This chapter examines the layout of the city, its neighborhoods, its interior and exterior, and its relationship to the natural environment that framed and constrained its growth. The chapter also provides an overview of the layout of the Asakura palace, the key neighborhoods, the doctor's residence, and the active neighborhoods found outside the city gates that help us to understand the larger hybrid function of the city.

While the stereotype of the oriental villain and the practice of yellowface have been discussed by scholars, less has been said about how practices of cinematography and editing more subtly controlled the representation of Asian immigrants in American film. This chapter examines how orientalism informed American feature-length silent films, including Chinatown Nights (1929) and A Tale of Two Worlds (1921), by visualizing the negative impact of Chinese immigration, depicting the investigation of Chinatown’s people and spaces by white American heroes, and concluding with the reassertion of occidental dominance over oriental people and spaces. In contrast, films such as The Tong-Man (1919) presented resistance to cinematic regulatory gazes by casting Asian American actors in key roles, including silent film’s only Asian American star, Sessue Hayakawa, to challenge those orientalist constructions of subjectivity and objectivity. This chapter demonstrates that, while many silent films depicted Chinatown as a space for white American adventure and Chinese immorality, some demonstrated an appreciation for Chinese immigrants who desired the American dream and assimilation in America’s melting pot.

This article attempts to outline the ways in which Chinese and Chinese American writers envision metropolitan New York by examining selected prose works which primarily engage with immigrant experiences. While recognizing the creative agency and imaginative power of this body of work, within these texts there are nevertheless embedded responses to and interactions with immigration laws and landmark events such as the Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, the AIDS epidemics, the 9/11 attacks, the 1997 handover or return of Hong Kong to China, and China’s implementation of the reform and opening-up policy which started in 1978. Hence, the representations of New York in these works from different generations of writers of Chinese descent are heavily influenced by, and connected to, variegated sociohistorical forces, creating distinct and intricate transnational linkages across the Pacific.

Chapter 5 explores emerging diasporic communities and their relationships to host societies. Through studies conducted by the sociologist Paul Siu and the historian Wang Gungwu, this chapter explores the ways in which Chinese scholars and writers explored these relationships. The chapter shows that one factor making explorations of these relationships so urgent was the obstacles that Chinese migrants faced in host societies, such as restrictions on immigration and other forms of anti-Chinese legislation. The chapter demonstrates that urgency also stemmed from disruptions to existing diasporic trajectories due to revolution in China and the onset of the Cold War. This chapter then introduces another example of an evolving diasporic community, Los Angeles, focusing in particular on a husband and wife who played prominent roles in shaping the city’s new Chinatown and in asserting the rights of Chinese Americans. The chapter then turns to “return” migration and “secondary” migration in the mid-twentieth century, as ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia and elsewhere faced anti-Chinese violence and legislation.