Michael Luo

Michael Luo:

And that feeling of kind of sadness that I felt as I was walking away that day pushing my daughter in her stroller was that feeling of: what will it take? And I don't have an answer to that question. It's like an impossible question. What will it take that we no longer have that feeling of still being strangers in the land?

Ted Roosevelt V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today is Michael Luo, an executive editor at the New Yorker and the author of Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Michael's book is both sweeping and intimate, a cinematic excavation of a chapter of American history most of us were never taught. The story begins in familiar territory: Chinese immigrants arriving in California in the mid 1800s, chasing gold, laying track, and helping build the spine of a new nation. What Michael reveals is what happened after the mythic part ends. These newcomers were met not with opportunity, but with a campaign of violence and exclusion so severe, it culminated in one of the worst mass lynchings in US history. And soon after, they became the targets of America's first race-based immigration ban. Michael restores these erased stories of families, laborers, visionaries, and everyday strivers, and shows how the currents they navigated still swirl around us today: economic fear, political scapegoating, and the perennial struggle over who gets to be seen as American.

But this isn't simply a chronicle of persecution. It's also a testament to defiance and dignity, of communities who refuse to disappear, who fought back in the courts, in newspapers, and in the culture itself. Their resilience reshaped the country, even when the country tried to push them out. Given the turbulence of our own moment, this history feels less like the past and more like a mirror. I'm grateful Michael could join me to help make sense of it. Let's dive in, starting at the beginning.

Michael Luo:

It was the gold rush that set this all in motion. I mean, this was an unprecedented global migration to the Pacific Coast, as they called it. People from around the world—European immigrants, people coming from the eastern part of the United States, formerly enslaved Black Americans, Indigenous people, people who were Mexican, Spanish descent, and there were Chinese immigrants. They were part of this...basically, this kind of unprecedented experiment in multiracial democracy all converging on the west coast.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And just to put some numbers on it, it's about a 10th of the California population is from China at one point. I mean, it is a significant migration.

Michael Luo:

Yeah, by 1860, yes. And a lot of people actually think of Irish immigration, which was roughly similar numbers in California. There was a lot of turmoil in China at this point. The Taiping rebellion was unfolding. There was some internecine conflicts going on in southeastern China between ethnic and linguistic groups.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And when they first arrived, they're largely welcomed.

Michael Luo:

There was this really public ceremony in 1849 held by city leaders in San Francisco, which included civic leaders and particularly pastors. And interestingly, the Alta California, which is the first daily newspaper, wrote this kind of glowing article about these Chinese arrivals, predicting that one day that they would be voting and they would be kind of in the halls of Congress on the same footing as other people groups in America. And that flipped.

Ted Roosevelt V:

One thing that occurred to me was that the story of Chinese immigration is one that seems to be undertold in this country. Do you feel that that's true?

Michael Luo:

Yes and no. There is a long tradition of Asian American historians who have done incredible work documenting these stories and telling these stories. The yes part of the answer is the history. The stories are not very well known at all. I'm a smart, educated person, grew up and went to public school in the United States, went to a reputable college and worked at the New York Times. And I'm reasonably conscious of my identity as Asian American, but my introduction to this really was—I wrote a piece in 2021, the spring of 2021, for the New Yorker. This was that period after the Atlanta spa attacks where several Korean immigrant women were killed by a white gunman where there was that surge in violence against Asian Americans and this feeling of real vulnerability for a lot of us. And I wrote this piece for the New Yorker that focused on this period that I talk about in the book called "The Driving Out," which was 1885–1886 when nearly 200 communities in the American West violently expelled the Chinese residents in their communities.

Ted Roosevelt V:

What is the sort of psychological temperament of the United States that, all of a sudden, they go from being very welcomed to what becomes a very sad moment for the nation?

Michael Luo:

When I came into this project, I was like: was it race? Was it religion? Was it economics? It's all of these things. You can see letters that were being written by ordinary gold miners back home and the way they kind of talk about these Chinese, they kind of see these people speaking this different language that's completely foreign to them. They had these queues, these long braids that a man in the Qing dynasty had to wear. There's this curiosity in the letters—but then you see in letters like, oh, there's far too many Chinese now here. They're comparing them to a flock of mosquitoes. It reminds me a little bit of the kind of populist outrage of today in the base of the MAGA coalition. It feels similar.

Ted Roosevelt V:

One thing that really struck me about your book is that you do a really good job of humanizing this experience and it's not a story that's told from a top-down perspective so much as a bottom-up perspective. And I'm curious why you decided to take that approach.

