9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genghis Khan on Gold Mountain, July 13, 2008
This review is from: Bitter Melon: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town (Paperback)
So are these the oriental horde, the unassimilable immigrant menace to America's proud Anglo heritage? You can see them in old black-and-white family photos on the pages of Bitter Melon. They all look something like Bing Fai Chow, pictured on the cover on his porch in 1976: small, bent, work-hardened people with a hardly inscrutable weariness in their eyes. No immigrant stock has ever been received more cruelly and ungenerously in America by the older immigrant stocks than the Chinese. Recruited by American capitalists deliberately to undercut wages to America's working poor, they were execrated by labor - brutalized, burned out, murdered, excluded, condemned to celibacy and familylessness, and slandered beyond words. But still they came, as I've recounted in my recent review of the book Island, and stayed.
Bitter Melon is the autobiography, in photos and oral histories, of a very small town in the delta of the Sacramento-San Joaquin rivers in central California. Locke was built on rented land in 1915 by a group of immigrants from the Zhongshan area of southern China. It thrived for a time as a river port supplying San Francisco with fresh vegetables, and it had a era of infamy providing gambling, drugs, and prostition to the good white citizens of the Bay Area and the state capital Sacramento. Then it simply grew tattered and ramshackle, as young people left and old people waited to die. By various quirks of land title and court procedure, Locke became a living ghost town. I visited it by bicycle many times in the late '60s and '70s. I may well have taken snapshots of Mr. Chow's house myself. By then, outsiders had begun to scratch their livings in Locke, farmworkers mostly, Filipino and Latino. In 1971, a photographer named James Motlow came to live in Locke; perhaps his work is responsible for saving the ghost town as a State Park, surrounded now by endless atrocious commuter non-communities, acres of McMansions and McTickytackies, all built where they shouldn't be on floodplains protected only by the earthern levies built by the unwelcome Chinese. If I sound scornful and elitist, so be it; go and have a look yourselves!
Did the "Celestials" assimilate? Not exactly. They have concentrated in certain urban neighborhoods, married each other more often than not, continued to prefer dim sum to bacon-and-eggs, not commonly accepting Christian doctrines... and they've committed the unpardonable sins of excelling financially, beating the WASPs on the SATs, and staying out of prisons. America is less a Melting Pot than a Baling Press, in which the vibrant 'others' of the world have been squeezed into a multi-cultural bundle.
But there is great strength in bundled fibers.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful!, May 14, 2007
This review is from: Bitter Melon: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town (Paperback)
This is a haunting and sad book, but filled with the dignity and hope that the Chinese immigrants brought with them to America. They were faced with more troubles than most newly arrived people, and managed to rise above them. This book is a honest story of the town of Locke. I highly recommend it.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Living History captured before it's gone, August 25, 2009
This review is from: Bitter Melon: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town (Paperback)
I have had the pleasure of knowing James Motlow for the last 6 years as a gentle, kind, humble person who only recently mentioned in conversation with me (a person who does photography and photo restorations) that he had helped write and did the photography for a book called, Bitter Melon. What an incredible undertaking this project of love was, and what a rich history has been preserved because of it. It speaks of the strong will, tenacity, and pride of a people who were ill treated by our Government, yet they graciously share with these white Americans who had gained their trust their personal stories of life in Locke, California in the Sacramento Delta. Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow present an historical gift to us that should be required reading in Middle Schools or High Schools. It is a book worth its weight in gold.
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