Mae Ngai is the Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and a professor of history at Columbia University. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. Her latest book, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, was winner of the 2022 Bancroft Prize. This distinguished history of the Chinese diaspora and global capitalism chronicles how a feverish alchemy of race and money brought Chinese people to the West and reshaped the nineteenth century. Drawing on ten years of research across five continents, Ngai narrates the story of the thousands of Chinese who left their homeland in pursuit of gold and how they formed communities and organizations to help navigate their perilous new world.
