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For years after World War II, the “liberal consensus”—the New Deal idea that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure—was a true consensus. It was so widely popular that in 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of the United States that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”

But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional tied the federal government to ensuring not just economic equality, but also civil rights. Opponents of the liberal consensus argued that the newly active federal government was misusing tax dollars taken from hardworking white men to promote civil rights for “undeserving” Black people. The troops President Dwight Eisenhower sent to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, for example, didn’t come cheap. The government’s defense of civil rights redistributed wealth, they said, and so was virtually socialism.

[Read: An attempt to resegregate Little Rock, of all places]

This intersection of race and economics was not new to the second half of the 20th century. It reached back into the past to resurrect an argument made by former Confederates during the Reconstruction years to overturn federal protection of Black rights after the Civil War.

Some of today’s Republicans are in the process of making that argument reality. Their insistence that all their opponents are socialists goes hand in hand with their effort to suppress Black and brown voting. When former President Donald Trump insists that the country has fallen to communism and “Marxists,” what he’s really saying is that a government in which racial minorities have a say is illegitimate.

The accusation of “socialism” had sharp teeth in the 1950s, as Americans recoiled from the growing influence of the Soviet Union and the rise of Communist China. But Republicans’ use of the word typically had little to do with actual, Bolshevik-style socialism. The theory that the people would rise up and take control of the means of production has never been popular in the United States. The best a Socialist Party candidate has ever done in an American presidential election was when Eugene V. Debs won about 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912.

Rather, in the United States, the political charge of socialism tended to carry a peculiar meaning, one forged in the white-supremacist backlash to Black civil rights in the 1870s.

During the Civil War, the Republicans in charge of the government both created national taxation and abolished legal slavery (except as punishment for crime). For the first time in U.S. history, voting in federal elections had a direct impact on people’s pocketbooks. Then, in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, extending the vote to Black men in the South. White southerners who hated the idea of Black people using the vote to protect themselves started to terrorize their Black neighbors. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.

But in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to protect the right of Black men to vote. Attorney General Amos Akerman oversaw the prosecution of more than 3,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, winning more than 1,000 convictions. Meanwhile, Congress passed laws to protect Black voting.

Suddenly, it was harder for white southerners to object to Black rights on racial grounds. So they turned to a new argument, one based in economics.

They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor, and they would vote for leaders who promised to build things such as roads and hospitals. Those public investments could be paid for only with tax levies, and most of the people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, although the infrastructure in which the southern legislatures were investing would help everyone, reactionaries claimed that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing.

Black voting was, one magazine insisted, “socialism in South Carolina.”

This argument that poor Black workers were dangerous socialists offered justification for former Confederates to block their Black neighbors from the polls, to read them out of American society, and ultimately to lynch them. It’s a peculiarly American version of “socialism,” and it might have been a historical anomaly had a small group of business leaders and southern racists not resurrected it in the 20th century as part of a deliberate effort to destroy the liberal consensus.

After World War II, most Republicans joined Democrats in believing that the federal government had to oversee business regulation, welfare programs, and infrastructure. They knew what businessmen would do to the economy unless they were checked; they had seen people homeless and hungry during the Depression.

And they scoffed at the notion that the New Deal system was a bad idea. They looked around at their homes, at their candy-colored cars that they drove on the new interstate highways built under what was then the biggest public-works project in U.S. history, and at their union-boosted paychecks in a nation with its highest gross domestic production ever, and they dismissed as a radical fringe the people trying to undermine this wildly successful system.

But the federal protection of civil rights added a new element to the liberal consensus that would threaten to tear it apart. Between 1967 and 1977, a North Carolina billboard urged people in “Klan Country” to “help fight Communism & Integration.”

The stagflation of the ’70s pushed middle-class Americans into higher tax brackets just when they needed their income most, and helped spread the sense that white tax dollars were being siphoned off to help racial minorities. As towns and governments tried to make up their declining funds with higher property taxes, angry property owners turned against the government. Republicans courted white workers by painting the Democrats as a party of grievance and special interests who simply wanted to pay off lazy Black supporters, rather than being interested in the good of America as a whole.

