日志

Strangers in the Land -美国华人历史新书！

已有 110 次阅读2025-3-5 01:42 |个人分类:族裔自信文化自信|系统分类:转帖-时事政治经济

《异乡人》讲述了一个民族的故事，他们从十九世纪中叶开始，成千上万的人移民到一个遥远的土地，他们称之为金山。美国人最初欢迎这些中国人的到来，但随着人数的增加，太平洋海岸爆发了可怕的种族恐怖事件。长期的经济衰退使大批白人工人失业，这为接下来发生的事情创造了条件：一系列日益繁重的联邦法律旨在将中国劳工排除在外，这是美国首次以种族为由禁止一个民族入境。在这部引人入胜的处女作中，迈克尔·罗跟踪了从早期到现代的中国人，他们面对偏见和迫害坚持不懈，再次揭示了我们多种族民主的复杂性。

罗明瀚写了反亚裔暴力的早期受害者，比如洛杉矶草药医生吉恩·通 (Gene Tong)，他在这场美国历史上最严重的集体私刑中被暴徒从公寓拖出并绞死；还有像丹尼斯·科尔尼 (Denis Kearney) 这样的煽动家，他是一位沙地演说家，成为 19 世纪 70 年代末反华运动的代表人物；还有先锋活动家黄清富和其他华人社区领袖，他们敦促他们的新家园实现其既定理想。这本书的核心是美国历史上可耻的一章：残酷地将中国居民驱逐出美国西部的各个城镇。中国人成为美国第一批无证移民：被追捕、被统计、被怀疑、被监视。

1889 年，在支持排华运动的同时，最高法院法官斯蒂芬·菲尔德 (Stephen J. Field) 将他们描述为“这片土地上的陌生人”。直到 1965 年，美国的大门才向罗的父母这样的台湾移民敞开。如今，美国有超过 2200 万亚裔，但罗写道，陌生人”的标签仍“然存在。《陌生人》借鉴了全国各地的档案，以《纽约客》作家的风格和气势写成，具有启发性和令人难忘性，是一个不可或缺的美国故事。

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.