Free Born to Kill by T. J. English

transformation. Among other things, in the last decade the city’s Asian population had nearly doubled, further crowding an already tight-knit, densely populated stretch of real estate covering just forty square blocks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. To accommodate the influx, the community’s traditional boundaries had expanded north, well past Canal Street into Little Italy. Newer Asian communities in Brooklyn and Queens were also growing at an astonishing rate.
    The geographic changes were only the most conspicuous aspect of the community’s metamorphosis. Even the average Caucasian could see that Chinatown was growing and reinventing itself, in slightly smaller versions, throughout the five boroughs of New York. What most New Yorkers did not know was that, as a result of the diverse nature of recent immigration, the community was being transformed at its core.
    In the past, Chinatown had been comprised overwhelmingly of immigrants from Mandarin-speaking regions of China. The 1965 Immigration Act had opened the door to a new generation of immigrants, and they had gone about the business of establishing a vibrant, largely self-sustaining society. In America, they spoke mostly Cantonese and saw themselves as Chinese subjects living in a country that held little interest beyond the clearly defined boundaries of their own community.
    Now, the community moved to the rhythms of an array of nationalities from all over Southeast Asia. Not only were the Vietnamese arriving in sizable numbers, but immigrants had also been flooding in from Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and Fukien, a rural province in south-east China with its own unique dialect. Like the Vietnamese, these newer immigrants were mostly from Third World countries in the throes of political turmoil. They spoke their own language. They came to Chinatown with little education or material wealth, straining the community’s already overburdened social-service organizations.
    From the beginning, Chinatown had always preferred to take care of its own problems, free of meddling by low faan , which is short for guey low faan , or “barbarian”—a term used to describe know-nothing outsiders. For decades the community’s unique isolation from mainstream American society was both its great strength and its most crippling weakness. The image of Chinatown presented to the general publicby its inhabitants was of a “Gilded Ghetto,” a thriving business community where any impoverished immigrant could make a living. In truth, Chinatown’s housing, health, and labor conditions were among the worst in the city, and they were getting worse.
    The community’s insular structure may have been counterproductive, but the reasons for its existence were not hard to fathom. Few ethnic groups in the history of the United States had been as systematically discriminated against as the early Chinese settlers who came to California during the years of the Gold Rush. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred further Chinese laborers and their wives from legally entering the country. It excluded Chinese from most occupations, including manufacturing and mining. It also forbade them to become citizens. Many states even denied Chinese the right to testify against Caucasians in court.
    Unlike American immigrants of Irish, Jewish, and African descent who fought against the pernicious stain of racism, the Chinese tried to make the best of a bad situation by drawing inward. Rather than face the risk of death at the hands of government-financed mobs, they formed their own internally governed societies, first in major metropolitan areas on the West Coast, then later in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities.
    The youth gangs that would eventually become a major problem in nearly every Chinatown throughout the United States were a product of this process. Before the gangs, there were the tongs. Initially, the tongs had been