Listener supported WNYC Studios.

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 Remnick. 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 Ellis Island, Lower East Side, and onward and onward.

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, which was, I think, pretty typical.

You grew up in a Chinese-American household.

Was immigration and, as it were, the old country ever talked about?

Not much. Actually, that's a great question. For this book, I had a chance to sit down and talk to my parents.

And the book spans nearly 200 years and goes back really to the middle of the 19th century

and this wave of Chinese migration that preceded

my parents. My parents came post-1965. They were born in mainland China, fled to Taiwan when

the communists came and came to the United States for graduate school. And so their migration was a

different migration than the heart of my book.

But this history relates to their history, and this post-1965 migration kind of ends my book.

What made you decide to write this book and what was the whole in the in the world that needed filling.

Yeah. The moment that set me on the path to this book is something that happened to me in the fall of

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