The ''Chinatown Handy Guide'' was one of the early Chinatown tour books published by a Chinese American author an
World Catalog. It was published in four different geographic editions tailored to the largest established
Chinatown
A Chinatown () is an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside Greater China, most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Austra ...
s in America's biggest cities:
Chinatown Handy Guide
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
, Chinatown Handy Guide
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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, Chinatown Handy Guide
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
and Chinatown Handy Guide
Los Angeles
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...
(in order of publication). In addition, there were four sister books that promoted tourism for the Chinatown's in
Cleveland
Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...
,
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,
Seattle
Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...
,
and
Stockton
Pioneering newspaperman
John T.C. Fang published all the ''Chinatown Handy Guides'' through his company Chinese Publishing House, and he served as Editor and Publisher for each of the books. Fang went on to start ''
AsianWeek
''AsianWeek'' was America's first and largest English language print and on-line publication serving Asian Americans. The news organization played an important role nationally and in the San Francisco Bay Area as the “Voice of Asian America”. ...
'', the first and largest English language newsweekly for the Asian American community, and the Fang Family became the first Asian Americans to own major American newspapers including the
''Independent'' Newspaper Group and ''
The San Francisco Examiner
The ''San Francisco Examiner'' is a newspaper distributed in and around San Francisco, California, and published since 1863.
Once self-dubbed the "Monarch of the Dailies" by then-owner William Randolph Hearst, and flagship of the Hearst Corporat ...
''.
“Capitalizing on the fact that Chinatowns were becoming tourist attractions”
across America, Fang's ''Chinatown Handy Guides'' took a unique approach of not only promoting Chinatowns as a tourist destination, but also as a place of interaction between Chinese Americans and white Americans. The San Francisco edition featured an “international group of businessmen and pastors” gathering for “bible class conducted each week in a local pharmacy.” The New York City edition included photos of Chinese children as part of a fundraising drive for the Red Cross, and another photo of “visiting Congressmen” being welcomed in Chinatown.
Later academics described the books as “intended to boost (Chinatown’s) flagging tourist economy”,
and as luring “sightseers with a predictable dim sum glossary, the origin story of chop suey, and a tutorial on how to hold chopsticks.”
But the ''Chinatown Handy Guides'' also sought to characterize the development of the nation's Chinatowns as important contributors to America's economy. Each edition included a history of the specific Chinatown in that city, and quantified the economic contributions of the
Chinese community
The Chinese people or simply Chinese, are people or ethnic groups identified with China, usually through ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, or other affiliation.
Chinese people are known as Zhongguoren () or as Huaren () by speakers of s ...
, claiming for example, that in 1958 it was “safe to estimate that in Greater New York there (were) over 2,000 restaurants representing a total investment of over $100 million dollars, 500 stores, markets and curio shops and 5,000 laundries owned by Chinese.” Each guidebook also included “Points of Interest” and advertisements from local Chinatown establishments.
The tourist booklets featured photos of many prominent Americans in Chinatown from President
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was ...
to U.S. Congressmen and Senators. Republican Mayor
George Christopher
George Christopher (born George Christopheles; December 8, 1907 – September 14, 2000) was a Greek-American politician who served as the 34th mayor of San Francisco from 1956 to 1964. He is the most recent Republican to be elected mayor of San ...
of San Francisco offered a welcome letter for the SF edition, while New York's Democratic Mayor
Robert F. Wagner Jr.
Robert Ferdinand Wagner II (April 20, 1910 – February 12, 1991) was an American politician who served three terms as the mayor of New York City from 1954 through 1965. When running for his third term, he broke with the Tammany Hall leadership ...
demonstrated how to use chopsticks in the NYC edition. Hollywood stars pictured visiting Chinatown ranged from
Lucille Ball
Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989) was an American actress, comedienne and producer. She was nominated for 13 Primetime Emmy Awards, winning five times, and was the recipient of several other accolades, such as the Golden ...
to
Danny Kaye
Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminsky; yi, דוד־דניאל קאַמינסקי; January 18, 1911 – March 3, 1987) was an American actor, comedian, singer and dancer. His performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and ...
. The only African American pictured in Chinatown was
Nat King Cole
Nathaniel Adams Coles (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965), known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer, jazz pianist, and actor. Cole's music career began after he dropped out of school at the age of 15, and continued f ...
in San Francisco.
History and distribution
John T.C. Fang immigrated to the United States in 1952 and studied journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
campus. Afterwards, he traveled to New York City where he published the first ''Chinatown Handy Guide'' in 1958. At the end of that year, Fang went to Chicago's Chinatown where the cold winter nearly prevented him from completing that city's edition. In 1959, Fang returned to the West Coast and published the San Francisco and Los Angeles editions of the ''Chinatown Handy Guide''. After launching all four books, Fang returned to Taiwan as a successful publisher and entrepreneur, and married his wife
Florence Fang
Florence Fang (; born 1933/1934) is a Chinese-American businesswoman, publisher, and philanthropist active in the San Francisco area. She is the former owner of the '' San Francisco Examiner'' and other media titles and has been a fund-raiser for t ...
, before the couple returned to America and John began working in the newspaper industry.
