Eat a Bowl of Tea. Louis Chu
Mei Oi is our free-loving flower child. Not hearing from her lover, Ah Song, she eyes her husband’s best friend, Chin Yuen, and flirts shamelessly and mercilessly with him. Like her Grass Widow forebears, Mei Oi is sexually ravenous. She craves the intimate touch, lusts for sexual attention and its rapture. Risking her marriage, she knits Ben Loy a green hat, broadcasting his shame of being cuckolded. Mei Oi will claim America by procreating.
Get laid, get pregnant, get power. Mei Oi’s womb is her gold.
In 1981, when I left for New York City, Eat a Bowl of Tea was the only novel I packed for my sojourn. Going east was like entering a new land, so I took the novel as my salve against homesickness.
Louis Chu was the first to bring the richness of Toishanese to the literary page. His novel has cadence, depth, and mirth: No can do. Go sell your ass. Sonavabitchee. Many-mouthed bird. Wearing a big hat? Pulling a big gun!
Its aim is as heavy and direct as a cleaver: [Ah Song] … the three-ply smoothie boy. Pretty butthole boy.
There’s literary invention: [Mei Oi] … was sorrowing over the abrupt termination of her brief honeymoon.
There’s imagination and action: Talking toilet news! Boiling telephone jook!
This next one can only be experienced live. Find a Toishan doy or a Toishan moi and ask them to read this: Nay gah do-do saang gai moe.
Watch and behold the true power of translation. Impropriety becomes endearing, betrayal becomes loyalty, and bitterness ends up a sweetness. Louis Chu not only preserves the rich, imaginative cadence of Toishanese but reveres its reticence and tolerance.
Arriving in Manhattan, I shared Eat a Bowl of Tea with my new New York friends: a Hong Kong–born, European-trained oboist, a conductor from Shanghai, a painter from Hangzhou, and a fourth-generation Chinese American, whose politically elite family had been immune from the effects of Exclusion. Every one of them was horrified and then baffled.
Wow your mother. Stinky Corpse. Fart drum. Sell your butthole.
“Why all these old men, and why all this vulgarity?” My new friends protested in shock. “This isn’t Chinese culture.”
“Wow.” I told them that this was real Chinese American culture, that their class upbringing had made them delicate.
“Wow your mother!” one shot back.
Another gained a fragile respect for the bachelor society. “I’ll look at the waiter at Big Wong’s differently now,” she said.
So we entered a new level of translation. They learned patience and I learned courtesy. What was birthed was the new Chinese American language, fearless and frugal, full of fight yet fraught, like our ancestors chiseling away on the Sierra rock face, tugging at the rope to be pulled up just before the dynamite blasted.
Welcome to Chinese America. Welcome to breaking up the English language and making it fully alive. Language is our gateway to power. Cursing was the way to break impotency. What the old bachelors didn’t know, they made up. What their progeny didn’t understand, they made up. Why not? This is our linguistic inheritance, language born of the unwelcome, words seeded to our long-standing imagination.
Why did the author translate “fuck” into wow? Did Louis Chu mean to sanitize wow, or did the publisher use wow as a censoring bleep?
I’d always heard the wows. For many years, my parents had a grocery store on Pacific, above bustling Dupont Avenue, and my mother kept a wicker chair in the center of the store for any old bachelor who wandered in. That chair was always occupied. (Now that chair sits empty in my writing room.) As a child, I was taught to greet each old bachelor as grandfather. I poured them tea and then stood by quietly, taking in their silence and their sighs and their explosive wowing. I consider that my first writing lesson; I honed language by listening to their hatchet-speak.
I intuitively knew the feeling behind every curse, so I never needed a translation. This linguistic passport is my birthright. Slipping along the edges of the bachelor society, the vulgarity gave me insight into the deeper hilarity. Humor is our medicine.
Eat a Bowl of Tea refers to the medicinal healing that Ben Loy trusts to regain his virility. The phrases 吃藥 eat medicine and 吃苦 eat bitterness are uniquely Chinese American. Through suffering, sweet life arrives. The ideogram for medicine has two parts. The radical, 艹, means grass and herbs. The root, 樂, means music, as well as happiness. Together they create the character for healing. Louis Chu makes music of Toishanese.
I like to think Louis Chu wrote a manual for our happiness, our health, and for our sweetness.
Writing Eat a Bowl of Tea had to be an endurance test. Louis Chu wrote the book under the double weight of the Exclusion Act and the Chinese Confession Program. Instigated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1956, the Confession Program’s intent was to ferret out paper citizenships (when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed the records at City Hall, my forebears claimed citizenship, as well as newborn sons, which were later sold as immigration slots for men to enter America, an ingenious way to circumvent the Exclusion Act). But its more subversive intent was to divert Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist hunt onto the Chinese. The program wasn’t eradicated until 1966, on the eve of the Summer of Love.
In Eat a Bowl of Tea, we feel the exploitation of the Red Scare and anticipate the explosion of the sexual revolution. Louis Chu is our renegade writer, withstanding Exclusion, enduring Confession, and perhaps pondering free love, to capture the terror of that climate as an unrelenting tension in his novel of bitter loving.
At its publication, Louis Chu was invited to appear on the game show What’s My Line? Because he was the fourth and last guest, it seems he might have been, as our forebears so often were, on standby. None of the panelists guessed his occupation as a disc jockey for a Chinese radio station, WHOM-AM. In closing, the host mentions Eat a Bowl of Tea. Louis Chu smiles, admirably courteous, admirably patient. His face is strong, yet humble. He has a boxer’s gait as he moves across the stage to shake the hand of each panelist (publisher Bennett Cerf was one). I don’t know what Louis Chu was thinking, but I see that rascal twinkle in his eye and I like to imagine he’s thinking in Toishanese.
Louis Chu’s Chinese name is Louie Hing Chu. Did the immigration official on Ellis Island flip the name, making Chu his family name and Louie his American name?
雷霆超 Louie Hing Chu is powerful naming. Louie is the character for thunder. Hing means a clap of thunder. Chu means to transcend, to surpass. I love how louie and hing stack up the thunder, and that chu shoots it to the great beyond.
We, his literary descendants, receive Eat a Bowl of Tea with a deep bow of gratitude. Louis Chu threw us urgent, supreme thunder, surpassing all.
Read this book and feel the richness of his Toishanese. The men of the bachelor society are masters of mischief; their language-play celebrates tenacity. They are troublemakers and funmakers; they make monkey laughter out of misery. Louis Chu slips in the suffering only to make the promise of surpassing a new American truth.
Read this book of pathos and mirth.
Wow your mother. Read this book.
Then pour Louie Hing Chu a cup of tea and call him Sifu. Our Grand Master.
FAE MYENNE NG’S work has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center at Lake Como, Italy. Bone was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award. Steer Toward Rock received the American Book Award. She teaches creative writing and literature at UCLA and UC Berkeley.
INTRODUCTION TO THE 1979 EDITION
First published in 1961, Eat a Bowl of Tea is