Reading Chinatown: A Literary Stroll Through 1970’s San Francisco Chinatown
This is a simple course. You read. We discuss what you read. No theory (or not much). Archival knowledge. What are we going to read? We’re concentrating on literature that takes place in the early 1970’s and is set in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the rise of the Asian American movement: Karen Yamashita’s I Hotel, Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Jeffery Paul Chan’s Eat Everything Before You Die, Frank Chin’s Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, and Jeffrey Partridge’s Beyond Literary Chinatown. In addition to these literary works, we will be screening three documentaries and two films: Curtis Choy’s The Fall of the I Hotel, The San Francisco State Strike, Bill Moyers’ Becoming American: The Chinese Experience, Chan is Missing, and The Year of the Dragon. Whenever possible we will be able to have video conferences with most, if not all of the authors. Karen Yamashita will be in Seattle during Spring Quarter to discuss her novel with this class. And, at the end, to find closure, maybe we’ll all go to Chinatown and have dinner.