LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION • From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, BOSTON GLOBE, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK, KIRKUS REVIEWS, LIBRARY JOURNAL, CHINA BOOKS REVIEW "A story about aspiration and belonging that is as universal as it is profound.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing "A gift to anyone interested in American history. I couldn't stop turning pages."—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown In Strangers in the Land, award-winning journalist Michael Luo tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan ––Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. Federal lawmakers enacted legislation aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. The Chinese became the country’s earliest undocu­mented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled. In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is a revelatory and unforgettable American story. A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK
A TIME MUST-READ BOOK
A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A CHINA BOOKS REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025
A NEW YORK TIMES NONFICTION BOOK TO READ THIS SPRING “Strangers in the Land is more than a story of an immigrant group accepting a wretched fate. Luo wisely puts the human experience at the center of this narrative. . . . In the process, he restores a voice to the forgotten men and women who endured endless broadsides in their adoption of a new country. . . . It’s these people who animate the book, filling the pages with stories of endurance and hard-fought victories but also searing accounts of sorrow, violence and injustice. Along the way, Luo reveals something essential about America: Any democracy’s promises should be measured against the way it treats its most marginalized members. At once an indictment of how our nation failed that test before and a reminder of how some pushed back, Strangers in the Land deserves a place on the shelf beside other essential works of American history.” — The Washington Post “You can’t paint a complete picture of America without [the story of Chinese Americans], 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. . . [The book] succeeds through its little biographies of individuals – a range of quirky and fascinating figures, both Chinese and white, who drive the narrative. . . [and offer] a view on the full complexity of American immigration.” — The New York Times Book Review "Michael Luo's important study reminds us that without such indemnities, any group—but particularly the most vulnerable among us—could find itself excluded or expelled." — The Wall Street Journal “In Strangers in the Land , Michael Luo has written a sweeping history that somehow feels intimate, a narrative of irrational bigotry and legal violence that somehow shines with hope. In a moment of anti-immigrant fever, this work arrives like a balm.” — Boston Globe "The story of the Chinese in America has been told before, but this history — written by New Yorker editor Michael Luo — does so with aplomb and verve. . . . Through individual stories he puts flesh on the bones of this history, combining assiduous research with compelling prose to complicate our understanding of Chinese migration to America over the last century and a half." — China Books Review “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