cover image Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society

Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society

Gwen Kinkead. HarperCollins Publishers, $23 (211pp) ISBN 978-0-06-016776-9

Reading this, one feels like an urban explorer walking a few paces behind the author, agog at the mystery and magic of New York City's Chinatown. Doors open. Faces appear and recede. At the end of the dazzling journey in which a low faan (barbarian or white person) finds unusual access to backrooms, tongs (secret societies), family associations, gong si fongs (bachelor apartments), herbalists, family histories, hopes and dreams, Chinatown retains its elusive character. Kinkead, a New Yorker contributor, vividly relates her various guides' accounts, told sometimes in broken English or in the snappy police lingo used by detectives to describe tong and drug activity. The variety, poverty, resilience and frenzy of Chinatown and its residents are brilliantly described, from a Chinatown apartment where an old woman immobilized by bound feet looks out a window to a late-night gathering of chefs swapping recipes. Take the tour. (June)