Forum from the Archives: The New Yorker’s Michael Luo on ‘the Epic Story of the Chinese in America'
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From GayQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, Michael Luo's new narrative history of the Chinese in America was sparked by the experience of having a racial slur hurled at him and his family in 2016. His write-up of the incident made the front page of the New York Times, and Luo, a go-to expert on the Chinese-American experience, a story he realized he didn't fully know.

Luo's new book, Strangers in the Land, tells the story he learned. We listened back to our conversation earlier this month. Join us. Mina Kim here. Before we get started with the show, we have a little bonus for you I like to call behind the scenes.

Mina Kim here. We've got a short pledge break going on right now, so you on the Pledge Free stream get a little bonus that I like to call behind the scenes. Sometimes our forum editorial meetings about upcoming shows trigger discussions of past shows, and today's topic got us talking about covering the pandemic as it unfolded, with its terrible hardships and unexpected silver linings.

One of our favorite shows back then was from December of 2020, when we were just getting word that the first vaccines would be rolling out. So we asked listeners to share the first thing they do when the pandemic was in the rearview mirror.

You said, hugging friends and family, an indoor restaurant date. Robyn, a sound engineer, said, the sound of an audience singing along with the performer always brings tears of joy, even now telling you about it. Many of you said travel, how you longed to travel. Like John. I'm anxious to resume my annual bicycle across the U.S. trips. Wow. How long does that take? It's about a month.

That's amazing. I'm sorry, two months. Two months, excuse me. Yeah, that would have been amazing if it were true.

But equally poignant were the gains you said you made, the things you'd miss after the world opened up again. Here's Fiona. Right now I don't have to chase three small children down, shove their feet into some shoes and a jacket and get them in the car about three times a day for school and after school sports. That was a huge stress. Another listener wrote, I have PTSD and depression related to military trauma, and I've felt deep shame that I'm not able to work.

The pandemic has taken away the pressure and the shame, and I felt more content, happier, and more myself these last nine months than I have in the past decade. And then there was caller Frank.

A few years ago, we moved from the East Coast to San Jose in order to be closer to our daughter and our son-in-law when they had two little boys. We're new grandparents. With this pandemic, ironically, they no longer can really bring in an outsider for childcare or go to daycare. So we, who are supposed to be the bonus grandparents, are now the full-time caretakers for these two little boys. And...

Take your time, Frank. You know, it's been an absolute joy, and we would never trade this for the world. That's behind the scenes. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. New Yorker editor Michael Luo says overt racism 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.

That sentiment has been a driving force behind his new book, looking at the role of Chinese immigrants in the American story and very much the California story. It's called Strangers in the Land, Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Michael, welcome to Forum. This is great. So it was in the fall of 2016 that an awful incident got you thinking about the need for a book like this. Can you tell our listeners what happened?

Yeah, I live in New York on Manhattan's Upper East Side. And so this was October 2016. We're a couple of weeks away from Trump's election, the surprise election. I wasn't expecting it. Most of us weren't expecting it. But you could kind of feel, even in that moment, this curtain of nativism descending on the country, I felt like.

My family and I were with some friends, all Asian Americans, after church on the sidewalk. We were trying to figure out where we were going to eat, and we were blocking the sidewalk, and a woman, a white woman, looked like well-dressed, looked like somebody who could have been a mother in my kid's preschool, brushed past us, aggravated we were in the way, and muttered, go back to China.

And even though this was after church and I didn't turn the other cheek, I basically abandoned my daughter in the stroller, sprinted after her, kind of got in her face. And what I remember is this is kind of like, was really, is that what you just said? We were going back and forth and she screamed at me down the block, go back to your effing country. And I, adrenaline's flowing and I,

All I could think of to say was, I was born in this country. It felt so pathetic in retrospect. I mean, even in the moment. And what happened was this was the heyday of Twitter, and I had a decent-sized following in Twitter, and I

basically live tweeted about it as I came back inside to the restaurant and it became this viral thing and I was at the New York Times at that point and I ended up writing an open letter to this woman about what happened and kind of explaining this feeling of otherness that

is a common theme for a lot of Asian Americans. And just thinking about this question, I felt this sadness as I was walking home that day, pushing one daughter's stroll and the other daughter, older daughter walking next to me. They are two generations removed from my parents' immigrant experience and just wondering whether they would ever feel like they truly belonged in this country.

