by Xinhua writer Yang Shilong
NEW YORK, April 27 (Xinhua) -- Michael Luo, executive editor of The New Yorker, steps from behind the editor's desk to revisit a long-overlooked chapter of American history in his debut book "Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America."
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the book is more than an archival excavation. It is a meditation on who gets to be American, and what it costs when a society embeds exclusion in law and language.
In a conversation with Xinhua, Luo traced the long arc of Chinese immigration -- from the California Gold Rush to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 -- and reflected on how this often overlooked history continues to shape American politics and identity.
"You go to the bookstore and there are shelves of books on the Civil War, World War II, and the civil rights era. It's hard to find books about Asian American history. I felt that was a gap," Luo said.
His book seeks to fill that gap, but it is also rooted in something far more personal.
The seed for the book was planted not in an archive but on a Manhattan sidewalk in 2016. Luo, then a journalist at The New York Times, had just left church with his Asian American family when a stranger told them to "go back to China."
He confronted her. "We were going back and forth. And then she yelled, 'Go back to your f---ing country.'"
In that moment, he searched for a response to a sentiment that has echoed across generations.
"I said, 'I was born in this country.' And that was the best I could come up with," he said.
The encounter lingered. Walking away, Luo found himself confronting an aching question: Would his daughters ever truly feel that they belonged in the United States?
He later wrote an open letter in The New York Times that went viral, thrusting him into a national conversation on Asian American identity and the "perpetual foreigner" stereotype.
"I joke I was the face of Asian America for a couple of weeks," he said. But privately, he felt unprepared. "I realized I didn't actually know a lot of this history, the history of the Chinese in America."
That realization became the seed of a seven-year journey.
Born to immigrants from central China's Hunan Province, Luo grew up in predominantly white communities -- an experience that shaped his perspective as he rose through the ranks of American journalism. His career is anchored by a distinguished thirteen-year tenure at The New York Times, followed by his move to The New Yorker in 2016.
"I'm a journalist by background ... so I approach this history with a different eye," he said.
He began writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, amid a surge in anti-Asian violence. In 2021, following the Atlanta spa shootings, he wrote an essay in The New Yorker examining earlier waves of anti-Chinese violence -- an essay that would become the precursor to the book.
Reconstructing the past was no easy task. Early Chinese immigrants left few personal records, their lives documented largely by others -- often in hostile or incomplete accounts.
"You have to really hunt for those Chinese voices in the archives," Luo said. Sometimes they surface in a stray quote or letter. Often, they are only faint traces.
One discovery stayed with him: a photographic album in the California Historical Society containing images of Chinese residents of Downieville, cataloged by a local constable during the exclusion era.
The notes beside the images were sparse but stark: "Died." "Killed." "Burned." These brief, brutal fragments hinted at lives but rarely told their full stories. For Luo, such silences became an essential part of the narrative.
At the heart of Luo's book is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 -- the first U.S. law to ban immigration based explicitly on race. The title "Strangers in the Land" is drawn from a Supreme Court opinion that described Chinese immigrants in exactly those terms.
Chinese exclusion, he argues, was not an aberration but a foundational element of U.S. immigration policy. Subsequent restrictions in the 1920s built upon and deepened that framework. Even after the Act was repealed during World War II, immigration quotas for Chinese remained tight.
Only with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act did a true turning point arrive, enabling family reunification and reshaping the country's demographic future. "My parents came as a result of that law," Luo noted.
Understanding today's debates on immigration and identity, he argues, requires confronting these earlier decisions. A phrase he returns to is simple yet profound: "Difference is hard." Not as an excuse, but as a clear-eyed diagnosis.
"What happened with the Chinese on the West Coast in the 19th century was an early test of multiracial democracy," he said. "We didn't acquit ourselves particularly well."
That test continues. "We're in a very anti-immigrant moment," he said. "History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes."
When Luo began the project, he did not fully see this history as his own. But as he delved deeper into his research, that sense of distance gradually narrowed. "I realized this is my history too."
He hopes especially that younger Asian Americans will engage with this history. Without it, he argues, there is "a loss of empathy, a loss of identity, a loss of shared story."
Luo sees history not only as retrospective but as deeply connective, binding communities and generations. At its core, he says, it is a compelling story "of persistence, resilience, and survival."
Toward the end of the conversation, he pointed to a place both literal and symbolic: the site of the 1885 massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, one of the seminal moments in Chinese American history.
Today, archaeologists continue to excavate the site, uncovering traces of the destroyed community, including the burn layer left by the fire that consumed the town's Chinatown.
The image mirrors Luo's own project: uncovering a past long buried, yet not erased. What he hopes readers take away is straightforward: "Difference is hard ... and it requires real effort and intention to overcome." Enditem