Includes bibliographical references and index.

Gold Mountain -- Indian, Negro, or Chinaman -- The Great Army and the Iron Road -- Colorblind -- Rope! More rope! -- The cauldron -- Lewd and immoral purposes -- Order of Caucasians -- The Chinese must go! -- The mission -- The Chinese question -- Beyond debate -- The gatekeepers -- Transformations -- Wipe out the plague spots -- White men, fall in -- Driven out -- Contagion -- No return -- The resistance -- Native sons -- Ruin and rebirth -- The station -- Becoming Chinese American -- Confession.

"In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act --a measure barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty years--Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as a people 'residing apart by themselves.' They were, Field concluded, 'strangers in the land.' Today, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, yet this label still hovers over Asian Americans. In [this book], Luo traces anti-Asian feeling in America to the first wave of immigrants from China in the mid-nineteenth-century: laborers who traveled to California in search of gold and railroad work. Their communities almost immediately faced mobs of white vigilantes who drove them from their workplaces and homes. ... In 1965, when LBJ's Immigration and Nationality Act forbade discrimination by national origin, America opened its doors wide to families like those of Luo's parents, but he finds that the centuries of exclusion of Chinese-Americans left a legacy: many Asians are still treated, and feel, like outsiders today"--