Michael Luo:

I'm a storyteller and I'm looking for protagonists. The traditional way you're thinking about stories is a protagonist is your vehicle for encountering conflict. And I'm looking to tell the larger story of Chinese exclusion and so I need to write about this 1871 massacre that took place in Los Angeles that's one of the worst mass lynchings in American history and who can be that protagonist? And I found this herbalist named Gene Tong who could speak English and was a good sort of vehicle that you can kind of get to know him a little bit and humanize him a little bit. I'm trying to move through time and cover those big moments that I need to cover, whether it's the building of the railroad. The other thing is yeah, you want to center Chinese people, Chinese voices, Chinese characters. The mistake early on among historians who wrote about this is sometimes they didn't do that and it was written more from a kind of white perspective or the kind of perspective of the people who were acting upon the Chinese as opposed to the Chinese themselves.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Something else that you did in the book was make sure that it wasn't just about victimhood, that there were a lot of forms of resistance, that people were proactive through this time period. Was that something that you set out at the start to do or was that something that, as you were going through these stories, was an angle that you realized was there and that was important to talk about?

Michael Luo:

It is something I wanted to do because this is how we responded, the United States of America responded, to an influx of tens of thousands of people who looked different, spoke a different language, had a different religion. But yes, the story of the Chinese in America, actually—they as the protagonist of the book, they persisted. There is this story of resilience that comes through in the book, and I say this in the introduction of the book, they were protagonists in the story of America. They won rights that are foundational to America today. Birthright citizenship—Wong Kim Ark, 1898. There's a family called the Tape family, Mary Tape and Mammy Tape. She was like this nine-year-old girl who just wanted to go to school in her neighborhood and was part of this effort to integrate the schools in San Francisco, and so they are part of the story of America.

Ted Roosevelt V:

What were some of the ways in which they were able to affect change, even coming from these marginalized communities?

Michael Luo:

Yeah, I mean the thing that's amazing about Wong Kim Ark—his individual story is something that we can rally around, like an ordinary person who was born in San Francisco above a grocery store who kind of traveled back and forth between China and the United States, and then was coming back into the United States. He carried with him these letters that kind of attested to his—that he was born in the United States, and the inspector of the Port of San Francisco, they detained him and were questioning him and they used him as this kind of test case for a theory around birthright citizenship that actually is part of what's being discussed today. Basically there was this kind of kooky lawyer named George Collins who was trying to say the 14th Amendment says if you're born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction there, you're a citizen of the United States.

It's the subject to the jurisdiction thereof. He was trying to say that if Chinese Americans, these people who are born in United States, are actually subjects of the Chinese empire and so therefore they shouldn't count as American citizens. Wong Kim Ark—kind of this ordinary guy—kind of became swept up in a historic court decision, but the thing that's really interesting is he had some of the best lawyers in America, this extraordinary team, and that was put together by the Chinese Six Companies is what it was called. It's this kind of coalition of mutual aid associations that looked after Chinese immigrants in the United States. What they did, again and again actually, is they financed these kind of court cases that belies the idea of the Chinese as simply victims and people who are acted upon, but that they actually had real kind of agency and as a result secured this legal precedent that has been part of the American story.

Ted Roosevelt V:

The poetry in all this, of course, is that the country is being forced to live up to its ideals by these immigrants, which is—it's beautiful. Do you have a sense of why they felt so compelled to fight back, to stay, when they were consistently being asked to leave?

Michael Luo:

That's the thing is, you cannot stem the tide of a people who are searching for a better life. This whole bureaucracy emerged to enforce these laws around Chinese exclusion. For folks who aren't familiar, in 1882, a law was passed that's known today as the Chinese Exclusion Act. There actually was a series of laws that were passed between 1882 and the early part of the 20th century when the law was made kind of the permanent law of the land that barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States. It actually didn't choke off Chinese immigration completely. They found ways around the laws and so in the end, the Chinese population in the United States declined for a while, but in the 20th century—1920s or so, 1930s—you start to see the Chinese population start to rise again, particularly as this kind of American-born generation starts to take root. And it's just a good lesson of where we are today. It's just very hard to prevent this kind of migration of people who want to better their lives.

Ted Roosevelt V:

The parallels between the period that you start your book into today are uncanny and I think that's part of the reason why the book has been such a success because it's extremely insightful about this moment in time. What did you learn about this moment in time from writing this book?

Michael Luo:

Actually now, decades later—more than a century later—economic researchers are able to look at data in retrospect at wages and productivity and income and things like that, and look to see in areas where there were a lot of Chinese immigrants where ostensibly white workers were meant to benefit from Chinese exclusion.