I didn't end up writing this book until a few years later. I embarked on it during the pandemic. But this kind of started me on this journey to thinking about these themes. And honestly, at that moment, I was on a lot of panels. I was doing interviews. It was this kind of viral thing because the New York Times published that open letter on the front page of the newspaper saying,

It generated a lot of conversation. And I actually realized, though, when I was doing those interviews that I actually didn't know much of this history. And I felt a little imposter syndrome during that period when I was doing all these interviews. And that's the seed of this book. Yeah.

Well, first, Michael, I'm just so sorry that that happened to you. And I know you note that it's familiar to many Asian Americans, but nevertheless, intensely felt. And in that open letter, you had this line that really stood out to me.

When you were telling the woman in the open letter to the woman on the front page of The New York Times, you had on a nice raincoat. Your iPhone was a 6+, which was like the newest model then. You could have been a fellow parent in one of my daughter's schools. You seemed, well, normal. And I'm wondering why her normality stood out to you so much. That's a good question. Yeah.

I mean, I guess part of it was wondering if this person might have been mentally ill, to be honest. It's this feeling that it could be anybody who harbors these feelings, this feeling that this is inside of a lot of people. And obviously...

Affluence or it doesn't isn't isn't any kind of indication of that or but it just struck me how normal the woman seemed and how she could be just somebody I knew. And to have that kind of vitriol come from there, that really I think that was part of what just hit me. Yeah.

Right. Given the fact that it could be anyone, you know, makes me think so much about how you have focused on what you call the precarity of the Asian American experience that has never fully subsided. Like you're basically saying this simmering of anti-Asian racism exists and can boil over at any time, right, given the right catalyst or the temperature of the country and so on.

Yeah, we've been told to go back to our country for a long time. That's what dwelling on this history and immersing myself in the archives taught me and one of the things I took away from it. I like the word precarity because when you're in a precarious position, you might actually...

not necessarily be immediately kind of falling or out of balance. It helps convey what I think is something that's important to remember about the Asian American experience, which is that it can be multiple things at once. I on this, I just got back from a

crazy nine cities in nine days book tour. And I did this private event in San Francisco, actually, that was full. It was a room full of founders, really successful Asian American leaders. And, you know, clearly there have been, you know,

A lot of people who have been ascended to CEO positions, they're people are directors, they're members of Congress. Um, yet at the same time, there is this precarity and there is this vulnerability and we, and we saw that, uh, during the pandemic, we, we, we see it. Um, I mean, I feel it even now, right now we're in a moment when, um,

Both parties really are bellicose about China and the threat posed by communist China. Whenever I say that, I think of Trump saying, China. And there are very real concerns, national security concerns, economic concerns about China today.

But what I feel is this every one of those mentions and every time people talk about China in that way, this kind of tender of racial suspicion just continues to grow. And and so that that precarity can can give way at any moment.

Yeah. And of course, as you learn throughout the process of writing this book, there are so many examples, sadly, of when that tinder could give way. I want to invite our listeners into the conversation. We're talking with Michael Luo about his new narrative history of the Chinese in America.

which was sparked by the experience of having a racial slur hurled at him and the continued precarity of the Asian American experience in Luo's words. He is an executive editor at The New Yorker, and his new book is Strangers in the Land, Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. So listeners, what experiences or historical examples can you think of that relate to what Michael Luo is sharing today

How are you thinking about the status of Asian Americans today and the precarity that Luo describes? What questions do you have about Chinese immigration to the U.S.? Did your family immigrate from China to the U.S.? What's your family's immigration story? You can tell us by emailing forum at kqed.org, finding us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or threads at KQED Forum, or calling us at 866-733-6786.

Again, that's 866-733-6786. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim. Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Amidst a terrible storm, Ida Mineo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters. But as he arrives safely to shore, his relief transforms into horror when the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Ina Kim. We're talking with Michael Luo this hour, an executive editor at The New Yorker, about his narrative history of Chinese Americans called Strangers in the Land, Exclusion, Belonging, and the epic story of the Chinese in America.

