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 ...