Charlotte Brooks's American Exodus provides a captivating account of the immigration of Chinese Americans from the United States to China. Within migration studies, there has been a long-standing effort to diversify the field with studies that pay increased attention to transnational movements of students, funds, and personal or familial networks. Immigration from the United States to China, along with return migration, is an understudied phenomenon. This book makes great strides to remedy that.

Brooks identifies two types of Chinese American immigrants. The first consisted of the sons and daughters of Chinese immigrants who returned to Guangdong Province or Hong Kong through family and merchant networks to study or work. The second included Chinese Americans who studied at US universities and then sought the kinds of vocational opportunities in China that were closed to them by American racism. Because in many cases they dreamed of using their knowledge to aid in China's development, Brooks terms this population the “modernizers.” The line between these two types of migrants proved most stark before the 1920s, though Brooks argues that they “never fully lost their meaning” (p. 9).

Brooks follows these migrants in five roughly chronological chapters beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and concluding at the end of World War II. Throughout these decades, the merchants/students and modernizers grappled with thorny questions about what it meant to be a citizen. Both China and the United States maintained a rhetoric of acceptance and belonging that did not match the lived experience of these immigrants. The United States after Wong Kim Ark acknowledged US citizens by virtue of place of birth, but the reality was that the full benefits of citizenship were conferred only on those who were also white. When Chinese Americans traveled to China, American consular officials invoked their dual citizenship to dismiss them, even going so far as to invent their own interpretations of nationality law to determine at what point Chinese Americans might be considered to have lost their US citizenship (p. 94). In both legal disputes in the late Qing era and in existential crises such as the Japanese invasions of the 1930s, US representatives in China abandoned Chinese Americans or provided only limited support.

Meanwhile, Brooks demonstrates that the rise of the Republican era and Sun Yat-sen's infamous laudatory tributes to the support of the overseas Chinese did not prevent the Guomindang-led government from treating many Chinese American immigrants as suspect. With their Western ideals and limited facility in Chinese, Brooks explains, new arrivals from the United States often sought refuge in foreign enclaves and colonized spaces in Shanghai and Hong King, where they could carve out a livelihood that did not require them to support political goals or tactics of the Guomindang.

Chinese American immigrants to China have been largely overlooked in histories of the migrations and diplomatic relationships between the two countries they bridge. American Exodus is a welcome remedy to this problem, making impressive use of the archival records generated by the intricacies of Exclusion Era immigration paperwork, available newspapers, and the records of private institutions and businesses to overcome the challenges of archival access in the present-day People's Republic of China. In this, Brooks weaves a thoughtful and deeply engaging narrative that brings to light a population that we have long known existed in a vague sense but had no systematic understanding of to consult. In the process, she ably bridges the migration and diplomatic histories of China and the United States, offering new insights about how constructions of citizenship and activist immigrants contribute to each. With its frequent use of colorful individual life stories, photographs, and lively, jargon-free language, this book will appeal to undergraduates as well as seasoned scholars of immigration history, overseas Chinese, and Sino-American relations.

In the course of her fascinating narrative, Brooks notes that Chinese migrants with citizenship in other Anglophone countries faced a similar “in-between” status, but she does not delve far into the extent to which overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia did as well. To what extent were Chinese Americans inherently set apart from the rest of the Chinese diaspora? Brooks makes passing reference to these comparisons on several occasions in the book, and a more complete comparison is far beyond the scope of her project. But it appears to be a fruitful avenue for future inquiry. Overseas Chinese and Chinese American histories have not often spoken directly to one another, but American Exodus suggests there might be more room to do so, at least with respect to returning migrants in China in the first half of the twentieth century.