And Michael, just before the break, we were talking about, you know, previous examples that you unearthed so many previous examples of violence targeting Asian Americans. And I'm wondering if you could focus a little bit on California because so much of it happened here, like the attempts to purge Chinese Americans from so many towns and cities up and down the state, right?

Yeah, this is, as you mentioned, I think at the top, that this is a story of the West Coast and California, the Pacific Coast, they called it then. The book opens with the gold rush, which is when the first significant numbers of Chinese immigrants started arriving in America. And this was...

actually, you know, this was a global migration and there were people from China, there were people from Europe, all different European countries. There were black Americans, white Americans, Californios who were the

Mexican settlers who became citizens after annexation. It was basically an unprecedented experiment in multiracial democracy that was taking place in California during this period. By 1860, I think the Chinese population was around 10%. And so it was something that the country had never quite experienced up to that point.

And, you know, initially the Chinese were welcomed. There was a ceremony of city leaders in San Francisco to welcome them. They were interested in evangelizing the Chinese and there were Bibles handed out and that kind of thing.

But then as their numbers start to grow, you pick up these horrific accounts of violence in the minefields. And it really started to accelerate the anti-Chinese movement in the 1870s when an economic depression settled over the country. This was actually a period...

People don't remember it much now, but they called it the Great Depression actually before the 1930s Great Depression and and and that's when this movement really started to take off and and

there was this horrific riot that I talk about in the book in San Francisco. It's kind of a labor rally that degenerated and turned into this horrific rampage through San Francisco. And all of this stuff was happening, a lot of it centered around San Francisco. The

The Chinese Exclusion Act, which we know today as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed in 1882,

set up this confrontation that was taking place in the port of San Francisco where these customs collectors, they were the people who were enforcing the exclusion laws at that point, were trying to decide if these were Chinese laborers or not. And everything that we are talking about today, we saw then.

Actually, the courts became a real big part of the story. Chinese took advantage of habeas corpus and filed petitions contesting deportations. A vast immigration apparatus started to take root in the early 1900s and 2000s.

Angel Island became this kind of the opposite of Ellis Island. And so, yeah, so much of this story is a San Francisco story, California story, a story of the American West. Yeah, when you say so much of what we're talking about today, we saw then you write about an April 1876 California State Senate committee meeting.

where they're talking about the, quote, social, moral, and political effect of Chinese immigration. And they're basically having law enforcement and government officials testifying that the Chinese represented the dregs of their native land and were rife with a criminal element as well as vectors of disease and so on. And the kind of language and rhetoric is, there are so many parallels to that.

the rhetoric that we have heard today. And then also, of course, you talk about how a lot of this flares up in a time when people feel more economically precarious as well. So just, you know, the parallels of history, I guess, you know. Yeah, I mean, we're talking right now moments after they just wrapped up

oral arguments in a court case before the Supreme Court about birthright citizenship. And birthright citizenship, of course, was enshrined in a case involving a Chinese immigrant, Wong Kim Mark, who was born in San Francisco. And yeah, so where we are, it's funny, this morning I was just looking through some documents from that case and

And just thinking about the...

the parallels to today. There's a guy named John Wise who was the collector of the port. He was the one who, working in coordination with the Justice Department who first detained Wong Kim Mark, they were hoping to create a test case to challenge this principle of birthright citizenship. And the thing that's actually less known is

is what was some of the background of what was going on at the time. And around the same time, John Wise was warning his superiors in Washington about stuff that he was seeing happening in San Francisco. There were these

There was an organization of native sons. These were American-born Chinese who were getting together and trying to organize and exercise electoral influence. And this alarmed him. And this is part of the motivation, I think, in China.

wanting to overturn birthright citizenship, this idea that, I mean, this was just a really frightening possibility that there were, you know, 100,000 Chinese in America heavily concentrated in California. And the idea that they could have the power to become citizens and vote was really frightening. Well, we have calls coming in. And let me go to Vinod and Gilroy. Hi, Vinod, you're on.

Hi, thanks for taking my call. So I want to share my experience similar to what happened to the caller. Like basically I am a parent of two boys who were born here. So I used to take them to the park every day and we used to stroll past a homeless shelter. So one day while you were strolling past that, like an old lady, like I think she's white. So she was staring at me. I stared at her and she said, she just said like, find a wife with your own color.

