Bruce Edward Hall may have an English name and a Connecticut upbringing, but for him a trip to Chinatown, New York, is a visit to the ghosts of his Chinese Ancestors -- Ancestors who helped create the neighborhood that is really as much a transplanted Cantonese village as it is a part of a great American city. Among these Ancestors are missionaries and reprobates, businessmen and scholars. There is the patriarch with three wives (two in China, one in New York), who arrived in Chinatown just as it was beginning to take shape, and who eventually became a key player in the infamous Tong Wars that ravaged the neighborhood at the turn of the century. There is the grandfather, whose nickname, Hock Shop, bespoke his reputation as Chinatown's favorite bookie. There is the dashing aviator whose dogfight in the skies over Brooklyn made him Chinatown's first hero in the way against Japan, and the matriarch who was purchased as a bride for $1,200 when the ratio of Chinese men to women was two hundred to one. And all of them shared the experience of the great-aunt who emigrated to New York at the age of eight months, but lived in fear of deportation for the next fifty years because this country refused to allow Chinese to become American citizens. 
 In Tea That Burns, Bruce Edward Hall uses the stories of these and others to tell the history of Chinatown, starting with the tumultuous journey from an ancient empire ruled by the nine dragons of the universe to a bewildering land of elevated trains, solitary labor, and violent discrimination. The world they constructed was built of backbreaking labor and poetry contests; gambling dens and Cantonese opera; Tong Wars, festivals, firecrackers, incense, and food -- always food, to celebrate every conceivable occasion and to confound the ever-meddlesome "White Devils" as they attempt to master the mysteries of chop sticks and stir-fry. A vivid and tactile story, rich with the sights, sounds, and sensations of Chinatown then and now, Tea That Burns reads like a novel, but is history at its best.

Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown

Biographies & Memoirs

Bruce Edward Hall

Community & Culture

Free Press

Diamond Street chronicles the history of vice and crime in the city of Hudson, NY, from its founding in 1783 to a major crackdown by the NYS State Police in 1950. The little city of Hudson, New York (pop.8,000), was for many years the unlikely setting for a world of prostitution, gambling, murder, and government corruption with more than a touch of the Keystone Kops thrown in. In the century or so before 1950, dozens of madams, bootleggers, and gamblers held sway there, making Hudson famous as a mini sin city. There were at least two major illegal horse rooms, a big-stakes floating dice game, and as many as fifteen houses of ill repute. Meanwhile, the church suppers took place and the parades marched up and down as Hudson's respectable citizenry convinced themselves that there was nothing out of the ordinary in this town described as ten streets wide and ten streets deep ... a Norman Rockwell painting in motion.

Diamond Street: The Story of the Little Town With the Big Red Light District

History

Americas

Black Dome Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bruce Edward Hall. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bruce Edward Hall