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Hall, Bruce Edward : Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown

Free Press, New York, 1998

ISBN 068483989X

308pp. B&W Illustrations Remainder mark The author studies his ancestors who settled in Chinatown, New York, 8vo, Fine in Fine DJ

1st Edition

Hall, Bruce Edward : Tea That Burns. a Family Memoir of Chinatown

Free Press, New York, 1998

ISBN 068483989X

[12], 308 pages, 6 plates, cloth, DJ, ex-library with usual library markings, lacks rear blank endpaper otherwise very good. From the book jacket: "Bruce Edward Hall may have an English name and a Connecticut upbringing, but for him a trip to Chinatown, New York, is a visit to the ghosts of his Chinese Ancestors -- Ancestors who helped create the neighborhood that is really as much a transplanted Cantonese village as it is a part of a great American city. Among these Ancestors are missionaries and reprobates, businessmen and scholars. There is the patriarch with three wives (two in China, one in New York) , who arrived in Chinatown just as it was beginning to take shape, and who eventually became a key player in the infamous Tong Wars that ravaged the neighborhood at the turn of the century. There is the grandfather, whose nickname, 'Hock Shop, ' bespoke his reputation as Chinatown's favorite bookie. There is the dashing aviator whose dogfight in the skies over Brooklyn made him Chinatown's first hero in the war against Japan, and the matriarch who was purchased as a bride for $1,200 when the ratio of Chinese men to women was two hundred to one. And all of them shared the experience of the great-aunt who emigrated to New York at the age of eight months, but lived in fear of deportation for the next fifty years because this country refused to allow Chinese to become American citizens. In Tea That Burns..., author Bruce Edward Hall uses the stories of his family and others to tell the history of Chinatown, New York, starting with the tumultuous journey from an ancient empire ruled by the nine dragons of the universe to a bewildering land of elevated trains, solitary labor, and violent discrimination. The world they constructed was built of backbreaking labor and poetry contests; gambling dens and Cantonese opera; Tong Wars, festivals, firecrackers, incense and food -- always food, to celebrate every conceivable occasion and to confound the ever-meddlesome "White Devils" as they attempt to master the mysteries of chop sticks and sitr-fry. A vivid and tactile story; rich with the sights, sounds, and sensations of Chinatown then and now, Tea That Burns reads like a novel, but is history at its best. " From Library Journal: "Part history, part family chronicle, part personal reminiscence, this saga by fourth-generation Chinese American Hall (Diamond Street, Black Dome, 1994) follows the Hall family (whose surname was once transliterated "Hor") from the 19th-century in Hor Lup Chui, a village outside Canton, to late-20th-century America. While the extensive bibliography lists only one set of documents pertaining to the Hor family, Hall consulted hundreds of publications and papers on Chinese Americans and Chinatown in New York City, a sizable research effort for a family memoir. The Hor family history is full of colorful characters, including grandfather "Hock Shop, " the bookie and bon vivant, whose scotch ("tea that burns") was served by the pot. Highly entertaining and quite informative, this excellent mix of Chinese tradition and Asian American history reads somewhat like Maxine Hong Kingston with footnotes. " FR1-8 ; Ex-Library; 308 pages, Fair

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