From the Penile to the Pinnal: Anatomizing Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea

Abstract

Although last year’s republication of Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea as part of University of Washington Press’ Classics of Asian American Literature series might seem to grant Chu’s novel canonical status, the book’s history reveals this moment as only the most recent accession. Upon publication in 1961, reviewers looked askance at a narrative containing characters who gambled, swore, whored, and chain-smoked their way through life, aspects that would later commend the text, as symptoms if not in themselves, to those cultural nationalists of the 1970s who saw in Chu an ‘authentic’ Asian American writer (Chin, et al. xxxi). By and large, the approval underpinning their reading, in which Chu’s transliterations of Sze Yup idioms were refreshing in their inattentiveness to the cultural and moral sensibilities of white American readers (as were his recuperated – that is, unexotic – depictions of New York City’s Chinatown), remains a central window into the text to this day (S. Wang 70). As against this, Chu’s contentment with underdeveloped female characters and, more dubious still, a social system of unreconstructed patriarchy are features that cannot be passed over without comment (Hsiao 152–153). Whether one positions Chu’s novel as a work of inspired antiracism or recrudescent misogyny, either way a double-layered awareness remains in the mind of the reader: one must heed, that is, the gendered and racial divisions that structure the narrative while also observing the ways in which these same structures have given rise to readings that are themselves ideologically divided. A critical model that might transcend this bifurcation has proven elusive, though its absence has not retarded the development of insightful scholarship that offers, for example, a reframing of Chu’s depictions of Chinese American masculinities, seeing in them fragmented rather than whole subjectivities (Ling 36); or a (re)reading of fraternity as a lived and/or an imagined experience, envisaging it as a system of equal importance to the family (Hsu 249–250). In what follows, I shall intervene in this wider discussion, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1951642