Author：Bruce Edward Hall

Publisher：The Free Press

Publishing Year：1998

Call Number：F128.68.C47H174

Introduction：”Chinatown was the only constant in my life,it seemed, the only spot to which I could always return to familiar surroundings and see the thumbprints of generations that had died before living memory. The crowded, tiny streets, the restaurants we held our semi-annual banquets in, even the ducks hanging in the dusty window of the old grocery store on the corner seemed eternal, although I knew perfectly well that those ducks were freshly killed everyday. It was a place with tradition, with customs, with old people who knew my father and would call him by baby names I never heard anywhere else. It was a place that America hadn’t homogenized out of existence,and there one could smell the village where the Ancestors had lived for perhaps a thousand years before. This is the history of that foreign universe called Chinatown, New York, with my Ancestors providing the string with which to tie together the loose beads of the past. The Chinese side of my family has experienced almost every phase of development of life in Chinatown, from early settlement, to racial apartheid, to Tong Wars, to all- American domesticity. All along the way were generous doses of magic, and poetry, and the exquisite, mystical beauty which was never to be found in the bland, white-bread towns of my youth.”

From the Introduction