And so there was this fascinating study that was published relatively recently that kind of found that a lot of the ostensible economic goals of Chinese exclusion didn't actually work out. And there's been other studies that just found that actually Chinese immigrants and white laborers were actually not really exactly in the same labor pool. They weren't competing over the exact same jobs. And I think that's a cautionary tale for today too. When you know how history works, when you know that we've been through this before, and you see the way this coalition of disaffected, restive, white working class voters... how that kind of populist leaders, demagogues, can take advantage of it—it gives us pause. And it gives us, hopefully, some sort of way to be introspective and a way to resist the temptation to scapegoat and demagogue.

I mean that's why history, the telling of history, the fight over history that's going on right now... I mean, our semi-sesquicentennial is coming up. History is under attack and this is why it's so foundational, so important, the stories that we tell about our history. The quote that I kind of opened the book with is like, "Who gets to be an American?" It's a little quote from this book called Interior Chinatown. It's a novel by a guy named Charles Yu and he is like, why do we keep falling out of the story even though we've been here for 200 years? And that is the reason for the book, is to examine that question. Too often the conception of who gets to be an American is a race-driven conception.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I'm curious in your writing of the book, as you were exploring these various stories, whether your understanding of what it means to be an American evolved.

Michael Luo:

The idea of who gets to be an American has been a contested phenomenon for much of our history and it's still contested today, that it's something that we have to fight for in terms of fighting for these things that we as a country stand for.

There's a well-known book by an academic called How the Irish Became White, and it talks about how the Irish, they were Catholic immigrants and they were kind of on the outside, not in the in-group. Obviously when the second generation was born in the United States, it kind of allowed them to exercise the ballot box, and there's a big part of the story of how the Irish became no longer this kind of oppressed group but kind of a group on the inside. And the Chinese weren't given that opportunity because they were not allowed to naturalize and become citizens.

The one person who really stands out as someone who really walked the walk is Frederick Douglass. He was giving these speeches and getting kind of paid for them and he was delivering these speeches all over New England. The speech that he gave was about America's composite nationality. He was actually directly responding to the attacks on Chinese immigrants and kind of talking about how America could stand for this kind of multicolored, multi-hued nationality that was kind of composite. And he had this really beautiful vision. That speech about America's composite nationality stands today as an inspiration.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I wonder how you feel about integration into this country, this idea of being an Irish-American or being a Chinese-American as opposed to an American, and whether that's good because it's bringing sort of more culture and a more dynamic and global perspective of the world or in the research that you've done a sense that we are all Americans to form a cohesive culture.

Michael Luo:

There is—I think it was Jill Lepore who wrote this little book about making the case for a certain kind of nationalism in the way that you're kind of talking about, not in a ugly sort of way, but trying to forge this common identity and ethos and there is value in that. The thing that obviously that the Chinese had to deal with, as all immigrant groups have had to deal with, is that kind of push and pull between assimilation and this kind of your Chineseness and your Asianness and that kind of thing. The story of a lot of, I think, second-generation Asian Americans is one of when they were younger, just being ashamed of their immigrant background. Like, it made you different. Your parents spoke a different language when all the kids around you, their parents spoke English and then there's this—come to your house and it smells different or you bring—what you bring to lunch is like, weird.

And I have kids who are now two generations removed from my own parents' immigrant experience and I'm trying to figure out what does it mean for them to be Asian American. It's just funny because the other day it was this really important holiday in Chinese culture, the Mid-Autumn Festival, zhōngqiūjié, and it's kind of the full moon and you eat moon cakes and there's this thing and my parents right now as we speak are in Taiwan and then we're texting each other happy Mid-Autumn Festival, and the thing that my dad said was the most important thing about Mid-Autumn Festival was it's time for family to be together even if you're far apart. And it just made me think about, I was like, man, I need to kind of observe that, instill that more in my kids. I think for me it's an ongoing story of what does it mean to be Asian American, to be Chinese American.

Ted Roosevelt V:

One of the most touching parts of your book was actually the dedication to your daughters because you wonder whether they will ever truly feel like they belong in this country. And I think it struck me because I was like, "Of course they should, of course they will"—in my own head, but obviously you wrestle with that issue.

Michael Luo:

The story of Asian Americans is, I think you have to be able to hold multiple truths in your hand at once. A ton of Asian Americans are really successful CEOs. For my book tour, I spoke to a group in Silicon Valley in San Francisco of these just really high-powered Asian American people, some of the most successful people in the world and I have been successful as a journalist. Yet at the same time there is still that feeling of otherness. I write about this in the introduction. It's been part of the kind of journey of the book, of this kind of moment that in 2016, the fall of 2016, on the street on the Upper East Side in New York, when a woman yelled at me and my family and other people that were with us to go back to China, and I yelled pathetically back at her, "I was born in this country!" And that feeling of kind of sadness that I felt as I was walking away that day, pushing my daughter in her stroller, was that feeling of what will it take? And I don't have an answer to that question. It's like an impossible question. What will it take that we no longer have that feeling of still being strangers in the land?

