Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
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 ... Although he describes the book as 'the biography of a people,' it succeeds through its little biographies of individuals—a range of quirky and fascinating figures ... Introduces many fascinating details. If there’s any weakness to Luo’s work, it’s contained within that strength: He offers us so many characters that it can be hard to keep track, but readers who do are rewarded with a view on the full complexity of American immigration.
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Even, quiet prose ... More than a story of an immigrant group accepting a wretched fate. Luo wisely puts the human experience at the center of his narrative, ensuring that Strangers in the Land never devolves into mere 19th-century political history. In the process, he restores a voice to the forgotten men and women who endured endless broadsides in their adoption of a new country. Throughout, Luo describes people who pressed, doggedly and fearlessly, for the United States to make good on its founding principles. 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 ... 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.
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The strength of the book is found in the stories that Mr. Luo...uses to illustrate the human costs of such bigotry and caprice ... 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.
