[In the following review, Rothman finds Chinatown Family to be a good description of the experience of a Chinese immigrant family in New York City.]

The life and hard times of a Chinese family in New York City would seem, in prospect, to be one more panel in the larger picture of immigrant struggle. The Czechs, the Swedes, the Jews, the Irish, and the Poles came in diverse ways to describe a series of homogeneous patterns on their way upward, into social solvency. But not so the Chinese.

The difference, very nicely illustrated in this novel [Chinatown Family], is one of equipment. They brought more of cultural ballast with them than any of the other peoples, and they regarded with wider and calmer eyes the gaucheries of a civilization younger than their own. More than any other foreigner, and certainly in a way that no European could experience (since the Europeans and ourselves share the one civilization), the sensitive Chinese is a man from Mars among us. Earnestly grateful though the poorest Chinese immigrant may be, he cannot help but weigh our knowledge and our instincts against his own. He is not so passionately anxious to disappear beneath the surface of America that he cannot pause to taste, and to roll critically upon his tongue, its characteristic flavors. It is this leavening quality of judgment which gives such light and sparkle to a tale not otherwise distinguished by very much of physical movement.

Every member of the family of Tom Fong has his commentary, implicit and explicit, to make upon his new environment; but chief among these and most eloquent is the younger son, Tom Fong, Junior. It is through his eyes that we are given the rare opportunity to examine again, freshly, the things you know too well now to think about unless goaded to do so. Observe young Tom's calm rejection of street-gang tradition: that he must brawl for his rights. (“I know you got stronger muscles. I know it without fighting. But that's all you got. I say I won't fight you. And I won't buy an ice pop for you. Get it yourself.”)

Note his amazement at the psychic knots we tie ourselves into over sex. (He concludes that Americans are ashamed not of sex but of childbirth. An interesting notion. You begin to deny it.) He is scornful of any study of Napoleon (“a crazy killer”), and his explanation of the Declaration of Independence will prove to be a half-page of luminous simplicity for those who have forgotten what it says. Perhaps it is because of his presence beside this solemn and philosophic young Tom, that older brother Yiko, an “Americanized” Chinese anxious to get ahead, wear sporty clothes, sell insurance, shake the right hands, seems so humorously pitiful, like the dog in the fable who has dropped his own bone to grasp at a reflection.

The tale itself, as I have said, is meandering and quite unexciting, as it traces the careers of the Fongs along their separate ways, to individual forms of happiness. The tone is the thing here. There is no need to explain at this time the warm and amiable penetration of Lin Yutang's writing. He has not extended himself. He has been content to make his point, quite openly, within the confines of a simple experience told without any fireworks at all.

There is some Lao Tse here too, slipped into the narrative as an extra fillip for the intellectually curious.