Announcing the Special Guest

We are pleased to welcome special guest Michael Luo to the California Book Club to discuss On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family with its author, Lisa See, and host John Freeman.

Luo, a journalist and an executive editor at the New Yorker, is the author of Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, a comprehensive narrative history of the first Chinese American immigrants. In the introduction to the book, he explains that he first understood there to be a need for this kind of book after a 2016 verbal altercation with a woman who yelled at him and his family to go back to China. However, he first began the book in earnest during the pandemic, when anti–Asian American attacks surged. He writes, “In examining the history of the Chinese in America, I’ve come to realize the precarity of the Asian American experience has never fully subsided. Throughout American history, we have been told to go back to where we came from.”

In the 19th century, the first Chinese immigrants boarded cargo ships without passenger quarters—usually, sanitation was limited and food and water were bare-bones. One ship arrived with a hundred dead Chinese passengers, who accounted for one-fifth of the passengers. There was early recognition of the difficulties of immigrating to the United States, but there were also those who welcomed the Chinese, such as city leaders in San Francisco and California businessmen hoping for a golden age of China–United States trade. From 1851 to 1852, the number of Chinese people passing through San Francisco’s Custom House went from fewer than 3,000 to over 20,000. Violence against the Chinese in California and the West increased in the course of gold mining and the construction of the railroads.

The book goes on to narrate many true stories of ordinary Chinese and Chinese Americans who, on one end of the spectrum, were made to feel they didn’t belong and, on the other, were treated with violence and hate. One anecdote tells of Leland and Jane Stanford’s cook, Moy Jin Kee, and gardener, Jin Mun, the former of whom found a Chinese herbalist, Yee Fung Cheung, to treat Jane’s serious lung infection and save her life. Later, Moy would be a voice of dissent against the “Fifteen Passenger Bill,” which sought to limit the number of Chinese people arriving in ocean vessels. Meanwhile, Leland had publicly called Chinese people “degraded,” expressing his belief that the country should be settled by “free white men.” He later came to depend on Chinese workers for labor when building the Central Pacific Railroad.

Many of the stories Luo relates are not about individuals but about the groups they formed—in the summer of 1867, for instance, after a harrowing winter of 44 snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada, during which time Chinese laborers worked in cotton jackets and jeans, making snow tunnels to continue the work, 3,000 Chinese railroad workers struck for $40 a month in wages and the request for work time to be reduced from 11 to 10 hours a day. In Eureka, in 1876, a drunken white man barged into a house in the Chinese quarters where residents were celebrating the Lunar New Year and got into a fight with a Chinese man inside. The Chinese man wounded the intruder, who died days later. This incident resulted in a mob’s converging on a Chinese residence, hurling rocks and ripping out doors and window sashes. Although a county newspaper argued that the mob’s actions were disgraceful, resentment against the Chinese built. The residents of nearby Garberville expelled the town’s Chinese residents, and the angry actions toward the Chinese continued, leading to other violence, which, in turn, led to the expulsion of Chinese people from Humboldt County.

Strangers in the Land discusses important points in Chinese American history, like the prominence of questions of naturalization and citizenship, including birthright citizenship, after the Civil War ended (though at that time, the Chinese-immigrant population was overwhelmingly male). Luo’s nuanced account takes care to show the interrelationship between the rights of formerly enslaved Black people and those of Chinese immigrants. He writes that animus toward the Chinese “nearly derailed” the passage of the 15th Amendment, which provides that the right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged by federal or state governments “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In the postwar era, Frederick Douglass urged the country to “overcome their darker passions” and argued for the “embrace of the ‘Chinaman.’” Debates about citizenship were especially intense on the West Coast.

While Strangers in the Land pays particular attention to the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, it also touches on Chinese Americans during the Cold War, at which point, Luo writes, “a narrative of Asian American ascent began to take hold in the country.” While the highly visible civil rights struggle of Black Americans made it difficult for America to claim itself a beacon of freedom, the improved status of Asian Americans, some of whom were highly educated and skilled, despite the community’s continued difficulties around poverty and discrimination, became an opportunity for policymakers hoping to improve the country’s image, leading to what we now call the model-minority myth.

Luo’s Strangers in the Land is a tremendous achievement and a perfect follow-up to On Gold Mountain. Both tell vital American narratives. Join us for a meaningful conversation, among See, Luo, and Freeman, about See’s book and the surrounding history that gave rise to her ancestors’ particular story.•

Join us on December 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when See will sit down with special guest Luo and host John Freeman to discuss On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. Register for the Zoom conversation here.