BOOK LAUNCH & CONVERSATION

Strangers in the Land

Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

by 

Michael Luo (AB '98)

Executive Editor, The New Yorker

HARVARD CLUB OF MARYLAND Alumni, Family, and Friends 

Join us at Michael Luo's Book Launch Talk 

with Jia Lynn Yang

April 30, 2025 (Wednesday)

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Politics & Prose

5015 Connecticut Ave. NW

Washington, DC 20008

Order Here: Strangers in the Land

Books will be available for sale and signing at the event.

This event is free.  First come, first served seating.

Luo will be in conversation with Jia Lynn Yang, the National editor at The New York Times, where she has worked since 2017.

She is also the author of One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, a political history of the landmark immigration law that allowed her family to settle in this country. The book was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Excellence for Nonfiction in 2021.

About Strangers in the Land

From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.

A TIMES  MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK | A NEW YORK TIMES  NONFICTION BOOK TO READ THIS SPRING

“A story about aspiration and belonging that is as universal as it is profound.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing

“A gift to anyone interested in American history. I couldn’t stop turning pages.”—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

“What history should be–richly detailed, authoritative, and compelling.”—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon

Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan­––Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy.

Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country’s history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late-1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals.  At the book’s heart is a shameful chapter of American history: the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country’s first undocumented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled.

In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer’s style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.

About the Author

Michael Luo worked at The New York Times, as a reporter and editor, from 2003 to 2016. He led a team of metro reporters focused on investigations and long-form narratives. In 2016, his reporters were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in three categories: investigative reporting, local reporting and feature writing. Prior to becoming an editor in 2014, he was a reporter for three years in The Times’s investigations cluster. Much of his work explored gaps in gun laws and their impact on public safety, as well as the influence of the gun lobby. He spent 2012 working on investigative stories related to the presidential campaign. Mr. Luo wrote about economics and the recession as a national correspondent; covered the 2008 presidential campaign and the 2010 midterm elections; and did stints in the Washington and Baghdad bureaus.

He started at The New York Times on the metropolitan desk. Before joining The Times, he was a national writer at The Associated Press, where he wrote narrative feature stories from around the country. He has also worked at Newsday and The Los Angeles Times.

In 2002, he won a George Polk Award for criminal justice reporting and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists for a series of articles on three poor, mentally retarded African-Americans in Alabama who were in prison for killing a baby who probably never existed. As a result of the series, two of the prisoners were freed; the third remained in prison on a separate charge.  In 2016, Mr. Luo joined The New Yorker as an editor. 

Mr. Luo graduated in 1998 from Harvard University, where he majored in government.