(RNS) — “Strangers in the Land,” the recently published book by New Yorker Editor Michael Luo, chronicles the journey of Chinese immigrants to the American West, and then eastward across the country. Perhaps inevitably, it is also an account of the violence and bigotry directed against them, which only became more intense as the boom years of the Western Gold Rush gave way to the economic downturn that followed the Civil War.
Christian clergy cast their own shadow over Luo’s narrative. Faith leaders — almost all of them white Protestants — were instrumental in shaping, not only the experience of the immigrant, but also the communities that sometimes welcomed, sometimes attacked them.
Asian American history is not, in general, part of the standard public school curriculum, nor have American historians paid much attention. “Until recently, U.S. historians largely ignored Asian immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants,” said Harvard University historian Erika Lee in her essay, “The Necessity of Teaching Asian American History.” “When they did appear in scholarly monographs or textbooks, they were little more than footnotes and dismissed as tangential to the making of the United States.”
Luo’s book, with its meticulously detailed cast of characters, makes a spirited argument that it is time to redress that imbalance, not only out of fairness to a minority group, but in order to reveal the central role Chinese immigrants played in the life of the nation. “The Chinese in America were not simply the victims of barbarous violence and repression; they wer …