Fang used a number of business, publishing and marketing techniques to promote Chinatown tourism. This included creating dual revenue streams – one from advertisements placed in the booklets by Chinatown restaurants and merchants, and another revenue stream from single copy sales as the booklets were sold for $1 each (including postage and handling for mail-in orders!)
Fang also produced innovative marketing materials to promote the books. A 1960 brochure promoting the
Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year is the festival that celebrates the beginning of a New Year, new year on the traditional lunisolar calendar, lunisolar and solar Chinese calendar. In Sinophone, Chinese and other East Asian cultures, the festival is commonly r ...
Festival exhorted tourists to get “more enjoyment from your Chinatown visit” by purchasing a ''Chinatown Handy Guide'', “available at Macy’s, White House (department store),
Emporium,
City of Paris,
Woolworth’s and all leading department and book stores and Chinatown gift shops.”
Orientalism and cultural impact
The ''Chinatown Handy Guides'' were published at the height of the American
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, Racial discrimination ...
. With their focus on
Chinese Americans
Chinese Americans are Americans of Han Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans constitute a subgroup of East Asian Americans which also constitute a subgroup of Asian Americans. Many Chinese Americans along with their ancestors trace lineage from ...
however, the booklets promoted integration of Chinese in America rather than fighting against segregation practices that
African Americans
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
faced in southern states. Fang was a Chinese American who published his work during a time when "San Francisco entrepreneurs recognized the retail potential of the model family concept” to serve as “both a political defense mechanism and a means to strengthen (the Chinese community’s) economic muscle.”
Facing eighty years of anti-Chinese policy since passage of the
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law excluded merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplom ...
in 1882, many Chinese leaders in the 1960s (including Fang) hoped to soften American attitudes by portraying the Chinese community as industrious, family-oriented and non-violent. As later researchers noted, “Chinese Americans came to rely on the trope of nondelinquency to advance their social-political ambitions—a tactic that enabled a reconciliation of claims to full citizenship with the replication of racial distinction.”
The ''Chinatown Handy Guide'' prominently included features like “Chinatown’s Pride: No Juvenile Delinquency Problem,” “San Francisco Hail Chinese as Law-Abiding,” and “Mutual Love of Children and Elders Is the Basis of Chinese Family Life.”
All editions of the book proudly proclaimed: “Chinatown is not concerned with finding a cure for juvenile delinquency. It has a preventive in its exemplary family life.”
The 1960s also marked the beginning of the end for “the usage of ‘Oriental’ or ‘
Orient
The Orient is a term for the East in relation to Europe, traditionally comprising anything belonging to the Eastern world. It is the antonym of ''Occident'', the Western World. In English, it is largely a metonym for, and coterminous with, the c ...
’ as a catch-all phrase for Chinese and Japanese” people. Popularized at the beginning of the 20th Century in the 1900s, the term ‘Oriental’ had replaced the earlier use of ‘Mongol’ or ‘
Mongoloid
Mongoloid () is an obsolete racial grouping of various peoples indigenous to large parts of Asia, the Americas, and some regions in Europe and Oceania. The term is derived from a now-disproven theory of biological race. In the past, other terms ...
’ as descriptors for people of Asian descent. ‘Oriental’ was still the most accepted term for Asians in 1960 as the ''Chinatown Handy Guide'' proudly called Chinatown the “Oriental Colony” on its front cover, and repeatedly used the term ‘Oriental’ throughout its text.
Later as founder of ''
AsianWeek
''AsianWeek'' was America's first and largest English language print and on-line publication serving Asian Americans. The news organization played an important role nationally and in the San Francisco Bay Area as the “Voice of Asian America”. ...
'' newspaper, Fang would play an important role in replacing the term ‘Oriental’ with ‘Asian’ as the accepted terminology for describing the pan-ethnic Asian Pacific Islander population which grew dramatically in the United States after passage of the
1965 Immigration Act. Even in his later years, Fang continued to be considered an expert on Chinatown and the Chinese community, commenting to ''
The Christian Science Monitor
''The Christian Science Monitor'' (''CSM''), commonly known as ''The Monitor'', is a nonprofit news organization that publishes daily articles in electronic format as well as a weekly print edition. It was founded in 1908 as a daily newspaper ...
'' in 1998 on how Chinese born in America were moving out of Chinatown into the suburbs.
The ''Chinatown Handy Guide'' is catalogued at the Library of Congress and continues to be used as a historical resource both for its text and its photographs. The books have also become memorabilia, an original copy recently sold for $425 as a part of a batch of scarce Chinatown ephemera.
Other publications
John T.C. Fang's company, the Chinese Publishing House was an active publisher of books and directories focused on Chinatown and the Chinese community in America. Aside from the four editions of the ''Chinatown Handy Guide'', these other books have also been documented:
''Dining a la Chinese: A Guide to the Chinese community and Restaurants in Cleveland''
''Yee Fow: the Chinese community in Sacramento'' (1961)
''Oriental flavors : a guide to Seattle's Chinatown'' (1962)
''The Chinese community in Stockton: Wah Yun Shih-tso tun hua jen'' (1963)
''Los Angeles Chinese Directory: Luosheng Hua ren shang ye shou ce'' (1965)
''Sacramento's Chinese Directory'' (1960s)
References
{{Reflist
American non-fiction books
Chinatown, San Francisco
Books about cities