''Chinatown Family'' is a 1948 novel by

Lin Yutang Lin Yutang (10 October 1895 – 26 March 1976) was a Chinese inventor, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and translator. One scholar commented that Lin's "particular blend of sophistication and casualness found a wide audience, and he became a ma ...

set in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

Chinatown Chinatown ( zh, t=唐人街) is the catch-all name for an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside Greater China, most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa, O ...

of the 1920s and 1930s, concerning the experiences of the Fongs, a

Chinese-American Chinese Americans are Americans of Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans constitute a subgroup of East Asian Americans which also constitute a subgroup of Asian Americans. Many Chinese Americans have ancestors from mainland China, Hong Kong ...

family in becoming successful by hard work and endurance in a sometimes less than welcoming America.

Plot

Tom, Sr. who runs a laundry on the

Upper East Side The Upper East Side, sometimes abbreviated UES, is a neighborhood in the boroughs of New York City, borough of Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded approximately by 96th Street (Manhattan), 96th Street to the north, the East River to the e ...

, has succeeded in bringing his younger daughter (Eva) and son (Tom, Jr.) from

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

to New York to join him, his wife (Mother Fong), and his other children. The family succeeds in establishing itself in American culture by its hard work and devotion to democratic principles. It offers a critique of Americans who do not live up to these ideals. The family welcomes a new daughter-in-law, Flora, an Italian-American. They say "you are like a Chinese woman" because you "work hard all day and have no quarrels with your husband and the parents." In Italy, she replies, "a padre is a padre." Another Fong brother becomes an insurance salesman, who becomes infatuated with a nightclub dancer who is interested only in material things. Tom, Jr., the leading character, learns English with a diligence which helps Miss Cartwright, his American teacher, to "rediscover the English language." He shows up American students who do not appreciate their own language and do not work hard to master it. He paraphrases the

Declaration of Independence A declaration of independence is an assertion by a polity in a defined territory that it is independent and constitutes a state. Such places are usually declared from part or all of the territory of another state or failed state, or are breaka ...

into basic English to reveal its importance for the world. He has to learn

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...

in addition to his

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

to court Elsie, who came from

Shanghai Shanghai, Shanghainese: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: is a direct-administered municipality and the most populous urban area in China. The city is located on the Chinese shoreline on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the ...

, and then has to study literature, both

Walt Whitman Walter Whitman Jr. (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist; he also wrote two novels. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature and world literature. Whitman incor ...

and

Laozi Laozi (), also romanized as Lao Tzu #Name, among other ways, was a semi-legendary Chinese philosophy, Chinese philosopher and author of the ''Tao Te Ching'' (''Laozi''), one of the foundational texts of Taoism alongside the ''Zhuangzi (book) ...

. In the late 1930s, when the Japanese army is invading China, Elsie leaves to return to her homeland to support the war effort. Tom, Sr. is hit by a car while crossing the street, "dying a typically American death." The mother of the driver shows up to offer the family compensation money, enough to send Tom, Jr., to college and to finance the opening of their restaurant in Chinatown.

Critical reception

The Chinese American themes have earned it thoughtful critical attention. Cheng Lok Chua points out that Lin identified with the Fongs as immigrants and showed his solidarity with them as working-class Chinese. He adds that Lin bent reality at a time when immigration laws would have prevented Tom, Sr. from bringing his wife and children. Lin himself was the victim of American discrimination and humiliation, which make the genial tone of the novel quite remarkable, perhaps even disingenuous. Richard Jean So traces Lin's composition of the manuscript and finds that his publisher, Richard Walsh, had suggested to Lin that he write a novel as a way to instruct Americans about Chinese Americans. David Palumbo-Liu observes that such Asian Americans (later called the "model minority") serve "both to prove the rightness of American democracy as a worldwide model and to remind Americans of the traditional values it has cast aside in the rush to modernization."David Palumbo-Liu, ''Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier'' (Stanford University Press, 1999), 156

/ref>

References

{{Lin Yutang 1948 American novels Chinese-American history Chinatown, Manhattan Chinese-American novels Novels set in New York City Novels about race and ethnicity Novels by Lin Yutang John Day Company books