In American Chinatown, acclaimed travel writer Bonnie Tsui takes an affectionate, attentive look at the neighborhood that has bewitched her since childhood, when she eagerly awaited her grandfather’s return from the fortune cookie factory. This book examines the most famous American Chinatowns, in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu–fingers of land on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, key entry points for multiple generations of Chinese immigrants to the United States–and, looking forward, explores what is quite possibly the next generation of U.S. Chinatowns, in Las Vegas. Using these neighborhoods as a map, American Chinatown deals with the persistently enigmatic idea of Chinatown by serving up narrative epics of its own: stories and personal profiles that reveal modern-day realities and chronicle unexpected details of life to which readers don’t normally have access.
American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods
By Bonnie Tsui
Author Bio
Bonnie Tsui
Bonnie Tsui is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. A graduate of Harvard University and a former editor at Travel + Leisure, she has written for The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure, Salon, and Condé Nast Traveller, among other publications. She is the editor of A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise, a collection of essays on the outdoors, and is a recipient of the Radcliffe Traveling Fellowship, the Lowell Thomas Award for travel journalism, and the Jane Rainie Opel Award from the Radcliffe Institute, for outstanding contribution to her profession. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, and can be contacted at www.bonnietsui.com.