Chinatown Sayings Quotes

She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.

The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain unstated always, these things being the invisible fabric of what a family is.

This is the dream. Sustainable employment. Some semblance of work-life balance. Talk white. Not a lot. Get contact lenses. Smile. They will assume you’re smart. The less you say, the better. Try to project: Responsible, Harmless.

Able to pass in any situation as may be required,” she says. “I get it all. Brazilian, Filipina, Mediterranean, Eurasian. Or just a really tan White girl with exotic-looking eyes. Everywhere I go, people think I’m one of them. They want to claim me for their tribe.

And there’s just something about Asians — their faces, their skin color — it just automatically takes you out of this reality. Forces you to step back and say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this? What kind of world are we in? And what are these Asians doing in our cop show?

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I’m sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I’m trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I’m doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right. I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I’m addressing you. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I’m obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. ...

The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain

You lie awake, staring through a small open window at a full blue moon complete with a silly face. This is the dream. Sustainable employment. Some semblance of work-life balance. Talk white. Not a lot. Get contact lenses. Smile. They will assume you’re smart. The less you say the better. Try to project: responsible, harmless. An unthreatening amount of color sprinkled in. That’s the dream. A dream of blending in. A dream of going from “generic Asian man” to just plain “generic man”.

That was the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, 'I'm getting ahead.' That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of [this datebook] with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition.

For my friend Fong,” he says, and begins singing John Denver. If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver. Maybe it’s the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have. Know something about this country that you haven’t yet figured out. If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.

A woman named Cynthia once told me a story about the time her father had made plans to take her on a night out in San Francisco. Twelve-year-old Cynthia and her father had been planning the “date” for months. They had a whole itinerary planned down to the minute: she would attend the last hour of his presentation, and then meet him at the back of the room at about four-thirty and leave quickly before everyone tried to talk to him. They would catch a tram to Chinatown, eat Chinese food (their favourite), shop for a souvenir, see the sights for a while and then “catch a flick” as her dad liked to say. Then they would grab a taxi back to the hotel, jump in the pool for a quick swim (her dad was famous for sneaking in when the pool was closed), order a hot fudge sundae from room service, and watch the late, late show. They discussed the details over and over again before they left. The anticipation was part of the whole experience. This was all going according to plan until, as her father was leaving the convention centre, he ran into an old college friend and business associate. It had been years since they had seen each other, and Cynthia watched as they embraced enthusiastically. His friend said, in effect: “I am so glad you are doing some work with our company now. When Lois and I heard about it we thought it would be perfect. We want to invite you, and of course Cynthia, to get a spectacular seafood dinner down at the Wharf!” Cynthia’s father responded: “Bob, it’s so great to see you. Dinner at the wharf sounds great!” Cynthia was crestfallen. Her daydreams of tram rides and ice cream sundaes evaporated in an instant. Plus, she hated seafood and she could just imagine how bored she would be listening to the adults talk all night. But then her father continued: “But not tonight. Cynthia and I have a special date planned, don’t we?” He winked at Cynthia and grabbed her hand and they ran out of the door and continued with what was an unforgettable night in San Francisco. As it happens, Cynthia’s father was the management thinker Stephen R. Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) who had passed away only weeks before Cynthia told me this story. So it was with deep emotion she recalled that evening in San Francisco. His simple decision “Bonded him to me forever because I knew what mattered most to him was me!” she said.5 One simple answer is we are unclear about what is essential. When this happens we become defenceless. On the other hand, when we have strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the non-essentials coming at us from all directions. With Rosa it was her deep moral clarity that gave her unusual courage of conviction. With Stephen it was the clarity of his vision for the evening with his loving daughter. In virtually every instance, clarity about what is essential fuels us with the strength to say no to the non-essentials. Stephen R. Covey, one of the most respected and widely read business thinkers of his generation, was an Essentialist. Not only did he routinely teach Essentialist principles – like “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” – to important leaders and heads of state around the world, he lived them.6 And in this moment of living them with his daughter he made a memory that literally outlasted his lifetime. Seen with some perspective, his decision seems obvious. But many in his shoes would have accepted the friend’s invitation for fear of seeming rude or ungrateful, or passing up a rare opportunity to dine with an old friend. So why is it so hard in the moment to dare to choose what is essential over what is non-essential?

I don’t care,” she says curtly. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but we want no part of it. Actually, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” She probably doesn’t have the right to kick me out. I’m not causing a public disturbance; I haven’t done anything illegal. All I did was make casual conversation with a waiter. I consider standing my ground, enforcing my rights as a customer, insisting that they call the police if they want to remove me. But I’d rather not go viral for yet another reason. I can imagine the YouTube title: “Chinatown Karen Insists She’s Not ICE.

out what you’re allowed to say. Above all, trying to never, ever offend. To watch the mainstream, find out what kind of fiction they are telling themselves, find a bit part in it. Be appealing and acceptable, be what they want to see. (then) My client was a part of this system. Both victim and suspect, he killed countless Asian men. (gasp from the gallery) Killed them and then, six weeks later, became them again, as if nothing had happened, as if he had no memory or remorse. He allowed it to happen, allowed himself to become Generic, so that no one could even tell what was happening. He is guilty, Your Honor, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Guilty of wanting to be part of something that never wanted him. (beat) The defense rests.

In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.

the Chinese food that’s been served here, in this Chinatown, for as long as he can remember. But this Chinatown is changing. Jew has heard that the owners of Hon’s want to retire, too. “Which is understandable,” he says. “They’re pretty old. But it makes me sad. Who’s gonna take the torch of these places that have been here for so long?