In 1976, former California Governor Ronald Reagan ran for president with the story of a “welfare queen” from the South Side of Chicago—code words for “Black”—who lived large on government benefits she stole. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” There was such a woman, but she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient. Nonetheless, the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy handed tax dollars to allegedly  undeserving Black Americans.

Reagan suggested a solution to such corruption. In August 1980, he spoke to voters in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 16 years and just a few miles from where the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been found murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan as they registered Black voters during 1964’s Freedom Summer. There, Reagan echoed the former Confederates during Reconstruction: “I believe in states’ rights,” he said.

Reagan’s campaign invited voters to remember a time before Black and brown voices and women began to claim equal rights. His campaign passed out buttons and posters urging voters to “make America great again.”

Voters put Reagan in the White House, where his administration cut taxes and slashed spending on public welfare programs (while pouring money into defense spending, and tripling the national debt). In the name of preventing socialism, those programs began the process of hollowing out the middle class.

In the years since 1981, wealth has moved dramatically upward. And yet, the language that linked socialism and minority voting never ceased to escalate.

Talk hosts such as Rush Limbaugh insisted that socialism was creeping through America at the hands of Black Americans, “feminazis,” and liberals. After its founding in 1996, the Fox News Channel joined the chorus of those who insisted that their political opponents were socialists trying to wreck the country. Republicans insisted that Barack Obama was a full-fledged socialist, and in 2018, Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers used the word socialism 144 times in a 72-page report attacking Democratic politicians. Trump’s press release for the report read: “Congressional Democrats Want to Take Money From Hardworking Americans to Fund Failed Socialist Policies.”

There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time: Since Reconstruction, white supremacists have argued that minority voting means socialism, and that true Americans stand against both. In recent history, that argument has led Republican-dominated state legislatures to make voting harder for people of color, and to rig the system through gerrymandering. Three years ago it led Trump and his supporters to try to overturn the results of a presidential election to keep their opponents out of power. They believed, and insist they still believe, that they had to destroy the government in order to save it.

This article is adapted from Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.

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In universities and newspapers, nonprofit organizations and even corporations, a new set of ideas about race, gender, and sexual orientation has gained huge influence. Attitudes to these ideas—which are commonly called “woke,” though I prefer a more neutral term, the “identity synthesis”—have split into two camps: those who blame them for all of America’s ills and those who defend them, largely uncritically.

Right-wing polemicists deride these ideas as a form of “cultural Marxism,” which has substituted identity categories such as race for the economic category of class but still aims at the same old goal of communist revolution. They invoke wokeness to oppose anything they dislike, such as sex ed and insufficiently patriotic versions of American history.

On the other side, many people in media and politics claim that wokeness is simply a matter of justice and decency: a willingness to acknowledge the cruelties of America’s past and a recognition of the ways they still shape the country. “Being woke,” Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who became a vocal critic of Donald Trump, has said, “just means being empathetic.”

[Adam Serwer: ‘Woke capital’ doesn’t exist]

Each position mischaracterizes these ideas, obscuring their true nature. Over recent decades, writers, activists, and scholars have melded a diverse set of ideas inspired by postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory into a new worldview that animates today’s progressive movements. It now constitutes a genuinely novel ideology, which has radically transformed what it means to be left-wing.

Amid all the contention, this ideology deserves assessment in a more evenhanded manner, one that weighs what is interesting or potentially useful about its tenets against the ways in which it undercuts the very values it claims to advance. And the key to a more sophisticated understanding and critique of these ideas lies in the story of where they came from.

At the beginning, there was Michel Foucault.

In his early years, the French philosopher was shaped by the fashionable “grand narratives” of his time. When he studied with the Hegelian philosopher Jean Hyppolite, Foucault imbibed the idea that history should be understood as the gradual realization of freedom in the world. When, a few years later, he went on to study with the Marxist thinker Louis Althusser, a passionate defender of the Soviet Union, Foucault embraced the idea that liberation would come in the form of the proletariat staging a worldwide revolution. In 1950, Foucault joined the French Communist Party, which was unquestioningly loyal to Joseph Stalin.

Yet Foucault soon chafed at the Marxist orthodoxy demanded by his comrades, leaving the party by 1953. “Over anyone who pretended to be on the left,” he would later complain, the party “laid down the law. One was either for or against; an ally or an adversary.” He became an adversary.

