Rescripting Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea: A Chinese[/]American Authentic?

Louis Chu's novel Eat a Bowl of Tea appeared in 1961, eighteen years after Congress repealed all Chinese exclusion laws and granted an annual quota of 105 Chinese immigrants. The events covered in the novel are directly related to this momentous shift in immigration policy toward a people who were the first to be legally discriminated against in United States immigrant history. The novel, however, shows a self-consciousness about language especially in its translations of Chinese terms and phrases. The novel represents a transformational moment when Chinese male immigrants participated actively in the modification of their own all-male institutions. Gambling, prostitution, and alcohol, the staple vices of the "bachelor" society, were no longer tolerated. Chu's novel shows an ethnocentric moment, a post-World War II renewal of Chinese-American community; Wang's film comes from a late twentieth-century moment, involving an Americanization of the ethnic community, and so articulates a different identity formation.