I live in Chinatown,” said Charlie, and although that was technically kinda-sorta true, he knew how to say exactly three things in Mandarin: Good day; light starch, please; and I am an ignorant white devil, all taught to him by Mrs. Ling. He believed the last to translate to “top of the morning to you.

On the phone in the living room, Henry Kissinger, a frequent overnight guest, engages in apparently serious conversation: “Mm. Yes. Yes, undoubtedly.…” Gilruth swoops in to light pine-scented candles and slip a coaster under Kissinger’s drink. Kissinger nods his thanks. Gilruth nods back. They’ve done this before. The music, a comely mingling of rock and jazz standards: “You must remember this.…” The threads of golden sconce light pinging off the roses … The china, gilded with a naked girl riding a centaur, waiting contentedly on a dining room table. Printed linen walls.… Gilruth—handsomely grizzled, William Holden with a tan—whistles while he works. “A sigh is just a sigh.…” “Yes,” Kissinger says. “Yes, goodbye.” Click. “The fun-da-mental things … apply.…” Kissinger stands. “As time”—he croaks on his way to the guest room to change—“goes … by.…

Will? What are you doing?” “Being in love with you.” “No, you’re not. You’re falling in love.” “Same thing.” “Not the same thing,” she says. “Falling in love is a story.” She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.

And I’ll be?” “Whatever you want, man,” she says. “A guy can dream,” you say. “Cheers to that.” You touch your small coffee cups to each other’s, a toast to something you both know will never happen.

The sole book now in Dorothy’s possession is a copy of Hamilton’s Mythology. A book she has loved since childhood, when she spied the tattered paperback in a bin in her local library, passed over by all the other kids for its ruined state. It says on the back, published in the U.S.A. She has learned to read this foreign language from this book, this book of myths. She loves each of the little chapters, how they are short, and self-contained, but also all fit together in a larger universe of gods and goddesses, spirits, lower and higher, deities of all types and their seconds, their assistants, their rivalries and hierarchies, their relative powers and weaknesses. Their petty squabbles and sordid doings and secret crushes. Every time she opens the book, she hopes to turn to a new page, a new god, a little tiny thing. She likes the minor gods the best, because they are easier to master, to learn everything about. She can search out and soak up all of the other things that other people had written or said about this minor god, and in that way become an authority on such a god. And when she becomes an authority someday, an expert in her own right, she thinks that maybe she might be able to make her own entry in the book. To create a tiny god from scratch. She has not named it yet. Perhaps the god of bus rides. The god of sponge baths, or maps, or minimum wage. The god of immigrants.

He says something you don't quite follow. You hear it, you catch most of the individual words, and yet somehow--you don't understand. This gap, always there. Somehow unbridgeable, whether it's across a wide Pacific gulf of language and culture, or just a simple sentence, father to son, always distance. The texture of everyday actions, simple movements and gestures, is harder than it looks. The great shame of your life that you can't speak his language, not really, not fluently.

Everyone in Chinatown seems to have a B side to his or her character---an untold story---Ernest reasoned as he lit a cigarette and remembered that one of his favorite songs was a Hank Williams flip-side record, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." That song had seemed to do pretty well. Then again, some say Hank Williams died of a broken heart.

In the spring of 2002, popular clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch decided to, as they say, fuck around and find out. The company’s latest round of overpriced clothing included an assortment of Asian-themed novelty graphic T-shirts advertising fictional businesses. One of the designs, the one most people seem to remember, was for “Wong Brothers Laundry Service,” evoking stereotypically cheap Chinatown labor, bachelor societies, and Ancient Chinese Secrets.

Able to pass in any situation as may be required,” she says. “I get it all. Brazilian, Filipina, Mediterranean, Eurasian. Or just a really tan White girl with exotic-looking eyes. Everywhere I go, people think I’m one of them. They want to claim me for their tribe.” “Must be amazing.” “Yeah, I mean, I can be objectified by men of all races.

BLACK DUDE COP Whaddya got? ATTRACTIVE OFFICER Restaurant worker says the parents live nearby. We’re hunting down an address. WHITE LADY COP Good. We’ll pay a visit. Might have some questions for them. (then) Anyone else? ATTRACTIVE OFFICER A brother. Seems to have gone missing. Black and White exchange a look. BLACK DUDE COP This might be a case of— WHITE LADY COP The Wong guy.

They’re going to shoot him. You have to say something. But how can you? You don’t have any lines.

The question isn't where did the Asian guy disappear to? The question is: why is the Asian guy always dead? Because we don't fit. In the story. If someone showed you my picture on the street, how would you describe it? You might say, an Asian fellow. Asian dude. Asian Man. How many of you would say: that's an American? What is it about an Asian Man that makes him so hard to assimilate? Why doesn't he have a role in Black and White? The question is: Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?

The question isn't where did the Asian guy disappear to? The question is: why is the Asian guy always dead? Because we don't fit. In the story. If someone showed you my picture on the street, how would you describe it? You might say, an Asian fellow. Asian dude. Asian Man. How many of you would say: that's an American? What is it about an Asian Man that makes him so hard to assimilate? Why doesn't he have a role in Black and White? The question is: Who gets to be an American? What does an American loo

The question isn't where did the Asian guy disappear to? The question is: why is the Asian guy always dead? Because we don't fit. In the story. If someone showed you my picture on the street, how would you describe it? You might say, an Asian fellow. Asian dude. Asian Man. How many of you would say: that's an American? What is it about an Asian Man that makes him so hard to assimilate? Why doesn't he have a role in Black and White? The question is: Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?