Necessity Vs. Extravagance:Interpreting The Chinatown’s Bachelor Life In Louis Chu’s Eat A Bowl Of Tea

Louis Hing Chu (born October1,1915) was a pioneer of Asian American Literature with his only published work Eat a Bowl of Tea. Widely acclaimed by Asian American writers and critics, Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea is the first Chinese American novel that realistically depicts New York’s Chinatown bachelor society in the United States shortly after World War Ⅱ. It’s a satire of New York’s Chinatown’s bachelor society. Characters include Ben Loy, the son of a "bachelor" father. He has been sent to China after World War Ⅱ to get married. After getting married to his bride Mei Oi, they return to America where he finds himself impotent to love his traditional and good wife. Another character Ah Song is a thug and a gambler who seduces Mei Oi. The story continues and basically depicts the Chinatown in New York and the Chinese Americans at that time.In my thesis, I will transplant the two groups of words—Necessity:force, constraint, survival-driven and Extravagance:urge, impulse, desire—into the interpretation of Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea.The first chapter mainly introduces the author Louis Chu and his masterpiece Eat a Bowl of Tea. It also clarifies the paper’s framework and the current research of Eat a Bowl of Tea.The second chapter will discuss the Necessity part. The novel provides two historically significant dates for both the father’s and the son’s marriages, respectively in1928and1948. The intervening twenty years witnessed the adverse effects of a series of U.S. immigration laws that profoundly affected the life of Chinese immigrants. It led to a special phenomenon that large numbers of "married bachelors" gathered in Chinatown. On the one hand, they were being thousands li away from their homeland and could not go back to have a normal family life with their families; on the other hand, they came to America to make money, and had to send the money back home out of duty year after year. They were isolated, limited and trapped in Chinatown, being called "married bachelors." I will put this part in its historical background (the years between1930and1950) in analyzing the word group—"force, constraint and survival-driven." In Chinatown, under the influence of Confucian thought, these bachelors firmly clung to the clan association (in this novel, the Wang Clan). Under the influence of Chinese traditional culture, or in order to survive in Chinatown in New York, it was indispensable for the "married bachelors" to cling to the family clan or to be responsible for the continuation of their family lines.The third chapter presents the Extravagance part. This part will focus on the bachelors themselves. Being as "the grimshunhock," they came to America to make fortune. While in America, things were different. The restaurant and the laundry jobs made the Chinese men earn little money, and the life with no women around turned them into a group of "married bachelors." So, sex, for the bachelors, became an extravagance in New York’s Chinatown. To whom they could turn were the prostitutes in New York in order to satisfy their sexual desires. Therefore, Ben Loy’s sudden impotence after his marriage with Mei Oi not only disclosed his "foolish, impetuous, stupid past"(Chu12), but also implied the social emasculation of the Chinese men by American laws as well as the revenge of their reckless youth. So Ben Loy’s impotence made the continuation of the family line become a luxury.The fourth chapter focuses on two images—the tea that healed Ben Loy’s impotence and the illegitimate child. Mei Oi’s appearance in the Chinatown in New York messed up the life of the bachelors."Ben Loy must drink a bitter bowl of tea:he must make amends for the excesses of the bachelor legacy"(Kim117). He must accept his own mistakes, his wife’s adultery and the illegitimate child as the revenge of his restless youth.The fifth chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis, based on the analysis of the bachelors’society in Chinatown. From the Necessity part, we can conclude that a series of American policies of discrimination against Chinese confined them in Chinatown, and left them no choice but to cling to family-based thoughts. Ben Loy’s impotence symbolizes American discrimination against Chinese during that time. On the one hand, America should be responsible for the impotence of the bachelors; on the other hand, the bachelors themselves should also surfer the consequence of their youth mistakes.