America versus China, the troubling prequel

Trump's bid to target birthright citizenship has a grim backstory related to the early days of Chinese migration to the US.

- Howard Chua-Eoan

I love visiting California. In many ways, it's like going home. I have siblings in the San Diego area and up north in San Jose. When my family moved to the US from the Philippines in late 1979, we stayed for a while with an aunt in Orange County. I got my first American job there - hefting bales of newspapers onto a truck from the loading dock of a Fullerton daily.

It's not all onward and upward: The properties of several friends and relations were reduced to ashes by the devastating wildfires that have yet to be fully extinguished in Los Angeles.

Still, the resilience of the city's diverse population coming together amid catastrophe is heartening. The metropolis has counted on people from everywhere in the world for its prosperity. Their forebears' sacrifices also shouldn't be forgotten, even though the Golden State hasn't always glittered for everyone. California and the US West Coast have had their fair share of sinister history.

I was perhaps more sensitive to it during my brief visit in January because I'd been reading a preview of a remarkable book, Strangers In The Land: Exclusion, Belonging, And The Epic Story Of The Chinese In America. Its main focus is the second half of America's 19th century, but the parallels with the US of the 21st century bear repeating, if only to prevent history repeating.

The author Michael Luo - an editor at The New Yorker - has taken a subject that most people of Chinese descent, like me, are aware of in a vaguely ominous way and turned it into a terrifying yet compelling narrative. Despite the gold that gave impetus to the region's absorption into the Union, the integration of California and the West Coast was an ugly and violent saga, suffused with race hatred, gunfire and lynching, greed and cruelty - and the twisting of American ideals to win votes and sate bloodthirsty populist furies.