“Go Back to China:” How a Racist Encounter Sparked a Journey Through History

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And Michael Luo, welcome to the show.

MICHAEL LUO: It’s great to be here with you, Walter.

ISAACSON: This book about Chinese immigration into America, starting in the 1840s with the Gold Rush, is a sweeping history, but also somewhat personal. You weave your own family’s life into it. It began with some incident that happened to you. That’s how you started coming to write this book. Explain that to us.

LUO: Yeah. This was October 2016. We were just a few weeks away from Trump’s election. I wasn’t expecting it. I think the country wasn’t expecting it. But you could feel a curtain of nativism really descending on the country, I think. And this was just an encounter I had on the Upper East Side, the, there was a – we were with some of –

ISAACSON: Of Manhattan.

LUO: Yeah, yeah. Upper East side of Manhattan. We were with some friends. I was with my family, two daughters. There was a woman who brushed past us and was aggravated that we were in her way. And she muttered under her breath, “Go back to China.” And we, this was Sunday after church, but I did not turn the other cheek. I confess, I kind of got, ran after and got in her face a little bit, and essentially was like, are you serious? And we were going back and forth. And then she screamed at me down the block, go back to your effing country, in more colorful language than that. And I was trying to come up with a smart retort, and I, and the adrenaline’s flowing. And I was, just said very pathetically, “I was born in this country.”

And I ended up I tweeted about this and then, and it ended becoming a viral thing. And I wrote a piece for the New York Times where I was working at the time. And it was an open letter to her that actually the newspaper ended up running on the front page the following day. And I wrote about this feeling of otherizing that I think is common to the Asian American experience. And I wrote about, I was thinking about my kids, my daughter who was in their stroller, the, my younger daughter, and my older daughter was walking next to me. And I wondered about, even though they’re two generations removed from my parents’ immigrant experience in the 1960s and 1970s, whether they would ever feel like they truly belonged in this country. And so that set me on this journey, intellectual journey really, and a desire to understand this history better, which I actually realized in the aftermath of this inciden, I didn’t really know. And I actually think that’s common for a lot of people, Asian Americans, Americans in general, this history, even though a lot of historians have done great work on it, is not broadly known.

ISAACSON: Well, the history of America is a history of immigration and also a history of nativism, a backlash against immigration. And one of the first big immigration waves is the one you write about, which is in the 1840s, especially because of the gold rush. Chinese immigrants coming in. So let’s start with Gold Mountain. I love that part of your book. Tell me how that began at all.

LUO: Yeah, I was looking for, I dreamed of the finding the first, the kind of patient zero, how this all started. And there, there actually is an account of a, and maybe it’s apocryphal. There’s lore passed, passed along in the Chinese community of a merchant who had arrived in 1847 and was among the legions who ventured in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. And he wrote this excited letter home to a fellow villager in Guangdong province. And this, as the story goes, this villager, this, wrote told other people about and set off himself whatever the story, basically this was, this was like an escalator really of like, of people coming telling their brothers, sons, fathers to come. They had told these stories of Gold Mountain is what they called it, a Gam Saan.

And people started just getting on boats and coming. They would use their family farms as, and land as collateral for loans. And by 1860, a 10th of the population in California was Chinese. And as you point out, this really was a global migration. And this was an unprecedented experiment in multiracial democracy that was happening just as the country was debating, and this other issue of race on the other side of the country, there was this other experiment that we had not ever gone through where there were white Americans, black Americans, immigrants from Europe and Chinese. And there were these, also Californios who were the Mexican settlers who had became citizens after California was annexed. It was and we didn’t do particularly well in this test. That’s, and that’s what the book is about.

ISAACSON: It’s interesting, ’cause you talk about on the eastern part of the United States, the slavery issue was happening, the west, the issue of immigration, especially Chinese immigration. And now, you know more than 150 years later, we’re still facing those two things in America. Are they interrelated in some ways?

LUO: Oh, totally. I think that’s one of the interventions of the book. And I think, I think interventions that, an intervention that a lot of historians are trying to make nowadays. You need to consider these histories together. This Chinese question, as it was called, the debate over Chinese immigration coincided with the vanquishing of Reconstruction in the South, and the expelling of native peoples and the eradication of native peoples in the West. And the Chinese question is part of that. All those histories continue to refract today, and they need to be considered together.

ISAACSON: It seems then from your book that the Chinese immigrants were accepted pretty well at first. What turned it around?

LUO: I think it was the, the numbers just started to rise. The welcome that you’re talking about, there was a, city leaders in San Francisco had a public ceremony that welcomed them in 1849. And it was organized by civic leaders and pastors. They were particularly interested in evangelizing the Chinese. And actually the daily newspaper in California at that point, the Alta the, which is the first daily newspaper in California, actually wrote very positively about these Chinese arrivals predicting that one day they’d be in the halls of Congress and they’d be voting and just as influential as other immigrant groups and natural, who would become naturalized and American citizens. But I, what you see is in the 1850s and 1860s, you start, you, there was, there were horrific episodes of violence in the minefields and that kind of thing.

The 1860s, the story of the 1860s was the building of the railroad, which the Chinese were an essential part of, particularly building the central Pacific, the western side of the railroad. And for a moment, there might have been an opening for Chinese to be welcome because they were essential in this gigantic accomplishment. But there was an economic downturn in the 1870s that really caused the anti-Chinese movement to take off. And political polarization is a big part of the story, too.

ISAACSON: Does that echo today, you think?

