American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods
- ISBN13: 9781416557241
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The mystery of Chinatown as foreign yet familiar has been long established in the American imagination. Visitors come to expect this, looking for “something different” in its narrow lanes and fish markets. They can taste a world apart, listen to a foreign language, and try to barter for a trinket on the street—without ever leaving the country. And then they go home, sometimes just a few streets away, and get on with the everyday. What is truly under the radar is what they don’t see: a unique community getting on with its own everyday.
In American Chinatown, Bonnie Tsui takes an affectionate and awestruck look at the bustling part of town that has bewitched her ever since she was a child, when she would eagerly await her grandfather’s return from the fortune cookie factory. By interweaving her own personal impressions with the experiences of those living in Chinatowns all across the United States today, Tsui beautifully captures its vivid stories, giving readers a deeper look into what “Chinatown” means to its inhabitants—and to America at large.
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Pleasant but unthoughtful: more a series of travel-magazine articles than a “people’s history”,
This book has a couple of chapters on each of five Chinatowns (San Francisco, New York, LA, Hawaii, and Las Vegas), but doesn’t really build to any cumulative point or additional insight. Instead it reads like a collection of pleasant but shallow magazine articles, of the kind you might skim on a long flight or in a dentist’s office. Each chapter contains a few of Tsui’s interesting interviews with a representative Chinatown resident or figure. And large swaths of the interviews are either transcribed verbatim or paraphrased; this gives the book a nice mix of voices, but also leaves it seeming scattered and disorganized without any real unifying idea.
The passages of the book written in Tsui’s own voice are generally glib and unmemorable, at best pleasant magazine writing and at worst embarrassingly trite amateur sociology. At best, there are many moments of family memoir, which don’t really provide a unifying frame for the book since Tsui herself, a Long Islander, didn’t grow up even in one of these Chinatowns. There are also some pleasant nuggets of cultural history here and there, about Chinese people in early Hollywood or the invention of fortune cookies, but these remain very light and shallow without even pointing the reader to a better source for in-depth information. And at worst, there are countless deadly-glib conclusions about the “meaning of Chinatown.” The trite shallowness of Tsui’s social generalization is truly stunning, and it made the book hard to slog through without groaning; I found myself skipping from interview to interview trying to avoid the next cheap paradox rather than having to make it through another college-freshman-esque paragraph about the irreducible tensions between assimilation and preservation of cultural identity, lucrative tourism and residential poverty, and so on. Even Tsui’s interviews with scholars in fields like urban studies and cultural history are reduced to glib oversimplifications rather than developed arguments.
There’s also a subtler problem with the book, one displayed in Tsui’s choice of Chinatowns. In each city she’s chosen to write about the culture and the residents of an old historic Chinatown while she ignores — or even denigrates! — newer, and often more vital, immigrant neighborhoods. In San Francisco she ignores the Richmond district; in Los Angeles she fails to discuss the San Gabriel Valley; in New York she barely mentions Flushing. In each case, this means writing about a moribund historic neighborhood, and focusing on stale cultural tourism, rather than visiting a place bustling with new immigrants and extraordinary food. If the book really were a history, this would be a defensible choice — but apart from the interviews there’s really no research, and only a very thin received historical account, here.
So this is ultimately a purely touristic book, informative only on the most superficial level while its trite attempts at analysis and historical reflection fall flat. Even non-Chinese readers, if they’ve grown up near a Chinatown or known its residents, will learn relatively little from reading it. Rather than anything like a real “people’s history,” without a single animating perspective, without much political, historical or cultural insight, this book seems like a cultural backgrounder for suburbanites.
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|documentary-style survey of five Chinatowns,
Notwithstanding the subtitle, this book is more a documentary-style survey than a history. The author conducted a large number of interviews with people living in or connected with Chinatowns in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Las Vegas. Some insights about the history of these various Chinatowns emerged, but the book is primarily an oral history of various people’s experiences with Chinatown, most of it from a contemporary perspective.
My favorite was the Los Angeles segment, largely because of the description of how the film business has impacted Chinatown over the years. Opportunities for Chinese-American actors to play leading roles were rare until recently. Even when a film was set in Asia, the leading roles would often go to Caucasian actors in “yellowface.” But there was also opportunity in these films for residents of the Los Angeles Chinatown, as extras in a “cast of thousands.” Hilariously enough, during filming, sometimes the whole population of Chinatown ended up at the film studio playing Chinese peasants. It was a good way to pick up a little extra money.
Tsui does a good job describing the paradoxes of Chinatown. To big-city Chinese visiting America, Chinatown looks dirty, shabby, and old-fashioned. Their Chinese cities are clean, modern, and convenient, sometimes more so than American cities. The iconic “oriental” look of San Francisco’s Chinatown is not its original incarnation. Before the earthquake of 1906, Chinatown just looked, architecturally-speaking, like part of the Old West. After the earthquake, in an effort to win goodwill for Chinese-Americans in San Francisco, Chinatown’s backers had white architects construct the area’s “Oriental” look that we associate with Chinatown today. Fortune cookies, of course, are not Chinese but Chinese-American, and people from various parts of China often feel less than fully at home in restaurants run by immigrants from another region.
Chinatown tends to take on the local flavor of the location where it is found. Nowhere is this true more than the last two Chinatowns studied, Honolulu and Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Chinatown is found inside a mall constructed specifically for that purpose and carefully promoted by politically-astute backers. New immigrants are essential to keeping a thriving Chinatown going, even though they often suffer the worst living conditions.
“American Chinatown” wasn’t exactly what I expected, but I felt like I learned a lot about how Chinatown works in today’s world and about how people feel about it. It’s a fast read and an interesting one.
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|A close look at American Chinatowns,
The book is written like a TV documentary. The author interviews various people to document their different experiences in their local Chinatowns. It offers intimate glimpses of the inner working of various Chinatowns. I learned many unique facts:
- The San Francisco Chinatown was built by Caucasian architects who had certain ideals about what a Chinatown ought to look like.
- Many residents in the LA Chinatown were in the movie business in the early part of the 20th century.
- The garment industry was the key industry for the NY Chinatown.
- Most of the fortune cookies are made in Long Island City.
It is a worthwhile book for those who want to go beyond the touristy view of Chinatown. I highly recommend it.
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