This combination of a commitment to left-wing ideals and a mistrust of grand narratives that justify coercion, including Marxism, constitutes the core of Foucault’s published work. In book after book, he argued against modern societies’ complacent assumption that they had made progress in the way they punish criminals or treat the mentally ill. Doubting claims to objective truth, Foucault believed that societies had become not more humane but merely more effective at controlling their subjects.

This paved the way for Foucault’s most influential argument, about the true nature of power. Power, he argued, is much more indirect than the top-down model traditionally taught in civics classes. Because real power lies in the normative assumptions embedded in the discourses that structure our society and the identity labels we use to make sense of the world, it is “produced from one moment to the next, at every point.”

This belief made Foucault deeply skeptical about the perfectibility of our social world. People would always chafe against the form that power takes at any given moment in history: “Where there is power, there is resistance,” he wrote. But this resistance, if successful, would itself come to exercise a power of its own. Even the most noble struggle, Foucault warned his readers, would contain within itself the seed of new forms of oppression.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: You can’t define woke]

Foucault left his devotees with a complicated legacy. On the one hand, they recognized that his philosophy allowed them to question the prevailing assumptions and institutions of their age, including claims to objective truth or universal validity. On the other hand, Foucault’s pessimism about the possibility of creating a less oppressive world disappointed them. As Noam Chomsky told me 50 years after a famous encounter with Foucault for a televised debate at a Dutch university, he had “never seen such an amoral—not immoral, amoral—person in my life.”

In the late 1970s and ’80s, a series of postcolonial thinkers, such as Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, set out to resolve this tension. Simultaneously influenced by Foucault and uncomfortable with his fatalistic conclusions, their ambition was to infuse the prospect for political agency back into his ideas.

Edward Said, a Palestinian American literary theorist who taught at Columbia University, shot to fame by arguing that the way Western writers had imagined the “Orient” helped them wield power over it, causing real-world harm. Explicitly acknowledging his debt to “Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse,” he claimed that analyzing the discourse of “Orientalism” was crucial to understanding “the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.”

This “discipline” of Oriental Studies cloaked itself as a scholarly tradition that claimed to be politically neutral, even objective. In reality, argued Said, “political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination, and scholarly institutions.” Historically, Western representations of the East justified colonial rule. Since then, Said argued, a newer set of ideas about the “Arab mind” had helped motivate U.S. interventions in the Middle East. Said’s goal was to free his readers from the pernicious power Orientalist assumptions still held.

This critique prepared the ground for a more politically engaged adaptation of postmodernism. For many of Orientalism’s readers, it seemed clear that the goal of cultural analysis should be to help those who have the least power. They sought to change the dominant discourse to help the oppressed resist the oppressor.

Postcolonial scholars took Said’s work as a model for how to apply discourse analysis to explicitly political ends. A new wave of researchers concerned with such topics as gender, the media, and the experiences of migrants and ethnic minorities quickly embraced their toolkit. In time, the idea that a lot of political activism might revolve around critiquing dominant discourses or labeling certain cultural artifacts as “problematic” went mainstream, finding currency on social-media platforms and in traditional newspapers.

[Franklin Foer: The new Republican battle cry]

Foucault’s legacy left postcolonial scholars with a second obstacle. In rejecting grand narratives, he had not only turned against the idea of universal values or objective truth; he was also arguing that identity labels such as “women,” “proletarians,” and the “masses of the Third World” were reductive. Such generalizations, he claimed, create the illusion that a hugely varied group of people share some essential set of characteristics; this misperception could even help perpetuate injustices. The oppressed, Foucault observed, do not need intellectuals to speak on their behalf.

Spivak, an Indian literary scholar, strongly disagreed. Parisian philosophes, she argued, could take their social standing for granted. But the people with whom she was most concerned had none of their resources and enjoyed no such recognition. In countries such as India, she concluded in her most celebrated article, the “subaltern” cannot speak.

This presented Spivak, who had made her name as an interpreter of postmodernist philosophers, with a dilemma. How could she stay true to her distrust of dominant discourses, including identity categories, while speaking on behalf of the marginalized groups for which she felt a deep kinship? The key to doing better, she argued, was to embrace identity markers that could prove useful in practice even if they might be suspect in theory. “I think we have to choose again strategically,” she suggested, “not universal discourse but essentialist discourse … I must say I am an essentialist from time to time.”

