The Asian American Movement: A Social History. - book reviews

Reason, Dec, 1993 by John J. Miller

Despite much assimilation, such enclaves persist to this day, helping both legal and illegal immigrants adapt to life in America. Gwen Kinkead's Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society offers a brief but tantalizing glimpse at New York City's bustling Chinese community. She spent two luckless years desperately trying to gain access to this city within a city. With translator in tow, however, she slowly won over enough of its inhabitants to peek into its crowded apartments and garment sweatshops. Her colorful anecdotes and character portraits reveal an industrious and inward-looking place.

Mr. Lin, for instance, peddles firecrackers and toys without a license. Every day he hustles his wares on the street and each night returns to a one-bedroom apartment shared with seven other men. He has managed to save about $18,000 of his $22,000 income for each of the last four years. When he gathers enough money, he hopes to start a small business. Lin has lived in New York for six years, but he has not often left Chinatown, on the lower east side of Manhattan. So Kinkead makes him an offer:

"I asked him if there was any place in the city he wanted to visit. He thought a minute. |I hear about her, not too far from here,' he said, cupping his hands above his head like a Thai dancer.

"|The Statue of Liberty?'

"|Sometime I go there,' he affirmed. |That's one thing I do.'

"I offered to take Lin there, or to any other place he wished to see. Lin decided that the Statue of Liberty was too far, and picked my second suggestion--Central Park, which he'd never heard of. We rode uptown in a taxi. Lin was very uneasy. |No go far, right?' he asked several times. |Not go far.'"

The bulk of Kinkead's book concerns Chinatown's criminal tongs, with a special emphasis on federal efforts to bust the Chinese-dominated Southeast-Asian heroin trade. According to Kinkead, the tongs and their lackeys maintain a tight grip on the community through a powerful extortion racket. "In Chinatown," she writes, "there is a social order so ruthless that its very existence seems to be against the law, but, because the area is so isolated from the rest of society, most of the people who live here accept it as normal." Locals fear to talk about the situation, especially to a reporter holding a pen and scribbling notes. Despite her best intentions to demystify the place, Kinkead's decision to focus so heavily on crime helps exoticize Chinatown even further.

Still, her final chapter is a splendid metaphor for Chinatown's isolation complex. Kinkead describes a typical Sunday in which thousands of New Yorkers descend upon Chinatown's comer of lower Manhattan to experience its restaurants and entertainment. Noisy day-trippers clog the main thoroughfare, so she escapes by stepping into a lonely, time-warped alleyway. She comes upon a dirty courtyard and discovers "a gritty, gray, forlorn place, a patch of old Chinatown more or less untouched since the 1880s." She climbs a stairway and sees a door with a sign that blesses those who pass. "I knock. A frail old man, like a withered moon, appears. He greets me quizzically. He has lived in Chinatown for sixty years, he says, and has never spoken with a white person."