I was taken aback because like she should know that I mean I'm already married and I've been going that way every day this happened almost two years back but it still lingers in my mind like sometimes I went to a talk thinking like what I'm doing in this country like that yeah that's what I was

It's a very bad thing happened to me, like two years back at first, but it's been a little bit longer than that. So, yeah, thanks for listening to me. Thank you. Oh, thanks for sharing that, Vinod. And I'm sorry, it really does stay with you, Michael, as you illustrate so beautifully when you talk about it in the book. And, you know, in the context of history, too, we're talking about, you know, how the

how people decided this was the time when they had to make sure that the Chinese didn't have any real power or were able to amass any. The purges were all the way through the Central Valley and you even concentrate an entire chapter to, you know, an 1871 massacre of Chinese Americans in L.A. that until I read your pieces on it and that chapter, didn't realize it's believed to be the worst lynching in American history.

Yeah, this happened in 1871 in Los Angeles, and 17 Chinese were lynched and 18th person was killed in a different way. And yeah, we hear obviously about lynchings of African Americans, and they were obviously...

Legion in the kind of post-reconstruction period particularly, but it's pretty shocking that the worst mass lynching in American history actually involved Chinese and so few people know about it. And actually in Los Angeles, there's only this tiny little plaque right now that marks where this happened. Interestingly though,

After the pandemic, some folks got together and started to work on a larger memorial and a design has been picked out and they're raising money now for a really powerful memorial that will be erected in a couple of years. And so, yeah, the...

The story, one thing I think it's actually what I try to do in the book is, I think it's so important to say the names of the Chinese to tell their stories in as three-dimensional way as possible. Most of the, we know the names of the victims of this massacre, but

It's really hard to kind of construct a portrait of them. But one of them was a guy that was known in town as Gene Tong. And he was a herbal medicine doctor who actually took on white clients too. And this actually gives you a little window into the work and how I wrote this book.

From the archives, you can kind of construct a little bit of a sense of him. You knew he had a roommate. He knew he had a wife, which is actually unusual at the time. You knew that he had a pet poodle, which was an incredible detail piece.

And the reason I know that is after he was lynched, a reporter for one of the Los Angeles papers went through his apartment and it was completely ransacked. His belongings had been sliced open. They were looking for valuables and there's blood everywhere. And they found this whimpering poodle with a broken leg. And

And so it's just an incredible detail. And it's part of how I... One of the things I'm most proud of is just the way that I was able to pull out these characters that populate the chapters. And, you know, it's hard to... Because I'm covering so much ground, to have, you know, a character who... I actually aspired to have... To build the...

the book around a few families at first, but it just proved really difficult and impossible with the way the archives work. But I'm really proud of the way each chapter is driven by characters, and some of them return and you become familiar with them. Yes. But I thought of the Chinese as a people, as the...

central protagonists of the book. And I think about how the Chinese were protagonists in the story of America. I really appreciated the details about Gene Tong and the fact that he was a popular and well-liked herbalist. But when the anger and resentment and racism seethed, it just trumped all of it. And he was treated so horrifically and the details are so horrific.

Robert writes, regarding the Chinese in California, the city of Eureka expelled all Chinese residents. Most moved to San Francisco. Los Angeles had an uprising where a mob burned down their Chinatown. So there are actually...

It's wonderful to hear people who do know some of this history. And yes, by you telling it in these individual stories, it really makes it come to life in a way that I don't think we have really seen with this kind of history, just because records were so hard to come by. Another listener, Noel on Discord, writes, this morning, the Supreme Court heard the birthright citizenship case, which we thought was decided years ago with the case of Wong Kim Ark versus the

the U.S., what that highlights to me, too, and this is something that I really felt in your book, was that the Chinese fought back. They didn't just take these laws and terrible actions and try to kind of push them away and live their lives. They actually actively resisted them. I also love the story you shared of Joseph Tate and Mary Tate. Do you want to

Just quickly tell us about them and their daughter Mamie. Yeah, yeah, totally. Just a brief aside in reference to one of those reader mentions. Eureka is a chapter in the book. It opened this period that is known as the driving out in 1885, 1886 when Eureka,

when nearly 200 communities in the American West drove out the Chinese from their communities. And again, a period of history that I actually didn't know anything about until I started thinking about this book and working on it. And so, yeah, and there's actually also a larger memorial going up in Eureka where to commemorate what happened.