These cryptic remarks took on a life of their own. Faced with the problem of how to speak for the oppressed, scholars from numerous disciplines followed Spivak’s example. They continued in the spirit of postmodernism to cast doubt on claims of scientific objectivity or universal principles. At the same time, they insisted on using broad identity categories and speaking for the downtrodden by embracing what they came to call “strategic essentialism.”

Over time, Spivak’s paradoxical compromise became a political rallying cry. Today, activists who carefully acknowledge that race or gender or ability status “is a social construct” nevertheless go on to make surprisingly essentializing claims about what, say, brown people or women or the disabled believe and demand.

The embrace of strategic essentialism also helps explain the logic behind the rise of new social customs, such as the establishment of racially separate “affinity groups” in many progressive spaces. Spivak came to believe that a commitment to identity categories such as race was strategically useful. Many progressives took this to mean that activists—and even grade-school students—should be encouraged to conceive of themselves first and foremost in racial terms.

Slowly but surely, these ideas gained traction in different parts of academia, including law schools. A new generation of legal scholars set out to question long-held beliefs about the judiciary, such as the idea that judges made decisions based on fine points of legal doctrine rather than on their own worldview or self-interest. But one member of this emerging tradition who proved especially influential argued that it had a crucial blindspot of its own: race.

Derrick Bell was a Black lawyer who spent the 1960s doing heroic work in the fight against desegregation. As an attorney for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, his mission was to win compliance with the major judicial victories of the civil-rights era, such as Brown v. Board of Education. In total, he helped oversee some 300 cases involving the desegregation of schools and businesses.

At first, Bell found his work exhilarating. But the longer he stayed in the job, the more dispirited he became. His lawsuits took so long to wind their way through the courts that many of the boys and girls he represented were adults by the time the school they’d hoped to attend was integrated.

Even then, progress could prove illusory. As Black schools were dissolved, many good Black teachers lost their jobs. And as white schools were integrated, many parents chose to send their kids to private schools, or moved out of the neighborhood altogether. In the end, some of the newly “integrated” schools were still predominantly Black and still suffered from a lack of resources.

[Adam Serwer: Trumpism is ‘identity politics’ for white people]

These disappointments transformed Bell’s thinking. By the time his first major scholarly article appeared, in 1976, Bell had come to reject basic assumptions that had underpinned his earlier work as a litigator. Expanding on an argument that—as Bell himself acknowledged—had originally been advanced by segregationists, he warned that civil-rights lawyers, caught between their clients’ wishes and their own ideals, were trying to “serve two masters.”

“Having convinced themselves that Brown stands for desegregation and not education,” Bell complained, “the established civil rights organizations steadfastly refuse to recognize reverses in the school desegregation campaign—reverses which, to some extent, have been precipitated by their rigidity.” Civil-rights lawyers needed instead to listen to their Black clients, Bell said. According to him, that meant becoming more open to creating schools that were (to reappropriate the disingenuous segregationist mantra) more truly “separate but equal.”

Bell’s skepticism about the civil-rights movement also made him distrust the idea that the racial attitudes of most Americans were improving. “Racism,” he contended, is not “a holdover from slavery that the nation both wants to cure and is capable of curing”; rather, it is “an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.” The civil-rights movement might have succeeded in making discrimination “less visible,” but, he wrote in the early 1990s, racism had become “neither less real nor less oppressive.”

According to Bell, the legal remedies implemented during the civil-rights era, such as school desegregation, would never suffice to overcome the legacy of slavery. It was high time, he wrote in a 1992 paper, for a “review and replacement of the now defunct racial equality ideology.” To win lasting progress, Bell proposed, would require more than nominal equality; it would take explicit group rights that compensated the marginalized. He and his followers called for policies that openly distinguished among citizens on the basis of skin color, so that those who had historically been oppressed would henceforth receive preferential treatment.

Bell died in 2011. A decade later, his ideas are enjoying a second life as an avowedly anti-racist left is embracing his call for race-sensitive public policy. The determination to put “racial equity” before old-fashioned forms of “racial equality” is evident today in many public policies, such as when, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the Small Business Administration prioritized nonwhite restaurant owners for emergency relief funds.

