Believing I could make a difference has driven the stories and beats I've sought, whether a story about three poor black, mentally handicapped people imprisoned in Alabama for killing a baby who probably never existed [the story that eventually won the George Polk Award and Livingston Award for Young Journalists], or writing about the human impact of the economic recession, which I did for two years at The Times.
Your recent investigative stories have focused on problems and loopholes with existing gun regulations and policies. Why did you start writing about these issues?
My gun-related investigative stories this year actually trace back to 2011, when I moved over from the national desk to the investigations unit. I had helped cover the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, among others, as a national correspondent in Tucson. I started asking public health researchers basic questions about what we know about the impact of high-capacity magazines, or background checks, or even whether communities with fewer guns were safer.
That was when I learned funding for research into these kinds of questions had slowed to a trickle in the mid-1990s, largely because of the clout of the National Rifle Association. That became a front-page article, which led to other gun-related pieces.
I was poking around in gun-related enterprise stories when I was asked to move over to investigations. My new bosses asked me if I had any ideas, and I mentioned to them that I had been exploring how a growing number of states were allowing people with a history of mental illness to petition to have their gun rights restored. That struck me as incredibly interesting and led to my first lengthy gun-related investigative piece. I went on to do several more, producing a series that was nominated by the paper for the Pulitzer Prize.
After the 2012 election, I had spent two months immersed in a project on poverty, when the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, happened. My bosses asked me to go back to doing investigative stories related to guns. That led to another series of articles this year, called "Bearing Arms," on the impact of the wide availability of guns and the influence of the gun industry, including most recently, a 5,000-word project on child gun accidents, in which we discovered that federal mortality statistics are significantly undercounting such deaths.
Pastor Rick Warren has been talking more about gun issues since his son Matthew committed suicide after obtaining a gun over the Internet. From your reporting and experience, how would you like to see Christians thinking and talking about guns?
This is obviously incredibly treacherous territory, particularly for a reporter who tries to simply let the work speak for itself. First, clearly, this isn't an issue that has gotten much traction in Christian circles to this point. It has not become a huge rallying point for either liberal or conservative Christians. I have read, however, some commentary by Christian bloggers after the interview Rick and Kay Warren gave to Piers Morgan, wondering if he might take up this issue and try to launch a Christian movement for gun control. I'm very interested in seeing what unfolds on that front.
In a good faith attempt to answer your question, it seems to me that this is one of those issues in which many people simply take the Bible and apply it in a way that fits their existing view point. There are a variety of principles, of course, that might apply, from loving one's neighbor to rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Above all else, however, I would hope Christians bring to the gun control debate the virtues of civility and humility. How great would it be if Christians could help lead the way in ushering in level headedness and decorum on an issue that has become almost irretrievably polarizing?
Some readers will know the name John McCandlish Phillips, another NYT reporter and a Christian who passed away this April. What kind of example was he for you?
I met John at a meeting for a group for Christian journalists....Here was this gaunt, elderly, extremely tall man--he looked like a modern-day Ichabod Crane--who introduced himself to me in this wheezy, high-pitched voice as "John Phillips, formerly of The New York Times" I had no idea who he was, but then I looked him up and discovered, of course, that he was a legend.
When I met John, I was still an AP reporter. He took an interest in me, as he did with a lot of promising young Christian journalists. He doled out advice and encouragement and was often just a listening ear. He was overjoyed when I moved over to The Times, and he'd regularly send me notes about stories I'd done.
At one point early in my career at The Times, I had sent a note to some top editors, which got passed around to more top editors, about some thoughts I had about our coverage of religion, in which I disclosed my personal faith background. A longtime editor sent an appreciative note back, in which he recalled John and how he used to lead prayer meetings in a room just off of the newsroom. John also, famously, kept a Bible prominently displayed at his desk.
A lot of what John used to talk about was not about evangelizing the newsroom, but simply being excellent at journalism, because that's what God would want. He was an example to me.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Glader, Paul. "All the faith that's fit to print: how Micah 6:8 informs the award-winning work of Michael Luo, reporter at the New York times." Christianity Today, vol. 57, no. 10, Dec. 2013, pp. 50+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A353319680/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=677fd54d. Accessed 22 Sept. 2025.
* Luo, Michael. Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America Doubleday. Apr. 2025.560p. ISBN 9780385548571. $35. HIST
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the news spread even to China, where many decided to make the long journey to the States in search of riches. New Yorker reporter Luo tells the story of early Chinese immigrants to the United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. Most of the first arrivals didn't strike it rich and looked for other opportunities, such as working on the transcontinental railroad. White American reactions to their presence ranged from welcoming to hostile. Over time, the hostility grew and was expressed in lynchings and violence that targeted the Chinese community. Political leaders reacted by passing laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; Luo clearly explains the bureaucratic processes used to enforce them. As he traces this history of immigration, readers will appreciate learning about the experiences of individuals such as Yung Wing, a Chinese student who played football while a student at Yale in the 1850s, and Wong Kim Ark, whose Supreme Court case established birthright citizenship in the U.S. VERDICT Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of Chinese Americans or immigration law in the United States.--Joshua Wallace
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Wallace, Joshua. "Luo, Michael. Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America Doubleday." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 3, Mar. 2025, p. 109. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837611548/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a5822c40. Accessed 22 Sept. 2025.