uh, in the tape family is an extraordinary story. They're, um,

Joseph Tape, that name is kind of a derivation from his name in Chinese, which is Zhou Dip. But it's notable how, I guess you could say, Americanized and westernized he had become. He decided to change his name to Zhou Tape. And he ended up marrying a woman

Chinese woman who had been raised in an orphanage and she grew up not speaking any Chinese she grew up obviously speaking English and so they courted in English and they raised their kids speaking English most of their kids playmates were

not Chinese, they actually lived outside of the Chinese quarter. And so what happened was he wanted his daughter, Mammy, to attend the school down the street as opposed to going down to the Chinese quarter. And the principal there blocked her from attending and they filed a lawsuit and they actually eventually won the lawsuit.

But the city of San Francisco decided instead of allowing Mamie into the

this school, they would comply with the decision by creating an entirely separate school that was reserved for Orientals, for Chinese. And so that's where she ended up going to school. But they were kind of a pioneering family. And just a really interesting look at

You know, the kind of push-pull that so many immigrant groups go through of maintaining their heritage and the forces of assimilation and acculturation. Yeah. The other thing I think it does so much is just remind us that Asian American history is American history because so much of the ripple effects of Asian

what Wong Kim Ark did and what the tapes did, a lot of people attribute their case also to setting a legal foundation for the issues around segregation and ultimately segregation's elimination. Two, it's such an important piece of it all, and probably, Michael, a really important piece of feeling a sense of belonging in this country.

Yeah, definitely. It is a pretty extraordinary thing. It's worth actually explaining a little bit about how the Chinese were able to band together and do some of these court cases that were so formative.

There was an organization called the Six Companies, which is actually a conglomeration of mutual aid associations that were geographically based that helped Chinese immigrants. And they got together and formed this group, the Six Companies. And the Six Companies pulled their money and financed a lot of these lawsuits that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Right.

We're talking with Michael Luo about his new narrative history of the Chinese in America called Strangers in the Land. Stay with us for more after the break. I'm Nina Kim. Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Amidst a terrible storm, Ida Mineo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters.

But as he arrives safely to shore, his relief transforms into horror when the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son.

This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! Xfinity!

You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

We're talking with Michael Luo about his new book on the history of the Chinese in America called Strangers in the Land, Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. It was sparked by the experience of having a racial slur hurled at him and his family while he was on a New York City street back in 2016.

and the continued precarity of the Asian American experience, as Luo says. He's an executive editor at The New Yorker, and you are listeners. What experiences or historical examples that Luo shares resonate with you? What are you thinking about in terms of the status of Asian Americans and the

precarity that Luo describes? What are your questions about Chinese immigrants to the U.S.? Did your family immigrate? And what are your family's immigration stories? 866-733-6786, the number. Email address, forum at kqed.org. Find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or threads at kqedforum.

And Noel on Discord writes,

Would it help if we started to refer to ourselves as American Chinese, which emphasizes our Americanness first? Your thoughts, Michael? Well, the... Yeah, so the...

One thing that comes to mind is the epigraph to my book is drawn from a book called Interior Chinatown. It's by the novelist Charles Yu. It's an extraordinary book, highly recommended if you haven't read it. It was published in 2020 and won the National Book Award. The conceit of the book is it's about a background character actor in a TV police procedural about a black cop and a white cop.

And the main character is a generic Asian man in this show. And his biggest aspiration in life is to become Kung Fu guy in the show. And needless to say, the book is...

a kind of an indictment of the way race in America is often viewed solely through the lens of black and white. And there's this passage in the book where he's litigating his case in this imaginary courtroom. And he says, who gets to be an American? So that's the question that is at the heart of my book. And the character goes on and says, we keep falling out of the story.

even though we've been here for nearly 200 years. And, and so that's really why I wrote the book. It's, it's trying to write us into the story, you know, the, the question of, um, what a publicity campaign helps. I mean, the, the thing that, the thing that I have felt as I've been on this tour is that, um,

that deep longing, that kind of yearning for belonging. And the energy in the room, the conversations,

are just so deeply felt. And I, and I have felt that, that kind of sense of like, this isn't just a book. It could, it's, it's a cause. I think it's really important. You know, I want people to buy the book and cause I think it's a good book. And, you know, um, I think people will be riveted by it. Even it's a long book, but it's like, uh, um,

I think there's characters and narrative momentum. But I think it's really important for publishers to see that there is an audience for books by Asian American authors on Asian American topics.

