CLASSICS OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
EAT A BOWL OF TEA
LOUIS CHU
FOREWORD BY
Fae Myenne Ng
INTRODUCTION BY
Jeffery Paul Chan
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Seattle
Eat a Bowl of Tea was made possible in part by a grant from the Shawn Wong Book Fund, which supports the publication of books on Chinese American history and culture.
Copyright © 1961 by Louis H. Chu
Foreword copyright © 2020 by Fae Myenne Ng
Introduction copyright © 1979 by the University of Washington Press
University of Washington Press 2020 edition published by arrangement with Kensington Publishing Corp.
Originally published by Lyle Stuart. University of Washington Press paperback edition published 1979 by arrangement with Lyle Stuart.
Design by Katrina Noble
Composed in Jenson Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
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Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA ON FILE
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046596
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046597
ISBN 978-0-295-74705-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-295-74706-4 (ebook)
To my wife
FOREWORD
The Wows: Wow Your Mother
FAE MYENNE NG
When Louis Chu’s novel about New York City’s Chinese bachelor society was published in 1961, I was starting kindergarten in San Francisco and just learning English. A decade later, when I wandered down the block to the City Lights bookstore and discovered his defiant, subversive novel, I didn’t just read Eat a Bowl of Tea, I inhaled it; I gulped it down.
What astonished me was how loud it was. I heard my whole world, the hatchet-speak of my great-grandfather working the abandoned gold mines, the seething courtesy of my great-uncle, the houseboy in San Antonio who later lost his business in the Watts riots, and the cursing of my merchant seaman father. I barely heard the hard-lined words held in the mouths of my army uncles, but I overheard the gutter cursing of my cousins and brothers.
In his sole novel, Louis Chu gave life to Toishanese, the dialect of those feisty and fearless immigrants from Toishan. He gave linguistic power to the railroad workers who not only blasted through the Sierra Nevada but also sliced out their own livers (the seat of love) to eat bitterness so that their descendants could carve a road into America and grow out a new soul.
My father could have been one of the men in Eat a Bowl of Tea. In 1941, he walked down Dupont Avenue in San Francisco as part of the 90 percent male population from Toishan. Toishanese men left home in droves to escape being killed. Over forty million had died in the Taiping Rebellion, probably a million in the Revolution of 1911, no doubt tens of millions in the Second World War, tens of thousands killed by the Japanese, and more tens of thousands who died in the Hakka-Cantonese wars, not to mention the many tens of thousands perishing in the endless natural calamities (famine, floods, typhoons; the bubonic plague killed nearly eighty thousand in less than a month). The natural and human-made disasters devastated the economy; crippling despair made the Toishanese especially vulnerable to the contract labor markets in America.
The bachelor society of Eat a Bowl of Tea escaped hopeless circumstances only to endure horrendous injustice in America. It’s no accident that the bachelors in the novel met every situation with a curse about death, dying, or killing. Go Die! Dead Man. Chop off your head.
If they had no actual power, they could at least control their world by cursing a fate worse than they could imagine; superstition staved off fear. Louis Chu used death-cursing to declare the bachelor society’s fearlessness in the face of hardship. He made language a shield against loneliness and death.
With the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, America enacted her first law to ban a nationality. It created the Chinese bachelor society. Only diplomats and merchants were legally allowed to bring their families. Married laborers left their wives in China; the unmarried ones remained bachelors because America’s antimiscegenation laws also applied to the Chinese. Today, on Chinatown benches across the country, old bachelors sit and wait for death—our national tragedy.
When Exclusion was repealed in 1943, the national origins quota limited the entry of the Chinese to 105 annually. No other race had a quota. This stayed in effect until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed for the reunification of families separated by Exclusion. But the damage was done. Grass Widows, those left-behind wives—if lucky enough to be reunited with their husbands—were often beyond the age of childbearing. My father called Exclusion a brilliant piece of legislation because it was bloodless. “America didn’t have to kill any Chinese. The Exclusion Act assured none would be born.”
Eat a Bowl of Tea is a manual on the brotherhood of the Chinese bachelor society. These men consigned themselves to never having an intimate family life, and their solace came from desiring more for the next generation. They were lonely but they were not morose. Louis Chu writes out how they survive their loneliness—with creative, unconquerable coolie spirit.
Wang Wah Gay runs the Money Come Club and has been separated from his wife for decades, the typical Exclusion marriage. He wants his son, Ben Loy, a waiter in New York City, to have a better marriage, for the couple to live together in America. Husband and wife fight at one end of the bed and make up at the other.
Lee Gong, a laundryman, wants the same for Mei Oi, his daughter in China, whom he has never met. The scheming fathers arrange for Ben Loy to travel to China, where the overjoyed mothers stage the first meeting. Ben Loy is smitten; Mei Oi is besotted. They have the traditional ceremony with a live groom (instead of a live rooster) and the marriage is consummated. But after they leave the village, the sex stops and the union seems doomed to be like all immigrant marriages, sexless.
In New York City, no one but Mei Oi gets laid. She hungers for sex and becomes consumed with getting it. Louis Chu created not only a temptress but a sexual adventurer, a devourer of carnal pleasure. Mei Oi is the erotic avenger, demanding sex as retribution not only for her Grass Widow mother but also for her fellow Toishanese—as in the actress Anna May Wong, who was both passed over for the Chinese lead in The Good Earth (1937) and prohibited from kissing a white actor on-screen because of antimiscegenation laws. Another Toishanese, James Wong Howe, was Hollywood’s most innovative cinematographer of the 1930s, but his citizenship wasn’t legal till 1943, and his marriage to Sanora Babb wasn’t recognized till 1948 (Babb was an ex-lover of Ralph Ellison and harbored unrequited love for William Saroyan).
Mei (for America) and Oi (for love) evokes American lovemaking. Honeymoon sex hooks Mei Oi and she craves it. Ben Loy becomes impotent, possibly from his whoring, while Mei Oi’s compulsion becomes an addiction. Ah Song’s “comic seduction”