Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown - Hardcover

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. 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.

For Bruce Edward Hall, whose family name was once Hor, and whose grandfather was a much-loved bookie operating out of a florist shop off Mott Street, Chinatown is filled with ghosts. Behind every teeming basket of raw chicken feet and dried sheep's lungs, every redolent platter of square fried turnip cakes and lotus-seed pastries, and every pot of "tea that burns" (a teapot full of scotch), there is a tidbit of tradition. Behind the whispered schemes and blistering gunfire of feuding tongs and behind every celebration of the birth of the honored First Son, there is an empire of symbolism. At the Port Arthur, "The Best Restaurant That Ever Was", with its tank of goldfish warding off demons, there is the uproarious sound of generations coming together to celebrate a shared and proud heritage.

A loving portrait of a family whose superstitions about the old world are eclipsed by the possibilities of the new, Tea That Burns brings to life the spirit of Chinatown that even modern-day residents may never before have perceived.