Much of today’s progressive politics is a popularized version of what I call the “identity synthesis.” To a remarkable extent, the ideas, norms, and practices that have become so prevalent on social media and in corporate diversity trainings owe a debt to these four thinkers in particular. They are rooted in a deep skepticism about objective truth inspired by Foucault, the use of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends taken from Said, an embrace of essentialist categories of identity derived from Spivak, and a preference for public policies that explicitly tie the treatment a person receives to their group identity, as advocated by Bell. (Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Black feminist legal scholar who coined the idea of “intersectionality,” which has since taken on a life of its own, might be considered another key member of this progressive pantheon.)

The mainstream influence of these ideas makes all the more interesting the fact that several of these thinkers came to have misgivings about the uses to which they were put. Foucault, who died in 1984, would, I suspect, have been quick to remind his devotees that the impulse to reshape discourses for political ends can, despite the liberatory aim, readily morph into new forms of repression.

Said, who died in 2003, addressed the problem explicitly. “Identity,” he wrote shortly before his death, is “as boring a subject as one can imagine.” For that reason, he admonished, “marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, and not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”

[Graeme Wood: What happens when a carnival barker writes intellectual history]

Spivak, too, was forthright about her dismay at how the idea of strategic essentialism had helped forge a new ideology. Praising the “political use of humor” by African Americans, she lamented its absence among today’s “university identity wallahs.”

The identity-synthesis advocates are driven by a noble ambition: to remedy the historic injustices that scar every country, including America. These injustices are and remain real. Although social movements and legislative reforms can help address them, the practice of politics, as the sociologist Max Weber famously wrote, is the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.” It rarely provides remedies as quickly or as comprehensively as hoped—leading some to conclude that a more radical break with the status quo is needed.

The appeal of the synthesis stems from promising just that. It claims to lay the conceptual groundwork necessary to remake the world by overcoming the reverence for long-standing principles that supposedly constrain our ability to achieve true equality. Advocates of the identity synthesis reject universal values like free speech as distractions that conceal and perpetuate the marginalization of minority groups. Trying to make progress toward a more just society by redoubling efforts to realize such ideals, its advocates claim, is a fool’s errand.

But these ideas will fail to deliver on their promises. For all their good intentions, they undermine progress toward genuine equality among members of different groups. Despite its allure, the identity synthesis turns out to be a trap.

As the identity synthesis has gained in influence, its flaws have become harder to ignore. A striking number of progressive advocacy groups, for example, have been consumed by internal meltdowns in recent years. “We used to want to make the world a better place,” a leader of one progressive organization complained recently. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.” As institutions such as the Sierra Club and the ACLU have implemented the norms inspired by the identity synthesis, they have had more difficulty serving their primary missions.

The identity synthesis is also starting to remake public policy in ways that are more likely to create a society of warring tribes. In the early months of the pandemic, for example, a key advisory committee to the CDC recommended that states prioritize essential workers in the rollout of scarce vaccines rather than the elderly, in part because “racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented” among seniors. Not only did this policy, according to the CDC’s own models, have the probable outcome of increasing the overall number of Americans who would perish in the pandemic; it also placed different ethnic groups in competition with one another for lifesaving medications.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Intersectionality is not the problem]

When decision makers appear out of touch with the values and priorities of most citizens, demagogues thrive. The well-founded fears roused by the election of Trump accelerated the ascendancy of the identity synthesis in many elite institutions. Conversely, the newfound hold that these ideas now have over such institutions makes it more likely that he might win back the White House in 2024. The identity synthesis and far-right populism may at first glance appear to be polar opposites; in political practice, one is the yin to the other’s yang.

Many attacks on so-called wokeness are motivated by bad faith. They fundamentally misrepresent its nature. But that is no reason to deny how a new ideology has acquired such power in our society. In fact, it’s imperative to recognize that its founders explicitly saw themselves as rejecting widely held values, such as the core tenets of the civil-rights movement.

The lure of the identity synthesis to so many people is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals. But the likely outcome of uncritically accepting this ideology is a society that places an unremitting emphasis on our differences. The effect is to pit rigidly defined identity groups against one another in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition.

