Strangers in the Land : Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act - a measure barring Chinese labourers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty years--Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterised the Chinese as a people 'residing apart by themselves.' They were, Field concluded, 'strangers in the land.'

Today, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, yet this label still hovers over Asian Americans.

In this book, Luo traces anti-Asian feeling in America to the first wave of immigrants from China in the mid-nineteenth century: labourers who travelled to California in search of gold and railroad work. Their communities almost immediately faced mobs of white vigilantes who drove them from their workplaces and homes. ... 

In 1965, when LBJ's Immigration and Nationality Act forbade discrimination by national origin, America opened its doors wide to families like those of Luo's parents, but he finds that the centuries of exclusion of Chinese-Americans left a legacy: many Asians are still treated, and feel, like outsiders today