Eat a Bowl of Tea (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Louis H. Chu
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Domestic realism
- Time of Work: 1941-1949
- Setting: Chinatown, New York, and Chinatown, San Francisco
- Principal Characters: Wang Ben Loy, Wang Wah Gay, Lee Mei Oi, Lee Gong, Ah Song
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Social realism, Domestic realism, Satire
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Parents and children, Love or romance, New York City, 1940’s, American Dream, Asia or Asians, Immigration or emigration, Fathers, Barbershops or barbers, Multiculturalism, San Francisco, Asian Americans, China or Chinese people, Chinese Americans, Confucianism
- Locales: Chinatown, San Francisco, CA, Chinatown, New York
The Story:
Early one morning in New York’s Chinatown, two newlyweds were awakened by the sound of their doorbell. Wang Ben Loy, the young husband, opened their door to find an undesirable figure, a prostitute, from his past. The woman did not believe he was married and only became convinced when shown a pair of his wife’s underwear on a clothesline. Ben Loy returned to bed with his beautiful wife, Mei Oi, but not to rest. Instead, thoughts of his recent impotence tormented him.
Ben Loy had been a young, hardworking Chinese American waiter in “Stanton,”...
[The entire page is 1997 words long]
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