Arnold Bennett’s Trip to New York’s Chinatown in 1912

I just finished a swift book tour through the Mid-West and New York and found myself walking through New York’s Chinatown. As it happened I’d brought along a copy of Your United States: Impressions of a First Visit, a series of vignettes written by the English writer Arnold Bennett, penned while he was on a book tour of the States roughly a century ago, in 1912. It’s a slim but entertaining volume with some funny observations on American hotels, restaurants, sports and telephone obsessions. Bennett too visited Chinatown…it was then, as now, a major tourist attraction….

“We even saw Chinatown, and the wagonettes of tourists stationary in its streets. I had suspected that Chinatown was largely a show for tourists. When I asked how it existed, I was told that the two thousand Chinese of Chinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese who came into from all quarters on Sundays, and I understood. As a show it lacked convincingness – except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors silenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage, by reason of its tawdry appeals of color and light, of making one feel like a tourist…

And it was a proud moment when in an inconceivable retreat we were permitted to talk with an aged Chinese actor and view his collection of flowery hats. It was a still prouder (and also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led through courtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloofness the American legitimate wives of wealthy Chinamen, sitting gorgeous, with the quiescence of odalisques, in gorgeous uncurtained interiors. I was glad when one of the ladies defied the detective (guiding Bennett through Chinatown) by abruptly swishing down her blind.”