Reading for Historical Specificities: Gender Negotiations in Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea

Abstract

Since its rediscovery in the mid 1970s, Louis Chu's novel Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) has become not only an active cultural agent for AsianAmerican writers' self-empowerment but also an important site of Asian American critics' ideological contestation. One ongoing polemic in the interpretation of the novel concerns assessments of its historical status in the face of the accomplishments of post 1970s Asian American writings, assessments, I find, often characterized by critics' inattention to or misunderstanding of Chu's treatment of women. For example, various readers praise Chu's novel for its pronounced revision of prior literary representations of Chinatowns and its bold fashioning of an alternative Chinese-American sensibility but simultaneously restrict the book's significance to its "carnivalesque" qualities: 1 the squalid, run-down New York Chinatown; the resourceful, tough-minded bachelors; and the richly nuanced voices and vocabulary that defy cultural standards of both China and of mainstream America. 2 On the other hand, readers informed by feminist critical perspectives are quick to point out the novel's lack of fully developed female characters and to argue that Chu's depiction of New York Chinatown bachelor society does little more than trivialize women, representing them from a "masculinist" perspective, as well as reproducing patriarchal dominance. 3 Noticeably, the critics who affirm the merit of Eat a Bowl of Tea do so often at the expense of serious investigations of the issue of gender on the ground that Chu's novel is after all a story about men, while those who emphasize the novel's weakness presuppose a Chinese-American immigration history in the pre 1960s era marked only by patriarchal domination. Underneath both assessments is a tacit acceptance of a given and static male "essence" in Chu's novel, an acceptance that raises important questions about the meaning of Chu's representation of New York Chinatown's male discourse and about the ongoing difficulties we as MELUS.

Constructing “The Third Space” On Eat a Bowl of Tea

“…He once visited prostitutes, often gambled and lived an idling life. For him, "what the twenty years of his 'marriage' means is separation from his wife and fathering the China-born son who joins him in New York at the age of seventeen" (Ling, 1995). In Chinese traditional culture, family education is emphasized and parents have obligation to educate children and arrange children's career and marriage.…”

“…They attach great importance to cohesive relationship among the network. "The members of the association must try to strengthen the primordial ties in an ethnic enclave that must be cohesive enough to resist racial hostility from the outside" (Ling, 1995) and also must maintain such internal cohesion. Therefore, when the old men confront with Mei Oi's case, they feel a threat to their internal cohesion and try to channel the potentially explosive internal dispute through this familial network in order to achieve a peaceful resolution and keep their community relationship unbroken.…”