A mesmerizing true story of money, murder, gambling, prostitution, and opium in a "wild ramble around Chinatown in its darkest days." (The New Yorker) Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not house-to-house searches or throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets and meat cleavers to pistols, automatic weapons, and even bombs. Welcome to New York City’s Chinatown in 1925. The Chinese in turn-of-the-last-century New York were mostly immigrant peasants and shopkeepers who worked as laundrymen, cigar makers, and domestics. They gravitated to lower Manhattan and lived as Chinese an existence as possible, their few diversions—gambling, opium, and prostitution—available but, sadly, illegal. It didn’t take long before one resourceful merchant saw a golden opportunity to feather his nest by positioning himself squarely between the vice dens and the police charged with shutting them down. Tong Wars is historical true crime set against the perfect landscape: Tammany-era New York City. Representatives of rival tongs (secret societies) corner the various markets of sin using admirably creative strategies. The city government was already corrupt from top to bottom, so once one tong began taxing the gambling dens and paying off the authorities, a rival, jealously eyeing its lucrative franchise, co-opted a local reformist group to help eliminate it. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next thirty years. Scott D. Seligman’s account roars through three decades of turmoil, with characters ranging from gangsters and drug lords to reformers and do-gooders to judges, prosecutors, cops, and pols of every stripe and color. A true story set in Prohibition-era Manhattan a generation after Gangs of New York, but fought on the very same turf.

Criminalization/Assimilation traces how Classical Hollywood films constructed America’s image of Chinese Americans from their criminalization as unwanted immigrants to their eventual acceptance when assimilated citizens, exploiting both America’s yellow peril fears about Chinese immigration and its fascination with Chinatowns. Philippa Gates examines Hollywood’s responses to social issues in Chinatown communities, primarily immigration, racism, drug trafficking, and prostitution, as well as the impact of industry factors including the Production Code and star system on the treatment of those subjects. Looking at over 200 films, Gates reveals the variety of racial representations within American film in the first half of the twentieth century and brings to light not only lost and forgotten films but also the contributions of Asian American actors whose presence onscreen offered important alternatives to Hollywood’s yellowface fabrications of Chinese identity and a resistance to Hollywood’s Orientalist narratives.

Tong War describes feuds between Chinese gangs that ended in the 1920s. However, one threatens to break out in Portland, Maine, and PI Melodie Chang is dragged into the middle of it. It doesn't help that she's five months pregnant and that her husband, Brad, is one of the targets of this new feud.Mike Wei is beating up people around town. Melodie will discover that every preconceived notion she has about tong wars will be wrong. She will discover things about her husband that might threaten her marriage. Mostly, she will need to discover the true reason that war has broken out in Portland before it threatens the life of her unborn baby.Into Melodie's world comes a girl named Sylvia and her baby, Johnny. Can Melodie save them before Wei kills both of them? Who is she and what does she have to do with everything that is happening? And why does she insist that Melodie's friend, Candy Howard, needs her?The case will end only when Melodie can answer all these questions. Still, one of them will die before she does and that death will transform not just Melodie but all of them.

Seventeen-year-old Chinese girl disguises herself as a boy and accompanies her countrymen who ship out from Canton to the gold fields of California in 1850.

When Chewbacca the Wookiee finds out that a job he thought was just ferrying tooka cats is actually much more, he's excited to have something to do! But when he, a young bounty hunter/librarian, and a droll cargo droid--who, unbeknownst to the others is rebel spy droid K-2SO--land in the middle of a blue forest that emits a fear-causing mist, Chewie realizes the job may be too dangerous for his liking. He and his companions will have to fight off snarlers, sniffers, and their own fears as they try to recover a sacred book--and rescue Han Solo in the process! Perfect for reading before or after seeing Solo: A Star Wars Story in theaters!

For years, Cleveland's Chinese residents struggled to find a secure place in the city. Immigrants came with dreams of building a better life, but without English proficiency, prospects dimmed, and emigres often earned poor pay for long hours of strenuous work. In 1925, Cleveland police responded to an especially brutal outbreak of the tong war violence ravaging the community by arresting every Chinese person in the city, creating an international scandal. In spite of the anti-Asian sentiment of the time, the community persevered and paved the way for its current entrepreneurial success. Today, Clevelanders and tourists travel to the growing AsiaTown neighborhood to enjoy authentic Asian dinners, shop at Asian-owned stores and enjoy Asian-themed karaoke nights in newly built malls and century-old former residential homes. Alan F. Dutka vividly portrays one of the oldest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods in the city.

A fourth-generation Chinese American man revisits his heritage, much of which is tied to New York's Chinatown, a place where his grandfather was a beloved bookie.