John Doe Chinaman: Beth Lew-Williams on the History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law

“The systematic erasure of the Chinese was not an accident. It was, in many ways, structured.” — Beth Lew-Williams

Her Chinese-American grandfather asked her to turn off the tape recorder as they spoke. Beth Lew-Williams was a history student interviewing her grandad, her YeYe, two weeks before he died. He had come to America in 1930, aged nine, in violation of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and was held on Angel Island for what he always said was nine months. Years later she looked up the file. It was “only” thirty-four days.

It was the shame of it all, he confessed to Lew-Williams, after she switched off the recorder. For his whole life, he blamed himself rather than American racial laws for his humiliation.

That student is now a professor of history at Princeton, and this year she has won more or less every prize for John Doe Chinaman, her history of Chinese life under American racial law. The Bancroft. The American Book Award. The Merle Curti for social history. The Langum for legal history. The Western History Association’s book prize. And now the grand Canadian one, the 2026 Cundill, worth seventy-five thousand dollars, the most lucrative history prize in the world.

“John Doe Chinaman” is the term Lew-Williams kept meeting in the archives — in the court records, in the census, in the newspapers. Record after record of that nameless Chinese man. Such anonymity, she argues, was purposefully manufactured by thousands of local and state laws governing where Chinese people could live, who they could marry, and whether they could testify against a white man in court.

A Chinese Jim Crow? Lew-Williams reminds us that the earliest racial zoning laws in America were aimed at the Chinese. So were the earliest restrictive covenants, written into deeds in the 1880s. First Chinese-Americans. Then African-Americans. The subtitle of John Doe Chinaman describes it as a “forgotten” history. No longer. This acclaimed book forces us to remember the humiliation of nameless Chinese immigrants like Lew-Williams’s YeYe.

FURTHER READING

•   John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press), by Beth Lew-Williams.

•   The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press), by Beth Lew-Williams.

•   The 2026 shortlist, Cundill History Prize.

•   The 2026 Bancroft Prizes, Columbia University Libraries.

•   Beth Lew-Williams, Department of History, Princeton University.

•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Sophia Rosenfeld on the age of choice, Joseph Kelly on the prehistory of American fascism, Stacey Patton on how white America learned to lynch black children, and Susan Neiman on calling it evil.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Beth Lew-Williams is a professor of history at Princeton, where in 2014 she became the university’s first appointment in Asian American history. She grew up in Davis, California and took her doctorate at Stanford.