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CHINESE_RED

                                                    July    22, 2015
                                               Rev: October  8, 2016

                                            A version of this was
I picked up a copy of a book on impulse     published here:
over at Bibliomania in Oakland (yes, an
actual used bookstore.  You've heard of        http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/07/26/1405780/-Chinatown-Tour
bookstores, right kids?), and it turned
out to be a good pick:

  Richard Burke, "Chinese Red" (1942)
  A Quinny Hite Mystery.

This copy was a small, cheaply made hardback edition that
seems to have been one of the main vehicles for popular
fiction back before the advent of the paperback-- though
1942 was concurrent with the pulp magazine craze,
which makes me wonder about the publishing decisions
involved in releasing this in book form.

But then, as mystery novels go, this one is pretty well
constructed, and holds up fairly well.  It's a work of
it's time that screams out the years it came from-- guys
in hats making wisecracks, with some reasonably
impressive hugger-mugger, up and down and around a
building in New York's Chinatown.

The story takes place in the early years of US entry into
World War II-- it's contempt for "Japs" makes it seem
likely it was written after the Pearl harbor attack in
late 1941.  Notably, it shows no similar hostitlity
toward Chinese people-- the white characters on stage are
New Yorkers, many of them ignorant, all of them brash and
occasionally insulting, but the overall impression you
get of the Chinese and of New York's Chinatown is not at
all negative:

  "The sinister, evil and mysterious
  Chinese of one-time popular
  imagination doesn't exist in the                CHINATOWN_BLINDFOLDED
  mind of any New York policeman, who
  knows these people to be the least
  troublesome of any element of the
  huge city." (p. 46)

There's also some commentary on how honest and
trustworthy the Chinese are, and much sympathy expressed
for their neighborhood getting treated as an attraction
for those damn tourists-- the one group consistently
treated with contempt by the author.

The general attitude here is: "yeah, they may seem weird
to us, but we probably seem pretty weird to them".

Though this sense of acceptance is combined with a
fascination with the exotic-- that's the one feature           HETEROPHILLIA
consistently present in any treatment of Chinatown,
however positive or negative it may be on Chinese people
in general.

In the case of Burke's novel, there's the "Chinese Red"
of the title, which refers to a half-Chinese woman with
naturally red hair, who wears a black wig when she needs
to pass as normal, but uses her own hair when dressed-up
for nightclub floor shows.

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