In my family, tales of anti-Chinese racism are passed from one generation to the next. A century ago, my great-grandparents, Wallace and Tungert Chong, were forced to get special documentation — visas, in effect — to travel to the U.S. mainland from Hawaii, even though they were American citizens. A decade later, a White college counselor forbade their son, my grandfather, Walbert Chong, from taking the MIT entrance exam. Despite my grandfather’s near-perfect grades, the counselor assured him that he wouldn’t fit in with the university’s culture. Twenty years after that, children taunted my mother, calling her a chink as she walked to and from elementary school.
Review by Makana Eyre
Ask any Chinese American and they’ll doubtless have their own stories of bullying and bigotry. New Yorker editor Michael Luo writes that his new book, “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America,” came into focus after a woman accosted him on the streets of Manhattan in 2016. After church, while he was standing in the rain with his family and some friends, a stranger brushed past, vexed that they were in her way. After taking a few paces, she turned around and yelled, “Go back to China!”
“Strangers in the Land” surveys the long history of Chinese experiences in America, in part to examine how such racist cruelty became so common. It opens with gold. No one knows how stories of glinting flecks in American riverbeds traversed the Pacific in the middle of the 19th century, but once they did, young, ambitious Chinese men began making the journey to California. In those heady days in the territorial West, the Chinese quickly settled into industrious new lives, trying their luck for gold or else taking jobs as cooks, laborers and servants.
America would largely greet them with violence and vitriol, thrusting them into the “crucible of racism and exclusion.” It should come as no surprise that the aftereffects tremble down in families like mine. “The precarity of the Asian American experience has never fully subsided,” Luo writes.
At times and in places, local leaders welcomed Chinese immigrants, at least in the beginning. In 1850, San Francisco held a public ceremony to fete the city’s new residents. Businessmen in California envisioned a golden age of trade between America and China, and immigration made up a part of that interchange.
