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American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods |  |
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American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods | |
But Chinatown is not a place that needs solving; it's a place that needs a more specific telling. In American Chinatown, acclaimed travel writer Bonnie Tsui takes an affectionate and attentive look at the neighborhood that has bewitched her since childhood, when she eagerly awaited her grandfather's return from the fortune-cookie factory. Tsui visits the country's four most famous Chinatowns -- San Francisco (the oldest), New York (the biggest), Los Angeles (the film icon), Honolulu (the crossroads) -- and makes her final, fascinating stop in Las Vegas (the newest; this Chinatown began as a mall); in her explorations, she focuses on the remarkable experiences of ordinary people, everyone from first-to fifth-generation Chinese Americans. American Chinatown breaks down the enigma of Chinatown by offering narrative glimpses: intriguing characters who reveal the realities and the unexpected details of Chinatown life that American audiences haven't heard. There are beauty queens, celebrity chefs, immigrant garment workers; there are high school kids who are changing inner-city life in San Francisco, Chinese extras who played key roles in 1940s Hollywood, new arrivals who go straight to dealer school in Las Vegas hoping to find their fortunes in their own vision of "gold mountain." Tsui's investigations run everywhere, from mom-and-pop fortune-cookie factories to the mall, leaving no stone unturned.
By interweaving her personal impressions with the experiences of those living in these unique communities, Tsui beautifully captures their vivid stories, giving readers a deeper look into what "Chinatown" means to its inhabitants, what each community takes on from its American home, and what their experience means to America at large. For anyone who has ever wandered through Chinatown and wondered what it was all about, and for Americans wanting to understand the changing face of their own country, American Chinatown is an all-access pass.
作者简介 Bonnie Tsui is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. A former editor at Travel + Leisure, she has written for National Geographic Adventure, Salon, and Cond - Nast Traveller. She is the editor of A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise, a collection of essays on the outdoors, and is a recipient of the Radcliffe Traveling Fellowship, the Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, and the Jane Rainie Opel Award. She lives in San Francisco, and can be reached at www.bonnietsui.com.
编辑推荐 "A wonderfully revealing and compassionate trip into the real lives of men and women who straddle the world's two great powers. The graceful travelogue is from a hidden world in our own backyards. Tsui plunges into Chinatowns that are, like China itself, reinventing themselves before our eyes, showing not only what it means to be Chinese in the world, but also the spirit of self-invention that made America great." -- EVAN OSNOS, BEIJING CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORKER^"A fascinating and thoughtful look at a thoroughly American phenomenon." -- GISH JEN, AUTHOR OF THE LOVE WIFE^"In this masterful work, Bonnie Tsui charts the fascinating history of America's Chinatowns. From geography to economics to linguistics, she presents a vibrant, intimate portrait of communities that have played a crucial role in shaping the American landscape. There are dozens of evocative, exhilarating, and touching stories here, from those of a beauty queen to a Vegas poker dealer in training. Candid, witty, and always engaging, Tsui is a wonderful guide for these many journeys." -- SARA HOUGHTELING, AUTHOR OF PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION^"Bonnie Tsui has written affectionately and astutely about a subject very close to my heart: Chinatown. In speaking with old-timers, the first generation to grow up in Chinatown, and the newest immigrants, she has captured the ways that five Chinatowns connect their inhabitants to culture, history, language, food, and to China itself -- even if they've never been there. She has looked beyond the colorful tourist facades to find unique neighborhoods that serve as home for some, refuges for others, and places of memory for all." -- LISA SEE, AUTHOR OF SHANGHAI GIRLS AND SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN
专业书评 Tsui (She Went to the Field) offers a meandering personal geography? of the Chinatowns in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Honolulu and Las Vegas. Straining to be a travelogue, sociological snapshot and history of Tsui's own family's immigrant experience, the account is repetitious and perfunctory. The author doesn't spend sufficient time on her subjects—including an Asian studies professor born in San Francisco's Chinatown, or the ethnic Chinese artist originally from Vietnam who made his way to Honolulu's Chinatown via Indonesia—to clinch the reader's interest or to compose a compelling narrative of the neighborhoods. She maintains that she never feels more at home than when visiting an American Chinatown, but her limited insights may lead readers to feel like the tourists she disparages, the ones who visit Chinatown for an afternoon but fail to look beyond its faded facades and kitschy gift shops. Her treatment strikes its most superficial chord when she reaches the banal conclusion that American Chinatowns represent heartland Asian America.? (Aug.)
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文摘
Some people unpack when they first arrive in a city. Me, I look for Chinatown.
It started, I suppose, with my grandparents. Traveling halfway around the world from Hong Kong, they settled in Manhattan's Chinatown in 1960. Even after moving to another Chinese enclave in Flushing, Queens, they kept going back, like clockwork, to their old neighborhood. Every morning they took the Q26 bus and the No. 7 subway train to the 6 train to Canal Street, where my grandfather worked in a fortune-cookie factory and my grandmother was a seamstress. Every night they brought home fresh vegetables bought from street vendors they'd come to know.
I picture a set of footprints marking a path from Queens down to Lower Manhattan, traceable on a map of the New York City transit system. When I come here today, I'm keenly aware that it's their route I follow.
New York, 1977. I am born in Flushing. My family's first apartment is a dingy affair with a leaky ceiling, and my brother is careful to pull me away from the drips. It's around this time, at the end of the 1970s, that economically depressed Flushing starts to change, departing from its roots as an Italian and Greek neighborhood to become, eventually, its own Chinatown. I never get a chance to build loyalty for my first Chinatown; before we hit school age, our parents move us to Long Island, where good public schools are a selling point. But it's not where we go to be Chinese -- Manhattan's Chinatown is.
My personal history with Chinatowns begins here, where we have wedding banquets, christenings, grocery shopping, daily life with my extended family of aunts, cousins, great-uncles, fake-uncles. Everyone's a relative, even when he's not.
I don't love coming here. At my height, the negatives are magnified: the filth of the streets, old takeout containers littering the gutters, sharply jostling knees. But at the child's eye level of exp
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