LUO: Oh, it’s all this, it’s all the, the echoes of history. The, all those cliches or they’re truths really you know, that Mark Twain his, or whether he said this or not, that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Yeah, like the anti-Chinese movement resembles in a lot of ways the MAGA movement. The, it’s a nimbus of outrage of disaffected white workers. But not just workers, but other people, I think, who felt stuck economically in some way. I think that on the West, there was this great expectation that the railroad was going to open up new markets. And actually, that turned out to not be true. That actually ended up opening up more competition. And so there’s just a number of factors that involve race and the economy. And also the emergence of demagogue like figures. There was a guy named Denis Kearney who gave these giant rallies in the sandlot, as they called it near City Hall in San Francisco. And he railed against corporate power. So there was that populous sort of angle, but he ended his rallies with the cr, the rallying cry chi, the Chinese must go. And it reminds me a lot of the populism of today.

ISAACSON: One of the echoes we have today from your book involves the fact that for the Chinese, after Carney and others started attacking, there was a program of mass deportation. How’d that work out?

LUO: <Laugh> It didn’t work out very well. What you’re referring to is, in 1882, they passed the Chi, what’s known today as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned laborers, Chinese laborers from entering the country. And they continue to pass increasingly more onerous versions of this law. And in 1892 there was a renewal of Chinese exclusion that was known as the Geary Act and it required that Chinese register en masse in order to justify their existence in the country. If they didn’t register, they would be subject to deportation. The Chinese, actually, it’s incredible, organized a campaign of mass resistance. And very few Chinese registered. And they made a court challenge. They took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and they actually wound up losing. But they were, there was talk with all these Chinese, who refused to register and refused to be photographed.

As part of this, there was talk of deporting them en masse. And there was, the funny thing was the Department of Commerce concluded that they didn’t have the funds to do this. That they didn’t have enough money allocated in the treasury to do this. ‘Cause, you know, it costs a certain amount to ship somebody back to China. It would also cost money to deploy people, to arrest people and detain them and all this kind of stuff. And they just, they didn’t have the money. Eventually, after the Supreme Court ruled against the Chinese, they eventually did wind up registering. And so that effort on mass deportation kind of, the need for that went away.

ISAACSON: Despite the racism and violence directed at the Chinese immigrants, here’s something you write in the book. “The Chinese in America were not simply the victims of barbarous violence and repression. They were the protagonists in the story of America.” Tell me about some of those protagonists you found in researching this book.

LUO: Yeah, that I, well, what I, I’m very proud of the way I – it was a little bit like panning for gold in the archives. The, as you know, the archives history is written by the powerful and the powerless are often left out. And so you have to do some panning for gold for, in the archives for the stories of people and characters. And there are incredible stories. There, I think of any, I think of any number of them. The story of Yung Wing, who was the first university student, Chinese to enroll at an American university, graduated from Yale, and he led this Chinese educational mission that brought Chinese students to America. I think of Ng Poon Chew who came as a young boy and converted to Christianity and became a pastor, and then a newspaper publisher, and a spokesman for the Chinese community.

I think of just ordinary stories of immigration and people who built their lives here. They, they’re throughout the book. And I think that’s what I was, I’m trying to do. In the end, I think the book, in the book, the Chinese, as a collective people, end up as the central protagonist of the book. And you get invested in them and root for them and get upset for them and sad for them. And but it’s individ – the stories of individual Chinese that help enliven this history and make it memorable.

ISAACSON: The 1965 , I think it was, act that lifted the quota that was holding down Chinese immigration. It was signed by Lyndon Johnson. Why did he sign it? What was the point?

LUO: Yeah, so he, Lyndon Johnson, this was part of him carrying on the legacy of JFK after the Civil Rights Act. This is what he took up next. And the thing that’s important to note is that, for proponents of the bill, they never expected that it was going to dramatically change the demographics of the country. This was really important for its passage. It was a little bit of a math mistake, to be honest. They, because it prioritized people with special skills and family reunification, people, the way the proponents of the bill rationalized, it was like, okay, there’s a certain number of this group, this group and that group. And so when they bring over their families, we’re just gonna have, the demographics of the country are gonna be roughly the same. When Lyndon Johnson signed the bill, he had reassured the American public that this is not a revolutionary bill. What they underestimated really was the power of the reunification, and Asian immigrants, once the doors were open to them, you know, brought many family members over. And that just kind of snowballed. And you see that with other groups too. And that’s what set in motion the demographic transformation that we’re experiencing today.

ISAACSON: One of the political issues today involves China in a geopolitical sense, a strategic sense, a competition with China, fights with China over everything from chips and tariffs and things like that. Is that at all connected to the anti-immigrant sentiments that you may have felt on the Upper East Side from that racist woman?

LUO: I mean, I think so. So the interesting thing is in this history that I write about, which is centered on the late 19th century and early 20th century, China was incredibly weak. It was torn by war, internist warfare. It was kind of humiliated with the Western powers. Today, obviously, China is an economic, technological military superpower, and we’re in this competition with China for dominance. And I think when the, during the pandemic, when there was this, the blame of China for COVID led to this outbreak in reports of violence against Asians, obviously that moment has subsided. But the thing that I’m afraid of at this moment, and that what I worry about in the trajectory of the Asian Americans and their experience in America is, yeah, like every time right now, it’s kind of in vogue for politicians of both parties, Democrats and Republicans to be bellicose in their language about China. And I think there are legitimate reasons, you know, for that. But every time I hear that kind of language, I feel the tinder of racial suspicion growing. And so a lot, the thing I, a lot of people have asked me about, am I optimistic? And I have to be optimistic because like, that’s the story of America. That’s the story of this kind of push and pull that you’ve, you’ve talked about. But I’m worried.

ISAACSON: Michael Luo, thank you so much for joining us.

LUO: Thank you so much for having me.