Immigrants, wanted and unwanted

The story of Chinese Americans really gets going with one of the great early episodes of globalization.

- STEVE INSKEEP

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 brought tens of thousands of fortune seekers from around the world, including some from China.

What happened next is the sort of history that many schools, states and the Trump administration have lately deemed dangerous and divisive. Chinese people and their descendants helped to build the country while enduring generations of abuse.

But you can't paint a complete picture of America without this story, 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 even-handed 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.

Luo, a former investigative reporter for The New York Times, relentlessly accumulates facts from old newspapers, court records and immigration cases. Parts of the story are hard to uncover, even though the outlines are well known. School children can tell you, for example, that in the 1860s the builders of the first transcontinental railroad recruited Chinese men to lay tracks through the snowy Sierra Nevadas. They outworked everyone else during this high point of America's national development. But not even the finest scholars can figure out who most of these hammer-swinging people were. While railroad bosses took pride in them, they couldn't tell the foreigners apart, and didn't write most of their names on the payroll.