Ted Roosevelt V:

First of all, I just want to circle back to... It's very sad to me to hear you—and not surprising, I don't want to say I haven't heard this before—but that you were born here, you went to Harvard, you write for some of the most prestigious periodicals in the country, and that you still have this experience—hopefully not every day, but—of otherness that manifests itself is a sad observation.

Michael Luo:

Yeah, I mean I think that that's why the work has to go on. That's the reality. The work, on a lot of different levels, including telling these stories. There is that kind of mantra that I've adopted for this book, which is Asian American history is American history. It's a mantra that folks who have been kind of pushing for more inclusion of Asian American topics in the teaching of American history at the secondary school level and my older daughter is taking AP US History right now— "APUSH" is what they call it. Her teacher made her order this kind of coursebook that gives an overview of AP US History and it would help you kind of study for the exam. And I opened the book and I just was curious—I flipped to the index to see if there are mentions of Chinese or Chinese Americans and Chinese immigration. And there was only one entry and it was for the Chinese Exclusion Act. And I flipped to that section and actually there was a slight kind of error that didn't quite explain it correctly... But that's sad that the only mention of Chinese in this coursebook of US History that is for the advanced placement course is just one thing.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I'm curious how you would respond to the idea—and I'm not making this statement, but it's a question that you hear sometimes from certain sides of the political aisle that by focusing on historical injustices in this nation that you divide the nation. How do you respond to that?

Michael Luo:

Yeah, so—I guess I would say no, it actually brings us together because it allows us to understand context and it gives us empathy for each other. And it's just an important part of understanding the patterns of human interaction and the ways that, in history, we have responded to similar circumstances and that if you understand history and you understand that the American experiment is an ongoing one and that requires work... Difference is hard. Just think about it in your own friendship groups, in your workplace. Martin Luther King said Sunday at 10:00 AM is the most segregated time in America, and why is that? It's because difference is hard. We're just more comfortable. We gravitate towards people that we are like. Think about that, multiply that out across interactions of whole people groups over the course of history. And so I think just being aware of that helps bring us together.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I want to just talk about your role as the Executive Editor at the New Yorker and long-form writing today because a lot of what we're... Underneath everything we're talking about is sort of very nuanced understandings of things and long-form writing has been falling out of favor in our country, if not the world. And I wonder how you think about the role that it plays and whether there's an opportunity in the future for a resurgence in the attention spent, not by the writers of long-form writing, but to the reader.

Michael Luo:

I hope so. I mean, that is the biggest concern I have. I got the question a lot on my book tour—what do you tell the next generation? My thing that I've said again and again is I hope they read. And I mean that in a joking manner, but I also mean it with seriousness, because I'm worried about that, that our attention spans are diminished by all the screens and I see it in my own kids. I have a 16-year-old and she's...I dunno, at this age, they're just starting to figure out who they are and what their interests are and it's been a wonderful thing to go—to have this book come out in this kind of moment when she's kind of starting to be in formation and this really cool opportunity to work at— it's an internship at the New York Historical Society where they're actually studying Frederick Douglass, his speech on the Composite Nation, and taking advantage of archives at the Historical Society and trying to use digital media to tell that story to reach other teenagers. And I just feel one, really proud of her, but two—what an incredible thing to have that kind of instilled at this age, the importance of history.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Michael, we ask everybody on this podcast the same question to close, and I'm particularly interested to hear your answer, which is: what makes a good citizen?

Michael Luo:

I think an informed citizenry is one that hopefully understands our history and the way that this question of who gets to be an American has been contested. I think history brings empathy. I think empathy would be a big part of being a good citizen.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Well, thank you very much for this. I've really enjoyed this conversation, so thank you for taking the time to chat with us today.

Michael Luo:

Yeah, I love that you invited me on. This is great.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Michael, you captured something essential in your last answer: that understanding our past isn't an academic exercise. It's a way of widening our empathy and sharpening our judgment as citizens today. Thank you for that insight and thank you for sharing your work with us.

For listeners, if you're looking for a book that both illuminates and unsettles in the best way, Michael's "Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America" is a powerful read. It fills in missing chapters of our national story and lingers long after you close the cover.

Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. To learn more about the library and the work we're building in the Badlands, please visit trlibrary.com. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.