Critics of the identity trap commonly claim that progressive activists are “going too far.” But what is at issue is not having too much of a good thing. The real problem is that, even at its best, this ideology violates the ardent aspirations for a better future to which all of us should remain committed.

In an age of democratized self-expression, you need not be Serena Williams or Prince Harry to write a memoir—or for people to want to read about your life. Not all of these first-person works are good, but more of them means that some will be good, even fascinating. Take an ever-swelling corner of the memoir market: those written about the Asian American experience. Identity, in these books, is a constant theme, but refreshingly, it plays out in all sorts of different registers—say, racial politics (Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings) or grief (Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart) or friendship (Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Stay True). The most compelling of these create space for bigger questions—about the historical legacy of marginalization, or the nature of belonging—through the details of a particular set of lives.

A recent entrant into this arena reassures me that the proliferation of first-person storytelling is yielding outstanding works. Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors, an aching account of the author’s family in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the tail end of the Chinese Exclusion era, is an exemplar of the historical memoir.

Exclusion, which lasted from the late-19th century to World War II, was the United States’ official policy of forbidding immigration and citizenship to Chinese people. The orphan bachelors were the men who, during that period, came to work in America’s goldfields, on its railroads, or in its restaurants and laundries. Most came as “paper sons” who circumvented the law by falsely claiming to be the sons of Chinese American citizens. Trading their identities for fake ones, they toiled alone in America. Some had wives and children in China who could not legally come over, and those who were single suffered from a double exclusion—the law forbade not only immigration but also interracial marriage. These men are known in Cantonese as the lo wah que, the “old sojourners.”

Ng’s father called Exclusion a brilliant crime because it was bloodless: “four generations of the unborn.” Ng and her siblings were part of the first generation that repopulated their neighborhood after the lifting of Exclusion but before the immigration reforms of the 1960s. Beyond telling her family’s story, Ng memorializes an enclave stuck in time, its demographics twisted by cruel constraints. She shows that Exclusion has a reverberating and painful afterlife that dictates the limits of inclusion: One does not simply lead to the other.

Orphan bachelor is not a translation from Chinese, but a phrase that Ng’s father came up with. To her, it signals the tragedy and romance of the sojourners: their labor and loneliness, and also their hope. By the time Ng is coming up, these men are wizened and gray-haired; the generational shift is clear. Still, though the memoir plays out from Ng’s perspective, it is full of color from the old timers’ lives. As young girls, Ng and her sister respectfully address these men, who while away the time in Portsmouth Square, as “grandfather.” When she introduces them to us, she uses names that bespeak their individuality: Gung-fu Bachelor, Newspaper Bachelor, Hakka Bachelor, Scholar Bachelor. In the park, they argue politics and play chess. Some have jobs; others do not. They shuffle off, Ng writes, “their steps a Chinese American song of everlasting sorrow.”

From an early age, Ng seems to have an inclination toward history, and toward storytelling—tendencies that help her observe the bigger-picture currents at the edges of her family’s tale. She spends time with Scholar Bachelor in particular, who lives in an SRO hotel, works in a restaurant, and teaches in the Chinese school where the immigrants’ kids go in the afternoon after “English school.” A sincere, tyrannical teacher who recites Chinese poetry from the Tang dynasty, he encourages Ng, a budding writer, to look “to the old country for inspiration.”

Another orphan bachelor who influences Ng is her father, a merchant seaman and raconteur who can “take one fact and clothe it in lore.” He lived in San Francisco’s Chinatown for almost a decade before he went back to his ancestral village and found a wife, with whom he returned to California, after Exclusion lifted, to start a family. Like many who’ve faced unjust barriers and ongoing precarity, he tells tall tales filled with warlord violence, famine, and adversity. These stories are the currency traded among the orphan bachelors in the park, necessary in order to believe that their present misfortunes are not the worst. It may be bad in America, but not as bad as it was in China.

The impulse to narrate hardship—and, in so doing, lay claim to it—is evident in the relationship between Ng’s parents, who are full of pity, both for themselves and for each other. They have little in common other than their suffering, but even in that, they are competitive. Ng’s dad rails about the racism he has faced in the United States. Her mom retorts that “nothing compared to the brutality of Japan’s imperial army,” which she experienced growing up in pre-Communist China. Seeking relief from all of the fighting, Ng’s father ships out and leaves his wife and children for a month or more at a time. Her mom works as a seamstress, during the day at the sewing factory and at night at home; Ng and her sister go to sleep and wake up to the sound of the sewing machine.

