루이스 추의 『차 한 대접 드세요』: 도시주의를 통한 뉴욕 차이나타운 읽기

Abstract

In Eat a Bowl of Tea, Louis Chu places the reader in struggling to clarify such a somewhat unfamiliar subject as male impotence, which has hardly been dealt with in Asian American literature. Unlike most Asian American novels giving prominence to the effects of racial oppression on ethnic individuals and groups, Eat a Bowl of Tea only focuses on New York Chinatown’s internal conflicts that culminate in Ben Loy’s impotency, which seems to reconsider the real obstacles to immigrants’ assimilation. This paper explores the assimilation issue Ben Loy’s physical disease stands for in terms of Hana Nesher’s urban semiotics. Viewed from the generic aspect, Eat a Bowl of Tea is categorized as an immigrant urban novel in which immigrants struggle to assimilate themselves to a new city and build their new ‘home.’ To approach an urban novel, Hana Nesher suggests to read through four aspects of the cityscape in the representation of the city in narrative: the “natural,” the built, the human, and the verbal (11). In addition, she presents the immigrants reading of the city by means of four traits such as “the erosion of a totalizing view,” “temporal progression,” “displacement by analogy,” and “privatization of landmarks” (141). When I approach Eat a Bowl of Tea through Hana Nesher’s semiotic framework, the Chinatown bachelor society of New York city is an ambivalent site of both “internal exile” (Eng 188) and cultural incubator, where Chinese immigrants could cultivate social power for a new culture of Chinese America.