Analysis of Chinatown Beat

CHINATOWN BEAT
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Introduction
Yu is located in New York City's Chinatown, and he is just about the only officer there who speaks the language and understands the community, according to Henry Chang's novel Chinatown Beat (2006). In addition to the typical (in the crime novel genre) police politics, he has had to contend with bigotry (usually unsaid) by his coworkers, as well as a loss of confidence from his old peers from the neighborhoods where he grew up, for entering the law-enforcement profession. The novel starts with NYPD officers of Chinese descent. Detective Jack Yu has returned to his old neighborhood, Chinatown, so as to be near to his ailing father. He runs into old mates who have turned into seasoned gangsters, and the death of a childhood young blood brother haunts him. Jack investigates the assassination of Chinatown tug boss Uncle Four following his father's unfortunate demise, an inquiry that takes him deep into the Chinatown darkest corners. Within these chapters, Yu is an angry individual. He's enraged that the city's senior Chinese community is being attacked and assaulted by Hispanic and African-American youngsters from the projects; he's enraged that the aged generations of Chinatown regard the city's regional demarcation areas as cages for their existence, he quotes in his book the following words to depict his anger "They trapped themselves here, the old bachelors, wrapping themselves in their fierce Chineseness, taking pride in their disdain for American ways"). He is mostly enraged by his vital father's untimely demise and his newfound failure to mend their formerly strained relation. The novel is a classic noir, full of nostalgia, violence, and the distinctly urban gloom, but it also introduces something different entirely: a sentimental characterization of communities and place, the multiple cultures of New York's Chinatown, that has seldom, if ever, been seen in literature before; a wonderful find. The themes to be discussed in this paper are racism as well as the coping mechanisms and the urban poor's socio-spatial isolation.
Urban Sociological Themes
In this book Chinatown by Henry Chang (2006). , we are can observe that in Chinatown, there is not only urban poverty but social exclusion as well. There are conflicting plotlines pushed one over the other, in the overcrowded, rundown community represented in this book, with its slammed fish and vegetable stands, mounds of overflowing trash that pile up at the close of each day, and numerous dialects overheard among the congregating masses. Urban poverty is one of the major themes in the story; this is observed by the way Chang (2006). describes the city and the place Jack lived in with his father; Jack pleads to his father to move out of the town to a much decent place (like uptown or Queens) as he would phrase it; a place where vermin did not infest their apartment, a place where the bedcovers were not affected by the dreary suffering of the shifting seasons but his father wasn't having it as he was already accustomed to the ways and he wasn't leaving. Moreover, we see a coupling of social exclusion and racism; in the book; Jack describes working in the precinct as if he was living a double life, this was because 99% of the police officers were white, the precinct itself was also 99% yellow as Chang put it. Jack is the only officer of Chinese-American heritage; he was faced with subtle racist comments from his fellow officers from time to time. Furthermore, as Chang (2006) puts it, the Chinese community was not only defined by their geographical locations anymore but by their distinct consciousness of the race. However, this went both ways as the Chinese community also had contempt for the American ways or the 'white way". This cultural clash is seen between Jack and his father; his father was a proud Chinese man whilst jack was attempting to follow the "white ways" or the "American ways," this brought conflict and indifference between them. There is still a lot of racism, with the Chinese being at the bottom of the ethnic pecking list, below African Americans and Hispanics. The issue of racism in the book can be taken as unsettling as the Chinese community seems to be racist against blacks; they even throw around the "N-word" on a few occasions. As a part of a predominantly white police department that doesn't concern themselves with the Chinese community and is often racist towards this same group it is tasked to defend and being a part of the Chinese community is a tricky balance that the protagonist -Jack has to perform every day of his career.
The social and economic exclusion is presented as the white officers would end their shift. They would go home to their white communes past the colored grasps of the inner city; for them, Chinatown was a foreign place that almost didn't feel real. "Don't worry about it, Jake its Chinatown. They were able to dismiss it as a troublesome nightmare," Chang (2006) writes; this shows that for the white officers, Chinatown was no more than a job for them that they felt was not worth remembering at the end of the day. The separation between the secure well-off white communities and the poor urban city of Chinatown shows social-economic inequalities as well as exclusion. In this story, Chinatown is seen as cut off from the rest of the city. Its Chinese inhabitants of the town have their own way of life, cultures, and practices that they have even built distrust to outsiders like law enforcement. Anytime a crime would happen, they would all say they haven't seen anything even though the reality was not so. Chinatown Beat offered an enthrallingly different perspective on a neighborhood that is commonly seen as a bustling town where visitors delight in its oddities. Instead, we are confronted with the entirety of its darkness, deviant behaviors, and brutality. Henry takes us down every lane and into every casino joint, immersing the audience in the sights, tones, and smells of a completely different place. He doesn't transport us to a pleasant and vibrant Chinatown, but he does shed some light on a city that the regular reader has never been to. As we track Jack Yu on his Chinatown patrols, there are aspects of a police procedural throughout, but Henry Chang is more concerned with ensuring that the reader understands how illegal Chinese immigrants survive, struggle, and perish in the mob-controlled urban wasteland that is Manhattan's Lower Eastern Side, Chinatown. The "snakehead" immigrant traffickers, as well as the businesses owned by the Chinese, take advantage of them. They operate in those businesses in order to compensate for their travel. They are ganged up upon by Black and Latin mobs and cartels from the Riis Homes as well a...