Michael Luo Profile picture
Jan 14 6 tweets 2 min read
At middle school basketball game at the Barclays center, the girls behind us are cheering for the opposing team. One bursts out: “If we lose, I’m going to smack one of those Chinese girls.” I talk to her. She denies it. Her mother comes over and gets in my face. #thisis2023
Not unusual, of course, but talking to two other Asian American parents nearby…we talked about the heart-pounding. The fear.
They’re kids. Where is this coming from? Just shows how people who seem foreign, alien, different…are perceived in America. It’s embedded in our history.
It’s why I got up early this morning, as I have for the last year-plus, working on this book—the story of the first Asian Americans, Chinese immigrants who came to “gold mountain” and endured bigotry and violence and were driven out of dozens of towns in the American West.
Aiming to finish the manuscript late this year, so hopefully out in 2024 from @doubledaybooks.
One final, ironic note: I actually had the latest draft of my book in my lap when this happened! I suppose I could have handed the folder over to the mother and asked that she read it. Happy to come to the girl’s school to talk about AAPI history.

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More from @michaelluo

Dec 26, 2022
Speechless at this extraordinarily brave, visceral, and important story by Luke Mogelson, who spent two weeks embedded in the front lines, documenting the unimaginable. War reportage at its finest. Journalism in its most vital function: bearing witness. newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…
Meet Doc, a former marine with a degree in computer science who worked for Google. “A thick scar spanned his neck, from a bar fight in North Carolina during which someone had sliced his throat with a box cutter.”
Many foreigners, no matter how seasoned or élite, were unprepared for the reality of combat in Ukraine: the front line, which extends for roughly seven hundred miles, features relentless, industrial-scale violence of a type unknown in Europe since the Second World War.
Read 8 tweets
Aug 23, 2021
In this week’s @newyorker, I write about Mai Ngai’s new book, “The Chinese Question.” The gold rush made California the substrate for an experiment in multiracial democracy that had little precedent in the country’s history. Hint: it didn’t end well. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
“The Chinese of the gold-rush era are mostly anonymous to us today. The absence of their voices from historical accounts perhaps contributes to the mistaken impression that they were passive in the face of abuse.”
“Even though several million Irish and German immigrants had streamed into American cities, it was whites’ resentment toward the Chinese that became a virulent nationwide movement.”
Read 12 tweets
Aug 2, 2021
SIREN @JaneMayerNYer⁩: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in 49 states, 18 of which have passed new voting laws in the past 6 months. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
“Dark-money organizations…have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.”
Re: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. “Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right.”
Read 7 tweets
Jul 16, 2021
Extraordinary details here via @sbg1. Beginning in late 2020, Milley began having daily 8 am calls: “…both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck, we’re in an emergency situation. Our job is to land this plane safely...” newyorker.com/news/letter-fr…
“Milley repeatedly met in private with the Joint Chiefs. He told them to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump and not to carry out any such orders without calling him first…”
In the months after the election, with Trump seemingly willing to do anything to stay in power, the subject of Iran was repeatedly raised in White House meetings with the President, and Milley repeatedly argued against a strike.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 3, 2021
So much here in @williams_paige investigation in this week's @newyorker: harrowing scenes from Kenosha; what happens when guns are everywhere; revelations about Rittenhouse family's meeting with Enrique Tarrio six days after the Capitol insurrection. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
Rittenhouse, holding his rifle, reached some parked cars just as a protester fired a warning shot into the sky. Rittenhouse whirled; the bald man lunged; Rittenhouse fired, four times. The man fell in front of a Buick, wounded in the groin, back, thigh, hand, and head.
The nearest bystander was Richie McGinniss, the video chief at the Daily Caller, the online publication co-founded by Tucker Carlson. McGinniss, who had been covering protests all summer, had been following the chase so closely that he had nearly been shot himself.
Read 7 tweets
Jul 3, 2021
NEW @ronanfarrow @jiatolentino investigation on the conservatorship that stripped Britney Spears of her rights, and the pop star’s fight to regain control of her life. newyorker.com/news/american-…
Jacqueline Butcher, a former friend of the Spears family who was present in court for the conservatorship’s creation, in 2008: “At the time, I thought we were helping,” she said. “And I wasn’t, and I helped a corrupt family seize all this control.”
Robin Johnson, a court-ordered monitor: “There were so many people involved in her life that caused all of this craziness with her. I don’t have anything derogatory to say about her. . It was probably one of the saddest cases that I’ve ever done in my entire life.”
Read 7 tweets

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