American Chinatown
A People's History of Five Neighborhoods
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"A wonderfully revealing and compassionate trip into the real lives of men and women who straddle the world’s two great powers” (The New Yorker) this inside look at the Chinatowns in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Las Vegas “captures the essence of each by telling the stories of its people” (Contra Costa Times).
Where in America can you visit another country without needing a passport? Chinatown, USA: a world within a world and a state of mind.
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
