A Bit of Old China

Stoddard wanders the gas-lit alleys of 1870s San Francisco Chinatown in this transportive travel narrative, and he takes us with him. Here are the clattering markets and hidden gambling dens, the aromatic tea houses and the cramped underground tenements where coolies labor in squalor beside prosperous merchants who maintain the grandeur of the old country. Stoddard writes with genuine fascination about the Joss House rituals, the opium pipes and the lottery tickets, the coded language of a community building itself inside a hostile nation. He captures what it meant to be Chinese in America during an era of intense discrimination and the Chinese Exclusion era, rendering a world that was simultaneously exoticized and marginalized. The prose carries the Romantic travel writer's breathless wonder, which can feel dated but also preserves a vanished world with remarkable sensory precision. For readers who want to step inside history, to walk streets that no longer exist through a community that has been transformed beyond recognition, this is an invaluable time capsule.