And so, yeah, it's my deepest desire that this is part of just one small part of changing the conversation. One thing I should say, too, is the book's title is Strangers in the Land, and it comes from the Supreme Court decision in 1889 that upheld one of the Chinese exclusion laws and the Supreme Court justice act.

justifies the decision by referring to the Chinese as strangers in the land and he talks about how they can't assimilate with us. But I actually really believe that the book is not just about the Chinese and American, it's not even just about Asian Americans, it's about

Any number of immigrant groups who have been or are today at this very moment treated as strangers. And it really is the story of America, it's the story of us. Let me go to caller Magdalena in Palo Alto. Hi, Magdalena, you're on.

Hi, thank you so much. I just wanted to say thank you to both you and your guest. Your guest, I'm sorry, I don't have your name. Michael Luo, yeah. Michael, yes, for writing your book. I'm just starting to read a book called Driven Out, The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. I'm sure you know this book. Yeah, by Gene Felser, yeah. Yes, exactly. And to my chagrin as I'm reading it,

A name jumps out at me, and it's my great-grandfather in Eureka, who was a civic leader, and he was part of driving the Chinese out from Eureka and Arcata and that area. My ex-husband, who's a

Dear Wonderful Man is an immigrant from Hong Kong. My kids are biracial. So this history, and on my father's side, I'm Mexican. And, you know, so I appreciate what you just said, the comment that you said, that this is...

Who we are as Americans. So many groups who are othered. Anyway, sorry. Who is your ancestor that you mentioned? Who was it? What's his name? Frank McGowan. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes. So, yeah, the Eureka story, first of all, I highly recommend Jean's book. It was, I drew it when I, when I first started on this, I wrote a piece for the New Yorker and it drew on Jean's work and she's been a pioneer in documenting this history. But yeah, I remember Frank, he was, Frank McGowan, he was one of the, this kind of circle of people in Eureka who were,

part of this decision to band together to drive out the Chinese. If people don't know the full story, basically it was a white city council member in Eureka was shot in a kind of a stray bullet. These rival Chinese factions were arguing and a bullet rang out and it struck him and he died. And that led to...

this ultimatum delivered to the Chinese community, about 300 people to leave within 24 hours. And not everyone ultimately left, but Humboldt County actually, the thing that's kind of frightening is Humboldt County left

boasted about the fact that there were no Chinese in Humboldt County. There were these, there are this kind of literature that they would distribute touting the virtues of coming to Humboldt County, the weather, you know, the opportunities, and there was no Chinaman here. So it's a really frightening, sobering thing to go back and read about. Michael, who were our allies? Did we have many allies?

Yeah. This is interesting. When you raise the idea of allies, two groups of people come to mind, both imperfect in their particular ways. So there are pastors who were

seeking to evangelize the Chinese and were in some cases incredibly brave in the face of anti-Chinese sentiment. But they also at the same time tended to refer to the Chinese in their character in really ugly ways and they would refer to

them as heathens and, you know, just have had this kind of really negative view of a lot of Chinese based on the fact that they were not Christians, even at the same time when they stood up for them in some instances. The other group that comes to mind is in some of these communities that drove out the Chinese, a group of kind of civic

almost like a conservative establishment also tried to defend the Chinese, but they tended to at the same time say, "We actually don't think that Chinese should be here either, but we don't want this kind of chaos and disorder

and lawlessness from this kind of mob that is trying to drive out the Chinese. And so they were really a voice for law and order. And so anyways, it's a little bit of friends like these kind of situation when you read about them. The other thing that I was struck by reading in your book was how often if people did sympathize or empathize with the situation of the Chinese, they remained silent. Why was it important for you to...

Like you would hear or read this in journal entries, but they didn't necessarily do anything publicly. Why did you want to include that? Yeah. I mean, I think about I've thought about lately a lot about political courage. What does it take? Yeah.