Luo, Michael STRANGERS IN THE LAND Doubleday (NonFiction None) $35.00 4, 29 ISBN: 9780385548571
Giving voice to the first Asian Americans.
An editor at theNew Yorker, Luo says that the impetus for writing this book was a random encounter on Manhattan's Upper East Side in the fall of 2016, a few weeks before the presidential election. While he was standing outside a restaurant with his family, a woman passed them, then turned around, yelling, "Go back to China!" That incident prompted Luo to write "An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China," which appeared on the front page of theNew York Times, generating an outpouring of reader response. When anti-Asian violence surged across the country in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Luo finally decided to write a narrative history of the Chinese experience in America. Such books of history are, of course, legion, and Luo relies on many of these, in addition to original archival research, to craft his own narrative. What distinguishes it from the others, however, is that Luo's book, though sweeping in scope, is also microscopic when it comes to stories. He writes about, for instance, not only Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (Yale, class of 1854) and later a prominent diplomat, but also many minor characters who have hitherto remained anonymous in the annals of history. Whether it is the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles or the brutal killing of Chinese in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, we now know, thanks to Luo's meticulous digging, the names and stories of some of the survivors of these infamous race riots. Readers interested in American history, not only Chinese American history, will savor these pages.
An estimable and vital work of history that honors the Chinese American experience.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Luo, Michael: STRANGERS IN THE LAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785066/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=29a4e426. Accessed 22 Sept. 2025.
* Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. By Michael Luo. Apr. 2025. 576p. illus. Doubleday, $35 (9780385548571); e-book (9780385548588). 305.8.
Luo's history of the Chinese American immigrant experience emphasizes pockets of belonging amidst a vast landscape of racially motivated exclusion. Beginning in the 1840s, the first major wave of Chinese immigrants entered through San Francisco en route to the gold mines, where they "patiently scratched out earnings" from claims abandoned by white miners. Chinese immigrant labor built the transcontinental railroad, and Chinese entrepreneurs grew the commercial infrastructure of the American West. But, despite the increasingly diverse population and its ideals of liberty and equality in the U.S., Chinese Americans found themselves at the bottom of a racial hierarchy, the victims of both casual violence and legally sanctioned cruelty. In 1882, decades-long efforts to restrict Chinese immigration through "miner's taxes," housing restrictions, and other discriminatory tactics would culminate in the so-called Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant U.S. legislation to target members of a specific nation of origin. Inspired in part by his own unsettling experience of modern-day anti-Asian racism, award-winning New Yorker editor and writer Luo celebrates the vitality and persistence of Chinese Americans while lamenting feelings of precariousness that pervade even today. His chronicle adds a much-needed Asian and Pacific voice to primarily Eurocentric narratives of nineteenth-century immigration. --Brendan Driscoll
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Driscoll, Brendan. "Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 13-14, Mar. 2025, p. 25. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847201869/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5354fe52. Accessed 22 Sept. 2025.
In ''Strangers in the Land,'' Michael Luo tells the story of the Chinese workers lured to the United States and expelled when 19th-century politicians turned against them.
STRANGERS IN THE LAND: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, by Michael Luo
The story of Chinese Americans really gets going with one of the great early episodes of globalization. The discovery of gold in California in 1848, brought tens of thousands of fortune seekers from around the world, including some from China.
What happened next is the sort of history that many schools, states and the Trump administration have lately deemed dangerous and divisive. Chinese people and their descendants helped to build the country while also enduring generations of abuse.
But you can't paint a complete picture of America without this story, and the New Yorker journalist Michael Luo tells it persuasively in ''Strangers in the Land,'' a granular account of Chinese migration to the United States. In an evenhanded style that yields neither a woke polemic nor a sanitized past, he traces the lives of immigrants to a country that actively drew them in and then tried to push them out.
Luo, a former investigative reporter for The New York Times, relentlessly accumulates facts from old newspapers, court records and immigration cases. Parts of the story are hard to uncover, even though the outlines are well known. School children can tell you, for example, that in the 1860s the builders of the first transcontinental railroad recruited Chinese men to lay tracks through the snowy Sierra Nevadas. They outworked everyone else during this high point of America's national development. But not even the finest scholars can figure out who most of these hammer-swinging people were. While railroad bosses took pride in them, they couldn't tell the foreigners apart, and didn't write most of their names on the payroll.
Despite such obstacles, Luo finds an incredible number of characters. Although he describes the book as ''the biography of a people,'' it succeeds through its little biographies of individuals -- a range of quirky and fascinating figures, both Chinese and white, who drive the narrative. We follow entrepreneurs like the ''Chinese courtesan'' Ah Toy, an immigrant to San Francisco who sold sex-starved prospectors the chance to ''gaze on her countenance'' and saved enough gold dust to go into business as a madam.
