New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776-1882

Abstract

From George Washington's desire (in the heat of the Revolutionary War) for a proper set of Chinese porcelains for afternoon tea, to the lives of Chinese-Irish couples in the 1830s, to the commercial success of Cheng and Eng (the Siamese twins), to rising fears of the heathen Chinee, this work offers a look at the role Chinese people, things and ideas played in the fashioning of American culture and politics. Piecing together various historical fragments and ancedotes from the years before Chinatown emerged in the 1870s, historian John Kuo Wei Tchen redraws Manhattan's historical landscape and seeks to broaden our understanding of the role of port cultures in the making of American identities. Techen tells his story in three parts. In the first, he explores America's fascination with Asia as a source of luxury items, cultural taste and lucrative trade. In the second he explains how Chinese people and things become objects of curiosity in the expansive commercial marketplace. In the third part, Tchen focuses on how Americans' attitude toward the Chinese changed from fascination to demonization.

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