Eat a Bowl of Tea. Louis Chu
lay moribund at the close of the second World War, enclaves of old men trapped by racist immigration laws to live out their days in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York City. Their allegiances tied to wives and family barred from entering the United States, they found refuge in the back-rooms of barbershops and restaurants, at the local tong, in the repartee and rivalries exchanged over a game of mah jong. In this tale of adultery and comic retribution, Louis Chu captures their vanities and illusions, these exiles become the vestiges of those who toiled in agriculture and mining, built the Transcontinental Railroad, and funded the Chinese Republican Revolution of 1911. He finds them fifty years later, bound by popular prejudice and the law to an aging, inflexible fraternity living in New York’s Chinatown. Each remains unfailingly that Cantonese peasant warrior, doughty, resourceful, loyal to a sensibility rooted in China that has already evolved in his absence, dogging the disreputable and notorious Quon Gung, patron deity and guardian of low life in general, of actors, gamblers, and hired assassins, in the guise of waiters, cooks, and laundrymen. Chu’s work is a vision of non-Christian Chinese-America, certainly the first and perhaps the last portrayal that accurately dramatizes the life and times of Chinese-Americans with a consistency of language and sensibility.
The novel opens with a white prostitute awakening the newly wed Ben Loy; the son of a “bachelor” father, he has been sent to China after World War II to marry. Returning to America with his bride, Mei Oi, he finds himself impotent, unable to make love to his respectable, traditional wife in the environment of Chinatown. Mei Oi is seduced by Ah Song, a gambler and notorious seducer of other men’s wives. The affair is discovered; Mei Oi is pregnant, and the cuckold is avenged by his father. Both father and father-in-law must leave New York’s Chinatown because of their mutual humiliation, and husband and wife move to San Francisco, where the child is happily received. Ben Loy regains his potency by eating a bowl of tea, a regimen prescribed by a herbalist, and the story ends happily, Ben Loy and Mei Oi in bed agreeing to reunite their fathers at the haircut party for their next child.
In language, the manner and ritual of address and repartee are authentic Chinatown. Chu translates idioms from the Sze Yup dialect, and the effect of such expressions on his Chinese-American readers is delight and recognition. His unerring eye and ear avoid the cliche, the superficial veneer and curio-shop expressions of missionary biographies that precede his work, and he ignores the speech of those obsequious villains and heroes of popular film and television that caricature the Chinese-American population to this day. His narrative consciously makes English out of Cantonese, and his use of the language remains consistent throughout. He does not translate names. The language is active and direct, filled with curses as a product of the predominantly male society, where abstractions are made concrete and literal, and speech must account for the social situations in which each speaker finds himself. When the novel was first published in 1961, reviews of the day found it offensive and the language “tasteless and raw.”
“Go sell your ass, you stinky dead snake,” Chong Loo tore into the barber furiously. “Don’t say anything like that! If you want to make laughs, talk about something else, you trouble maker. You many-mouthed bird. You dead person.”
But the linguistic sensibility that lies behind these Sze Yup curses accurately reflects the combative nature of these bachelors who give no advantage in a land of trial, humiliation, and sacrifice. In order to characterize formality between relations, Chu invariably describes the physical distance each maintains from the other. Ben Loy avoids his father to circumvent unnecessary talk. The two fathers-in-law, while lifelong friends in America, must exile themselves to different cities in order to avoid the strain of obligations each owes the other after the problems created by Mei Oi’s adultery have been resolved. Overhearing Wah Gay’s plan to match his son in marriage, we see the peasant warrior as tactician summarizing his advantages over a friend soon to become a relative.
To him Ben Loy’s marriage was something that had to be attended to sooner or later. The sooner, the better. If Ben Loy should not like Lee Gong’s daughter, he could always get another girl and be married. A sense of male superiority came over him and he almost laughed out loud. A daughter-in-law is somebody else’s daughter.
The portrayal of a predominantly male Chinatown is not unique. As early as 1896, Sui Sin Fah (Edith Eaton) wrote about the Chinese on the Pacific Coast and sympathetically portrayed Chinatown’s bachelor society. Missionary portraits and autobiographies depicting a Chinatown devoid of white characters, save for prostitutes, where gambling and adultery marked the Chinese criminal, unassimilable and pathologically opposed to Western ways, are numerous. For example, Dr. Charles Shepherd, founder of the Chung Mei Home for Boys in El Cerrito, California, produced a novel entitled The Ways of Ah Sin (1923) in which he justifies his life’s mission to shelter young Chinese-American boys from their heathen parents.
Not surprisingly, in published works variously labeled biography or memoir or guide book—word maps to the “exotic” environs of Chinatown—Chinese-American authors historically have avoided mention of this Chinatown culture that Chu renders so faithfully in his novel. Works such as My Life in China and America (1909) by Yung Wing, Garding Lui’s Inside Los Angeles Chinatown (1948), Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (1944), Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), and Virginia Lee’s The House that Tai Ming Built (1963) uniformly ignore the existence of a non-Christian bachelor population that represented the vast majority of Chinese-Americans for nearly a century. These works rely instead on stereotyped differences of culture between “East” and “West,” wresting poorly formulated notions of dual cultures from English language lessons taught by white missionaries anxious to assimilate the “heathen Chinee. ” Such works deny the continuity of Chinese-American culture, its history and evolving sensibility, and surrender to a model of acceptance that was defined and authenticated by their reading public. Will Irwin wrote in the text accompanying Arnold Genthe’s Pictures of Old Chinatown (1908):
I hope that some one will arise, before this generation is passed, to record that conquest of affection by which the California Chinese transformed themselves from our race adversaries to our dear, subject people.
Louis Chu was the first Chinese-American writer to refuse such acceptance.
He was born in Toishan, China, on October 1, 1915. Immigrating to the United States as a young man, he completed his high school education in New Jersey, and went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from Upsala College, a master’s degree from New York University, and postgraduate training at the New School for Social Research. He was employed by New York City’s Department of Welfare and became director of a social center. He served as executive secretary for the Soo Yuen Benevolent Association, and was a well-known figure in New York’s Chinatown, where he hosted a radio program called “Chinese Festival.” He died in 1970, survived by his wife and four children.
The art of Chinese-America’s first novelist is more than that of the journalist or historian or social observer or social propagandist whose works are more accessible because their purpose is to give white readers an acceptable tale of what it is to be Chinese in America. The vision of a Chinatown community in transition, from a bachelor to a family society, that Chu describes in his pioneer work acknowledges the path of social and historical development that community traveled. He details its integrity as an evolving culture, a Chinese-America spread out across the North American continent, at the same time capturing the sense of its community life, the shop-to-shop interiors of Chinatown, the portable coffee from the restaurant next door, the marital problems of a Chinese waiter. So it is that Ben Loy has the opportunity to marry, to raise children in America. His father, Wah Gay, was resigned to his bachelorhood. Wah Gay and his contemporaries, self-styled sojourners, found their own rationale, disparaging their wasted days spent gambling and reminiscing about a China that had already changed in their absence. The thematic irony of the novel is anticipated when Wah Gay slices off Ah Song’s ear. Chu invests these old bachelors with a simple male chauvinism that brooks no sympathy, underscoring their lip service to a code of behavior they never followed. Mei Oi’s adultery represents comic revenge perpetrated by the wives who remained in the villages of Kwantung while their husbands played mah jong in New York.
There is no question in Chu’s narrative about what determines the paternity of the child Mei