Theirs is not a story of upward mobility or assimilation. Going to sea and sewing, the arguments and resentments—they all continue, even after the parents buy a small grocery store and a house on the outskirts of the city. In the 1960s, Ng’s father signs up for the U.S. government’s Chinese Confession Program, in which paper sons could “confess” their fake identities in exchange for the possibility of legalized status. The program is controversial: A single confession implicates an entire lineage, and there is no guarantee of being granted legal status (indeed, some are deported). Ng’s mom pressures Ng’s dad to confess; she wants to be able to bring her mother, whom she has not seen for decades, to the States. But confessing invalidates his legal status, and his citizenship isn’t restored until many years later.

[Read: Racism has always been a part of the Asian American experience]

Confession ruins the marriage. Still, there are small acts of devotion. When Ng’s mother is diagnosed with cancer, her father travels to Hong Kong and smuggles back an expensive traditional Chinese treatment: a jar of snake’s gallbladders, which he tenderly spoon-feeds her at her bedside. This ongoing tension is one of the memoir’s remarkable qualities. The story it tells is, in one sense, simply about the aches and dramas of a single family. But in another, its scope is more deeply existential. It considers the unjust constraints that can make unhappiness feel like fate, and the role that stubborn fealty can play in helping a family, somehow, stay together.

One of the things Ng’s dad, ever the weaver of yarns, teaches her is that stories always contain secrets; the important thing is to find the truth in them, however hidden they might be. That makes Orphan Bachelors something of an excavation—one that seems to build on a previous effort. Thirty years ago, Ng’s evocative debut novel, Bone, told a version of this story.

That novel was similarly focused on a family in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the Confession era: The mother is a seamstress and the stepfather is a merchant seaman; the marriage is fraught, buffeted by adversity; the first-person protagonist is, like Ng herself, the eldest daughter. In the novel, the middle daughter has jumped to her death from the rooftop of the Chinatown projects. The sister’s death is the plot device that forces a reckoning with the lies that fester in the family’s troubled relationships—and the bigger lies that have structured the lives of the paper sons.

Bone is full of minimalist but distinctive place-setting details—a chicken being plucked “till it was completely bald,” the culottes the mother must sew to meet popular demand in the flower-power ’60s. In Orphan Bachelors, Ng has enriched the environment further by attending to linguistic subtleties. She understands what language can reveal about identity formation—what it creates and enables, what it denies and obscures. Of the subdialect of Cantonese that she hears crisscrossing the neighborhood while growing up, Ng writes, “Our Toishan was a thug’s dialect, the Tong Man’s hatchetspeak. Every curse was a plunging dagger. Kill. Kill. You.” (It’s written in English, and although I can hear the Chinese, non-Chinese speakers will have no trouble getting it.) The second-generation children live in between languages, “obedient, polite, and respectful” in English school, yet like “firecrackers” in Chinese school. “We talked back. We never shut up,” Ng writes. “Our teachers grimaced at our twisty English-laced Chinese. We were Americans and we made trouble.”

In a way, the secret that Ng reveals about this era—across fiction and memoir—is how the trauma of Exclusion is transferred from one generation to the next: the complications of true and fake family histories, the desire of the younger generation to unburden themselves of that difficult inheritance, the impossibility of actually escaping it. In Bone, we see the dissonance between familial duty and selfhood playing out from a young woman’s point of view. Orphan Bachelors captures the longer arc of Ng’s life as a Chinatown daughter, including her parents’ deaths. The struggle to balance devotion to your elders with living your own life, it suggests, does not necessarily end when those elders have passed away.

As a historian who has written three books on aspects of Chinese Exclusion, I have explained how Exclusion separated families and how Confession separated them still. I hope I have told the story well enough. I am grateful to Ng for lending her voice to this history and crafting a narrative that reckons with this period’s devastating psychic costs. The storyteller’s delusion, as Ng puts it in Orphan Bachelors, is the belief that if you tell the story right, you will be understood. It may be an impossible task, but with this latest endeavor, she is getting closer.