A Historical Epic of the Chinese in America
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnick. Michael Luo is an executive editor at The New Yorker and his background is investigative reporting.
He's a journalist steeped in the art of prying out secrets that someone is trying to keep hidden. But his new book takes a turn into history, into the past, in particular the complicated history of Chinese immigration to America. Michael's book is called Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Now Mike, my grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and had a very typical late 19th century path to uh Ellis Island, Lower East Side, and onward and onward.
Um and it wasn't until I read Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers where I learned anything about this background. My grandparents never talked about it, um, which was, I think, pretty typical. Um, you grew up in a Chinese American household. Was immigration and, as it were, the old country ever talked about? Not much.
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