Chinese Immigrants in Early America

Michael Luo ’98 on the first great wave of immigration—and of nativist anti-immigrant reaction

Man sits outside "Golden Gate of Liberty" under sign that reads, "“Notice—communist, nihilist, socialist, Fenian & hoodlum welcome but no admittance to Chinamen.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act caricatured (from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 1882): the sign reads, “Notice—communist, nihilist, socialist, Fenian & hoodlum welcome but no admittance to Chinamen.”   |   Library of congress

In the fall of 2016, writes Michael Luo ’98, “I was standing in the rain with my family and some friends, in front of a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side,” when a woman brushed past on the sidewalk and shouted back, from down the block, “Go back to China!” After she escalated to an obscenity, Luo recalls, “I said, ‘I was born in this country!’” Thus was planted the seed for his sweeping Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, $35). Amid the current paroxysms concerning immigration, diversity, and race, his history of earlier, often dismaying, confrontations and crises could not be more important. From the introduction, where Luo, now a New Yorker editor, summarizes what happened—beginning in 1848 when the Gold Rush lured Chinese workers to California, yielding a population that was nearly 10 percent Chinese a dozen years later:

 

This book tells the story of how the United States responded to the influx of tens of thousands of people from a distant land, who spoke a different language, had different beliefs and customs, and did not fit into the country’s existing racial stratification. Americans initially welcomed the Chinese arrivals, but as their numbers grew, the sentiment turned ugly. While the debate over slavery roiled the eastern half of the country, a different kind of racial conflagration broke out on the West Coast. Horrific episodes of racial violence erupted in the minefields; lawmakers passed laws targeting Chinese immigrants; California’s highest court ruled that Chinese testimony was inadmissible in court against a white person. Politicians recognized an opportunity in the rising anti-Chinese sentiment and began calling for their removal. They cast Chinese immigrants as a threat to Anglo-Saxon civilization. They twisted the principle of “free labor,” an ideology that took shape in response to slavery, into a weapon of racial oppression, condemning all Chinese as “coolie” laborers. Crucially, lawmakers decided to bar Chinese immigrants from naturalized citizenship, even as they extended the privilege to “persons of African descent.” A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next. Congress enacted a series of laws, each more onerous than the previous, to exclude Chinese immigrants from the country. As shiploads of Chinese people continued to cross the Pacific, their opponents turned to violence, resulting in some of the ugliest episodes of racial terror in our national history. Later, in the twentieth century, after Chinese exclusion became permanent, a sprawling federal bureaucracy took shape to keep them out.…

Yet the Chinese in America persisted. They spread out across the American West…. A population of Chinese Americans even took root in the Mississippi Delta, operating grocery stores that catered to Black customers in the Jim Crow South.…A native-born generation emerged, whose members found themselves caught in the familiar wrenching contest between their parents’ culture and the forces of assimilation and acculturation. Unlike the descendants of Irish, German, and other European immigrants, Chinese Americans carried the additional burden of race.

You might also like

What of the Humble Pencil?

Review: At the Harvard Art Museums’ new exhibit, drawing takes center stage

‘Passengers’ at A.R.T. Blends Acrobatics with Einstein’s Relativity

Review: Quantum mechanics meets circus arts at the American Repertory Theater’s performance

Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival

Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard.

Most popular

Trump Administration Unveils New Attacks on Harvard

Government tightens financial oversight of Harvard, threatens to pull student aid.

Zelia Nuttall

Brief life of a remarkable anthropologist (1857-1933)

Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts teaches the value of immersive attention

Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention

Explore More From Current Issue

Nineteenth-century prison ruins with brick guardhouse surrounded by forest.

This Connecticut Mine Was Once a Prison

The underground Old New-Gate Prison quickly became “a school for crime.”

Johnston Gate

Your Views on Harvard’s Standoff, Antisemitism, and More

Readers comment on the controversial July-August cover, authoritarianism, and scientific research.

Student walking under bright stage lights shaped like smartphones displaying social media apps.

Two Years of Doxxing at Harvard

What happens when students are publicly named and shamed for their views?