Customer Reviews

American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

A very informative book about Chinatowns. The author did her work, made a lot of researches, interviewed many local personalities, and at the same time learned more about her roots. There are many side stories on interesting people who helped formed the history of each of the 5 individual Chinatowns. From where I came from (Philippines), there is also a huge Chinatown which is like a magical place when my parents used to bring us there when we were young. Until now, we cherish the memories as we eat, sample exotic delicacies, try medicines and even cheap electronics. I have been to Chinatown in Honolulu, New York, Washington DC and Los Angeles. Most of them are crowded and noisy. But always a very interesting and enjoyable place to visit.

The book digs deeper than what was in the surface. It tells the story of a very close knit community. How its inhabitants have lived and left and came back. How members of families left their original country to chase their dreams and future for their families. How they find protection and comfort within the shelter of these towns. It also explain how some aspects of Chinatowns are not really authentically Chinese but were built and heavily influenced by the local surrounding to fight for its own existence. And how many have predicted that Chinatowns will eventually die of its own death but amazingly remain alive.

Overall a great read full of fascinating facts about the subject.

I learned information about the various China towns that I did not know before, but the book did not seem to dig in deep enough as to what makes any one of those China towns what it is.

I think the book would have been better had it focused on just one of those towns, and took a deeper look into its history alone and the people who built it and live there now. I never really got to really know the people or "feel" the history of any community the author covered. The book did offer some interesting history and words from interesting people, yet it just seemed a bit superficial.

Not a bad book really, and I am glad I read it, but it isn't a great book either.

I really enjoyed The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food so I hoped that American Chinatown would be an equally enjoyable and informative read. Sadly, informative is the only part of the equation that I found. I must disclosed that I only made it through the lengthy introduction and the large section on San Francisco's Chinatown. I can't fault Ms. Tsui's information or her thorough coverage of the topic - she was really a bit too thorough with the many references to a "gilded ghetto" - but the delivery just wasn't that enjoyable.

In the section on San Francisco's Chinatown, she covers the history of the neighborhood, its origins in racism and the reason for the almost cartoonish architecture, and the current affordable housing issues for new immigrants and those who choose to stay in the neighborhood. She interviews activists, historians and youth that live and work in the area. But as a reader, I never got a real picture of the neighborhood. I've been to this Chinatown and it was only from my own memories that I had a sense of the places she referenced. For a place that is so full of history, sights, sounds, smells and tastes, Tsui's version of San Francisco's famous Chinatown was decidedly dry and uninteresting. Where was the life of this area? Where were the stories that really gave the reader a flavor of the past? Twice she mentioned a waiter, Edsel Wong, that made Sam Wo's restaurant famous but she never tells the reader the story so we understand the reference. Details like this might have made the book more interesting for me.

Overall, it seems well-researched and it could have been an interesting topic for readers - whether they have a connection to a Chinatown or not - but it just fell flat.

I grew up in San Francisco's satellite Chinatown mentioned in this book - the Richmond District. I was one of the few white kids in my school, and grew up eating dim sum and snacking on Haw Flakes and Pocky sticks. After moving away ten years ago to a small, mostly white town in far Northern Cali, I long for the sights and sounds of the neighborhood where I grew up. The author is Chinese, but sounds like she had a similar experience growing up in that she did not live in Chinatown, but felt at home there, even though she was a tiny bit of an outsider.

This book starts out by talking about San Francisco's Chinatown - how it came to be, the racism that confronted residents of the past and still does in the present, and brings Chinatown to life by talking personally with some of the folks who live there today. I'm frankly not that interested in history, but this author really brought it alive by connecting it to modern day life and talking about the human stories behind the history.

The author then moves on to talking about her own family's past in New York's Chinatown, then discusses some of the other Chinatowns in the US.

This isn't an academic study, and it doesn't try to draw too broad of conclusions about what it all means. Rather, it's a humanizing portrait of how some very different Chinatowns came to be, and what the culture is like there now. As a person missing the Chinese culture of my home, and the stark differences between the Chinatown facade and everyday life for the residents, I thought this book was a wonderful read. The style is clear and simple, and is warm towards Chinatown and its residents while being realistic about the negative aspects of Chinatowns.

Being a Sinologst, I've studied Chinese History, specializing in the Sung Dyasnty. I've also visited the many Chinatowns around the US, but I've always viewed the history of those places in light of Chinese History. This book provides each enclave with a history of its own with only a reference back to the cultures that gave them birth. Excellent and informative.

Having been born in Hong Kong and raised in San Francisco Chinatown, I can verify the accuracy of her information. I've also had the opportunity to visit the Chinatowns of LA, Vegas, Boston, and Dallas, Seattle, and Vancouver (in Canada, not CA) and see a lot of the things she's talked about. In particular, I definitely agree with her analysis of the exploding rise of Mandarin speakers versus Cantonese speakers of the 80's and early 90's.

Overall, a very good read, and her history is a good supplement for me.

Recommended.

Ling Fung (Bonnie) Tsui describes the character and history of five Chinatowns: San Francisco, New York, LA, Honolulu, and Las Vegas. She's been a resident of two of them herself and as an ABC (American Born Chinese) finds herself fascinated by them. Edit: I wanted to mention, but forgot, that this book is quite obviously a work of love for 'Chinatown' - all of them, even the ones not included here.

I have no Chinese ancestry whatsoever, but found myself enthralled by this book. Each Chinatown has a different character and history - New York's is the largest and most industry (sweatshop) driven, San Francisco's is the oldest yet most artificial architecturally, Honolulu's was most insulated from the early 20th Century's pervasive anti-Chinese sentiment, etc.

Tsui leads the section on each city with a hand drawn map, gives her own impressions of each, and interviews various 'players' in each Chinatown, from the conservative old guard to the thoroughly Americanized youth who nonetheless have a natural attraction to their roots. Particular subjects merit their own chapters, such as the very American Chinese invention of fortune cookies and the largest producer of them in NYC, Wonton Foods.

What I found most fascinating were the contradictions that life is so fond of - no matter the city, Chinatown is both a refuge and a trap, and that comes across very clearly in the many personal interviews. It's a place of familiarity and people you can rely on where they speak your language(s), but if you don't learn English you're trapped. For many parents who don't have the time, the best you can hope for is that your children learn English - and then they might laugh at your wish that they also learn Chinese. And while you might think of 'Chinese' people as some big amorphous blob, most American Chinese speak Cantonese, while Mandarin is the ascendant official language of mainland China, and many of the immigrants only speak Fujianese or Toisanese dialects. There are of course conflicts between the various groups, and even between the ABCs and the FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat). The most bizarre thing for me in this entire book was the woman who couldn't even speak to her own mother, but had to rely on her father to translate for them.

This book is 250 pages, which means each town gets an average of 50 pages: just enough time to get the mixed sweet and sour flavor before moving on to the next one. If you grew up in one of these, you might reasonably feel your Chinatown got short shrift, and since Tsui is most familiar with the San Francisco and New York Chinatowns these have the most intimate feel and the others are more amorphous. These are reasonable complaints, but as an overview, as a contrast and comparison, and a collection of personal interviews, it nonetheless fascinated me and felt just about the right length and I felt compelled to read it in a single afternoon.

It was also interesting to read this soon after Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, which complements it quite well.