Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society

Gwen Kinkead's fascinating book is an explanation of a mystery: Chinatown. In the first book in fifty years to break the code of silence about New York's Chinatown, Kinkead offers us an intimate portrait of an exciting community that is also one of the most insular and, until now, enigmatic in the world. New York City's Chinatown is the largest in the Western Hemisphere, a vibrant, chaotic little piece of China entirely segregated from the United States. Against all odds, Kinkead managed to get recent immigrants to Chinatown to speak to her—an astonishing feat for a low faan (a barbarian, white person) with a notepad. Her portraits of Chinatown's invisible people are intriguing. They work in its garment factories and restaurants, where child labor laws seem not to obtain; they do not speak English and have no desire or opportunity to learn the language; they rarely, if ever, venture outside Chinatown's boundaries and have no interest in the American world surrounding their enclave. Kinkead describes their family associations, the tongs, and the gangs they employ to extort and murder. She charts the growth of Chinese organized crime, now smuggling in half the heroin in the United States. She illuminates the Chinese work ethic, their attitude toward money, the extended-family obligations, their traditions of concubinage, the Chinese penchant for gambling, their newspapers—owned by Chinese in Asia who determine what is reported and how—the importance of food, Chinatown's millionaires, and more. A rich, eye-opening account of a little-known community, Chinatown is also a provocative reflection on assimilation and racism in this country.