Author: James C. Mohr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198036760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
A little over a century ago, bubonic plague--the same Black Death that decimated medieval Europe--arrived on the shores of Hawaii just as the islands were about to become a U.S. territory. In this absorbing narrative, James Mohr tells the story of that fearful visitation and its fiery climax--a vast conflagration that engulfed Honolulu's Chinatown. Mohr tells this gripping tale largely through the eyes of the people caught up in the disaster, from members of the white elite to Chinese doctors, Japanese businessmen, and Hawaiian reporters. At the heart of the narrative are three American physicians--the Honolulu Board of Health--who became virtual dictators when the government granted them absolute control over the armed forces and the treasury. The doctors soon quarantined Chinatown, where the plague was killing one or two people a day and clearly spreading. They resisted intense pressure from the white community to burn down all of Chinatown at once and instead ordered a careful, controlled burning of buildings where plague victims had died. But a freak wind whipped one of those small fires into a roaring inferno that destroyed everything in its path, consuming roughly thirty-eight acres of densely packed wooden structures in a single afternoon. Some 5000 people lost their homes and all their possessions and were marched in shock to detention camps, where they were confined under armed guard for weeks. Next to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Chinatown fire is the worst civic disaster in Hawaiian history. A dramatic account of people struggling in the face of mounting catastrophe, Plague and Fire is a stimulating and thought-provoking read.
Author: Bonnie Tsui
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416558365
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
CHINATOWN, U.S.A.: a state of mind, a world within a world, a neighborhood that exists in more cities than you might imagine. Every day, Americans find "something different" in Chinatown's narrow lanes and overflowing markets, tasting exotic delicacies from a world apart or bartering for a trinket on the street -- all without ever leaving the country. It's a place that's foreign yet familiar, by now quite well known on the Western cultural radar, but splitting the difference still gives many visitors to Chinatown the sense, above all, that things are not what they seem -- something everyone in popular culture, from Charlie Chan to Jack Nicholson, has been telling us for decades. And it's true that few visitors realize just how much goes on beneath the surface of this vibrant microcosm, a place with its own deeply felt history and stories of national cultural significance. But Chinatown is not a place that needs solving; it's a place that needs a more specific telling. In American Chinatown, acclaimed travel writer Bonnie Tsui takes an affectionate and attentive look at the neighborhood that has bewitched her since childhood, when she eagerly awaited her grandfather's return from the fortune-cookie factory. Tsui visits the country's four most famous Chinatowns -- San Francisco (the oldest), New York (the biggest), Los Angeles (the film icon), Honolulu (the crossroads) -- and makes her final, fascinating stop in Las Vegas (the newest; this Chinatown began as a mall); in her explorations, she focuses on the remarkable experiences of ordinary people, everyone from first-to fifth-generation Chinese Americans. American Chinatown breaks down the enigma of Chinatown by offering narrative glimpses: intriguing characters who reveal the realities and the unexpected details of Chinatown life that American audiences haven't heard. There are beauty queens, celebrity chefs, immigrant garment workers; there are high school kids who are changing inner-city life in San Francisco, Chinese extras who played key roles in 1940s Hollywood, new arrivals who go straight to dealer school in Las Vegas hoping to find their fortunes in their own vision of "gold mountain." Tsui's investigations run everywhere, from mom-and-pop fortune-cookie factories to the mall, leaving no stone unturned. By interweaving her personal impressions with the experiences of those living in these unique communities, Tsui beautifully captures their vivid stories, giving readers a deeper look into what "Chinatown" means to its inhabitants, what each community takes on from its American home, and what their experience means to America at large. For anyone who has ever wandered through Chinatown and wondered what it was all about, and for Americans wanting to understand the changing face of their own country, American Chinatown is an all-access pass.
Author: Bonnie Tsui
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416557237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Tsui offers a unique full-access pass to America's most famous Chinatowns--New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Las Vegas--revealing a captivating world-within-a-world. b&w photos throughout.
Author: Greg Ward
Publisher: Rough Guides
ISBN: 9781858288512
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
The Rough Guide to Honolulu covers the epicentre of Hawaii's mass tourism, while discovering gems of untrammelled beauty on the rest of the relatively undeveloped island of Oahu. As would be expected for the surf capital of the world, the beaches are all covered in detail as are the sights, monuments, shops and architecture that make up this modern city.
