Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown - Softcover

Hall, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743236599 ISBN 13: 9780743236591

Publisher: Free Press, 2002

Synopsis

Bruce Edward Hall may have an English name and a Connecticut upbringing, but for him a trip to Chinatown, New York, is a visit to the ghosts of his Chinese Ancestors -- Ancestors who helped create the neighborhood that is really as much a transplanted Cantonese village as it is a part of a great American city. Among these Ancestors are missionaries and reprobates, businessmen and scholars. There is the patriarch with three wives (two in China, one in New York), who arrived in Chinatown just as it was beginning to take shape, and who eventually became a key player in the infamous Tong Wars that ravaged the neighborhood at the turn of the century. There is the grandfather, whose nickname, Hock Shop, bespoke his reputation as Chinatown's favorite bookie. There is the dashing aviator whose dogfight in the skies over Brooklyn made him Chinatown's first hero in the way against Japan, and the matriarch who was purchased as a bride for $1,200 when the ratio of Chinese men to women was two hundred to one. And all of them shared the experience of the great-aunt who emigrated to New York at the age of eight months, but lived in fear of deportation for the next fifty years because this country refused to allow Chinese to become American citizens.

In "Tea That Burns, " Bruce Edward Hall uses the stories of these and others to tell the history of Chinatown, starting with the tumultuous journey from an ancient empire ruled by the nine dragons of the universe to a bewildering land of elevated trains, solitary labor, and violent discrimination. The world they constructed was built of backbreaking labor and poetry contests; gambling dens and Cantonese opera; Tong Wars, festivals, firecrackers, incense, and food -- always food, to celebrate every conceivable occasion and to confound the ever-meddlesome "White Devils" as they attempt to master the mysteries of chop sticks and stir-fry. A vivid and tactile story, rich with the sights, sounds, and sensations of Chinatown then and now, "Tea That Burns" reads like a novel, but is history at its best.

About this title

Review:

Linda Ching Sledge author of "Empire of Heaven" and "A Map of Paradise" Bruce Edward Hall brings New York's Chinatown to life in all of its raw, turn-of-the-century power. He weaves tales of family heroes and eccentrics into the rich history of an American Chinatown in a truly memorable narrative.

From the Author:

What I hoped to achieve in writing "Tea That Burns"
I always like to say that in my writing I am trying to enable the reader to smell history, so I hope people can get a good whiff in "Tea That Burns." It is really not so much a family memoir as the memoir of a neighbhorhood -- a history (complete with notes and sources) that can be used as a reference book or read like a novel. Since three generations of my family lived in Chinatown New York, starting back when the entire Chinese community consisted of some 800 souls (it now numbers 250,000), I can use various relations of mine to illustrate almost every aspect of the Chinese experience in New York, or in America for that matter. Among my ancestors can be found merchants and gamblers, Tong council members, artisans, and at least one opium addict. And then there's my Great-Grandmother, who the author of one 1898 book claims was Chinatown's most popular prostitute. Well, I explore that issue among many others, and try to convey as much as I can what it felt like to live among New York's Chinese from about 1820 to the present. As for whether my Great-Grandmother was actually a prostitute -- well, you'll just have to get the book and read that for yourself, now won't you?

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743236599
• ISBN 13: 9780743236591
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340