On the other side of the country, we meet Yung Wing, the first Chinese student at Yale. By the time this enthusiast for America returned to China, he had almost forgotten his native language. Then the Chinese government, eager for Western knowledge and technology, sent Yung back in the 1870s with dozens more students in tow. Americans welcomed the scholars into their homes -- until China cut short Yung's mission, fearing the students had grown too comfortable with the local customs and religion.
I read this book while covering the early moves of the second Trump administration and also while reporting in China, and kept finding parallels to current events. In the 19th century, American capitalists welcomed Chinese laborers -- the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington said, ''It would be all the better for us and the State if there should be a half million come over'' -- but many politicians described their arrival as an ''invasion.''
Some constituents assumed that Chinese migration was a form of slavery. Chinese workers were stereotyped as ''coolies,'' controlled by the Chinese bosses who contracted out their work. Luo casts doubt on this idea, but reports that Chinese laborers were sometimes used against their white counterparts. When Massachusetts shoemakers went on strike in 1870, for instance, their boss sent an aide to California to round up Chinese replacements. Opponents of Chinese migration claimed to be taking a progressive stance for free labor.
Those opponents transformed the country's concept of border security. In early American history there was no class of people called ''illegal immigrants,'' because few laws governed movement to the United States. That changed specifically for the Chinese. By the mid-1880s, only certain kinds of people -- merchants, teachers and students -- were allowed to disembark from the ships. Even they were barred from citizenship. As a junior at Yale, Yung had become a citizen in the 1850s, but in the harsher legal climate of 1898 the State Department decided his citizenship was invalid.
Critics said the flow of Chinese migrants abetted human trafficking. Enticed by promises of marriage, some women, especially in the 1860s and '70s, were lured into signing contracts in China and brought to San Francisco for prostitution.
And some white citizens tried to help the victims: In 1870, Otis Gibson, a missionary, established a home to which entrapped young women could flee. Yet California authorities eventually decided to fight human trafficking by passing laws that made it hard for Asian women to come at all, threatening to send them back from the San Francisco docks after they'd traveled thousands of miles. If husbands didn't come to pick them up, they were presumed to be prostitutes. A U.S. Supreme Court justice ultimately intervened in favor of the women, ruling that a state could not legislate immigration.
Through it all, Chinese arrivals persisted in making a home in their adopted country. In 1885 white residents of Humboldt County, Calif., rioted to expel their entire Chinese community (''Wipe Out the Plague Spots,'' the local newspaper urged). It's one of many riots and murders that this book recounts in excruciating detail. After it was over, a local business directory proudly advertised Humboldt as ''the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.'' But it wasn't true: Some Chinese people remained with the support of white residents; a jack-of-all-trades named Charley Moon, who survived the pogrom, was still living in Humboldt upon his death in 1943.
The Chinese American population did not grow significantly until Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the old rules and made it possible for Chinese Americans to begin bringing over their relatives. But descendants of the earlier arrivals are among us today. Luo's book recounts the family story of Connie Young Yu, a historian from California. Her ancestors include a railroad worker from the 1860s, a woman who was separated from her children by immigration authorities in 1924 and a veteran of World War II.
Although parts of Luo's story have been told in other books, such as Mae Ngai's ''The Chinese Question,'' Erika Lee's ''The Making of Asian America'' and Gordon H. Chang's ''Ghosts of Gold Mountain,'' this account introduces many fascinating details. If there's any weakness to Luo's work, it's contained within that strength: He offers us so many characters that it can be hard to keep track, but readers who do are rewarded with a view on the full complexity of American immigration.
We hear from Wong Chin Foo, an exuberant, self-described ''missionary from China,'' who staged a public debate in a Chicago theater in 1879. Extolling the industriousness of the Chinese, he refuted the claims of a white sailor who had formed a negative opinion during a port call in Shanghai.
Other characters in this book seem to debate with themselves. In the 1870s, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field reasoned that the recently passed 14th Amendment, guaranteeing ''equal protection of the laws'' to ''any person,'' applied to immigrants. Years later, in an 1889 decision, Justice Field called the Chinese ''strangers in the land'' and wrote that the federal government had the right to expel them to resist ''foreign aggression,'' as if immigration were an act of war.
Then there is Frederick Douglass. Fresh from the fight against slavery, he proclaimed that ''a new race is making its appearance within our borders, and claiming attention.'' He said the Chinese newcomers had ''the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race; but belongs alike to all and to all alike.''
Not everyone agreed that there was a ''right of migration'' then, and the concept is definitely out of style now. But as ''Strangers in the Land'' reminds us, immigrants have always found some way to get here.
STRANGERS IN THE LAND: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America | By Michael Luo | Doubleday | 542 pp. | $35
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Americans pan for gold at the head of the Auburn Ravine in California in the 1850s. (PHOTOGRAPH FROM LIBRARY OF CONGRESS) This article appeared in print on page BR22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Inskeep, Steve. "Railroaded." The New York Times Book Review, 8 June 2025, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A843026984/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d43bd54a. Accessed 22 Sept. 2025.