Author: Laurence J. C. Ma
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742517561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
Leading scholars in the field consider the profound importance of meanings of place and the spatial processes of mobility and settlement for the Chinese overseas. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Author: Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252099001
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
Awards: Irving Lowens Award, Society for American Music (SAM), 2019 Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society (AMS), 2018 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2018 Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Media, Visual, and Performance Studies, Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), 2019 The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre–World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Author: Nancy Bannick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781933570495
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 94
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Book Description
Author: Brandon Jew
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1984856510
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
JAMES BEARD AWARD WINNER • The acclaimed chef behind the Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s restaurant shares the past, present, and future of Chinese cooking in America through 90 mouthwatering recipes. ONE OF THE TEN BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle • ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Glamour • “Brandon Jew’s affection for San Francisco’s Chinatown and his own Chinese heritage is palpable in this cookbook, which is both a recipe collection and a portrait of a district rich in history.”—Fuchsia Dunlop, James Beard Award-winning author of The Food of Sichuan Brandon Jew trained in the kitchens of California cuisine pioneers and Michelin-starred Italian institutions before finding his way back to Chinatown and the food of his childhood. Through deeply personal recipes and stories about the neighborhood that often inspires them, this groundbreaking cookbook is an intimate account of how Chinese food became American food and the making of a Chinese American chef. Jew takes inspiration from classic Chinatown recipes to create innovative spins like Sizzling Rice Soup, Squid Ink Wontons, Orange Chicken Wings, Liberty Roast Duck, Mushroom Mu Shu, and Banana Black Sesame Pie. From the fundamentals of Chinese cooking to master class recipes, he interweaves recipes and techniques with stories about their origins in Chinatown and in his own family history. And he connects his classical training and American roots to Chinese traditions in chapters celebrating dim sum, dumplings, and banquet-style parties. With more than a hundred photographs of finished dishes as well as moving and evocative atmospheric shots of Chinatown, this book is also an intimate portrait—a look down the alleyways, above the tourist shops, and into the kitchens—of the neighborhood that changed the flavor of America.
Author: Laura Ruby
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 0738593001
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130
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Book Description
Before Honolulu became one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, there was a small Hawai'ian settlement at the edge of a natural harbor known as Kou. Named Kou for the sheltering, orange-blossomed trees, the area was ideal for launching canoes for fishing and cultivating fields adjacent to the Nuuanu Stream. In 1845, King Kamehameha III moved the permanent capital of the Hawai'ian Kingdom from Lahaina to O'ahu, and the Honolulu we know today started to take shape. The name Honolulu means protected harbor and that is what the tropic paradise must have felt like as the city began to grow in commerce and resources. Americans began to flock in from the mainland as tourists, businessmen, and missionaries, and immigrants from around the world traveled to this small island to begin a new life. Successive waves of immigrants came to this port town, bringing with them new religions, architecture, education, foods, and social mores. The small confines of this town encouraged cross-pollination of peoples and ideas that fostered the unique neighborhoods that give Honolulu its character.
Author: Alan Brennert
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429977736
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
From the bestselling author of the "dazzling historical saga" (The Washington Post), Moloka'i, comes the irresistible story of a young immigrant bride in a ramshackle town that becomes a great modern city "In Korea in those days, newborn girls were not deemed important enough to be graced with formal names, but were instead given nicknames, which often reflected the parents' feelings on the birth of a daughter: I knew a girl named Anger, and another called Pity. As for me, my parents named me Regret." Honolulu is the rich, unforgettable story of a young "picture bride" who journeys to Hawai'i in 1914 in search of a better life. Instead of the affluent young husband and chance at an education that she has been promised, she is quickly married off to a poor, embittered laborer who takes his frustrations out on his new wife. Renaming herself Jin, she makes her own way in this strange land, finding both opportunity and prejudice. With the help of three of her fellow picture brides, Jin prospers along with her adopted city, now growing from a small territorial capital into the great multicultural city it is today. But paradise has its dark side, whether it's the daily struggle for survival in Honolulu's tenements, or a crime that will become the most infamous in the islands' history... With its passionate knowledge of people and places in Hawai'i far off the tourist track, Honolulu is most of all the spellbinding tale of four women in a new world, united by dreams, disappointment, sacrifices, and friendship.