There was actually one person who comes to mind, a guy named Stewart, Charles Stewart in California, actually. There was a constitutional convention where they were amending the California's constitution and they passed some onerous things targeting the Chinese. And it was just kind of this overwhelming debate.

sentiment approving these measures. And this guy got up. He had a lot of land in Sonoma County, and he employed a lot of Chinese, and he stood up to defend them. And

He was the only one. And I don't know much about him. And I wonder about what gave him the fortitude to do that. Because, yeah, a lot of most folks stayed silent. The journal entry you're referring to is...

something I pulled out from the city of Tacoma where they drove out the Chinese there and were lucky enough to have journal entries of a businessman who was in Tacoma at the time and he privately confided

uh how wrong he thought this was and and how he actually thought uh well of the Chinese and and and was rooting for them but he as far as I can tell he didn't speak up and I I just think about uh today and I I think about

It's actually kind of in vogue for both parties to speak negatively about immigration and immigrants to a certain extent. And I think about what it takes to, I don't know, to...

It's about... Obviously, these politicians are thinking about their own survival, their electoral hopes, and you have to have some sort of transcendent belief about right and wrong in which you're...

Preservation, your political future, is not as important as upholding these principles of right and wrong and equality and these principles that our country supposedly stands for. Let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Well, Tricia writes,

John writes, I wonder if Michael Luo could speak about the news media's complicity in America's unwelcome response to Asians. I led a study in the 1990s of anti-Asian stereotypes in the news media, and we found many examples in mainstream traditional news media in which Asians and Asian products, anything from Toyotas to Chinese garlic, were framed as part of an Asian invasion. What are his thoughts on current media practices?

Yeah, I think that is something to be on guard about. This has to do with this feeling of invisibility that really is, I think, something that a lot of Asian Americans feel. I alluded to that lovely passage in Interior Chinatown that talks about how

that we're not really part of the story. And I think it's hard. I think that we are oftentimes exist in thinking about race in America through a black and white lens, and there isn't room for other groups in that. And I think some of these things that this study is picking up

There is a feeling among Asian Americans of that no one notices, no one cares. If this involves some other group, there would be an outrage. And that's that kind of, there's a lot of pent up emotion and feeling behind that. And it relates to this feeling of invisibility. Julie writes, I live in San Jose and was told in line at the local Target to go back to China because a woman thought I cut in line.

In front of her. I'm so sorry, Julie. I was called a slur by a group of teenagers recently. It's everywhere. I kick myself every time because I don't have a good comeback after experiencing this so many times. Michael, do you feel like your sense of belonging in America has shifted? Yeah.

And if so, I'm curious. I'm sure doing this book, or maybe I shouldn't assume, helped. But I'm also just curious if it did, what you learned about what that requires to feel that shift. I've struggled with this question because it's come up in some of my book events. And really, I think it's a question of...

optimism? Are you optimistic about the trajectory for Chinese Americans, Asian Americans? One thing I'll say is what I see in this history, this sweeping history of nearly 200 years is actually I see, and this is what excited me, to be honest, as a writer, is I see a narrative arc. You think of

movies and you think of a the kind of three-act structure where there's a protagonist and they confront this conflict and there's kind of these complications and rising tension and at some point there's this climactic sort of moment and there's this resolutions true sometimes it's not that they get exactly what they were after but there is some sort of

And what I see in the story of the Chinese in America is a story, the driving out period, this effort to eject the Chinese from the country failed. That's that climactic, the emotional heart of the book, but it failed. And while the Chinese population in America declined for a while, Chinese continued to come in

They continue to find ways around these racist laws that were designed to keep them out. A native-born population took root, and in the 1920s and 1930s, their numbers started to go up again. And so I see a story of resilience and persistence here.

I mean, on the question of am I optimistic, I think the best answer I have is I don't think I have any other choice. I'm doing my part as a writer to write us back into that story and to keep us moving forward. But it's obviously a misreading of American history to believe that progress is a straight line. It's not. Yes, definitely. Yeah.

Well, Michael, I really appreciate you talking with us today. Thank you so much. Thank you. The book is Strangers in the Land, Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America by New Yorker editor Michael Luo. My thanks as well to our listeners for sharing painful experiences and also great questions and a reflection of what you do know about the Chinese in California. And my thanks to Caroline Smith for producing today's segment. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

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