Customer Reviews

Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society

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I have to concur with the previous review that this book is written by an outsider. As someone who has grown up in New York City's Chinatown and is still a resident there, I can say that the superficial views represented in this book misrepresent the true core of the community. Kinkead paints an exaggerated image of exoticism and mystery; the book is overly simplistic, quite patronizing and perpetuates stereotypes of Chinese-Americans and Chinese immigrants. The author makes assumptions about how members of the community feel about their own surroundings and manipulates the information that is given to her through interviews and research to reflect her own judgments. This is no documentary. As a Chinese resident in Chinatown, I feel misrepresented and very much the object of the author's fanciful thoughts. The author uses negative stereotypes and generalizations as the points of departure for her statements.

No less aggravating than Kinkead's take on Chinatown are the reviewers' comments on the covers, which reveal that they are as baffled and mystified by the neighborhood as she is. The book is more about the brave outsider who, against all odds, manages to break down barriers and attempts to understand a dark, dangerous and foreign community. Is this really an intimate portrait of Chinatown or a prescribed self-discovery journey? Often Kinkead refers to residents as "prisoners" living in Chinatown. I can attest that I do not feel trapped in my own community and have chosen to live here. And yes, I do venture outside of Chinatown and have "spoken to a white person."

All of the problems I had with this "portrait of a closed society" raise the following issue: perhaps people like Ms. Kinkead would find neighborhoods like Chinatown less mysterious, less foreign and more a part of the fabric of New York City if so many of their recent ancestors hadn't tried so hard to ostracize the Chinese-American community in the first place. The significance of the book, then, is that it is the residue of prejudices that typified those earlier chapters of New York and American history. In this case the book should have been titled "Chinatown: Portrait of a Closed Mind."

To me, this book seems to have been written from a great distance. When are caucasian writers going to stop calling themselves "bold" and "daring" when they "lift the curtain" on Chinatown? Stop all the self-congratulation. This is a book written from the point of view of an OUTSIDER, which is okay, but let's call it what it is. Read "The New Chinatown" by Peter Kwong or "Born to Kill" by T.J. English, both books about the Asian community written with compassion and understanding.

I live near New York's Chinatown and walk through it almost daily. I'm intrigued by the subject of a society that IS very much closed from the rest of America.

This book answers a lot of my questions and is very entertaining and informative; however, it obviously went through several re-writes. Some paragraphs seem stuffed in without any rhyme or reason to them. Confusing. Sentences don't connect with each other.

I hope this book is reprinted with more-recent facts.