Chinatown: Most Time, Hard Time

(Hardback)

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In this contribution to the study of ethnic minorities, Chalsa Loo documents a distinctive American community - Chinatown, San Francisco. Based on an interview survey of residents of Chinatown, Loo's study tests prevailing sociological and psychological theories, and ultimately dispels stereotypes about Asian Americans, replacing them with empirically derived realities of American life. "Chinatown: Most Time, Hard Time" comprehensively covers a range of significant areas of life, integrating several disciplines and combining the rigour of scientific analysis with the richness of individual experience through the use of photographs and personal vignettes. This analysis serves as a model of comprehensive, quantitative multidomain interview sample survey research. It provides data on the major domeains of life for all Americans, but particularly for ethnic Americans: neighbourhood, crowding, physical and mental health, employment, language and cultural barriers and the condition of men and women. This book is scholarly yet readable, and will be particularly useful to human service professionals, policy planners and those involved in ethnic and Asian studies.

Reviews

"This book performs an important service to the scholarship of minority groups in the United States: it dispels stereotypes and turns them back to the reality of persecution. The book documents the history of Chinatown and shows how persecution formed it, contained it, and made it what it is today. This is not a pleasant story but it is one that every U.S. citizen needs to see, the full product of what happens when we treat a minority group as less than equal."-Robert B. Bechtel, Ph.D. Editor, Environment and Behavior
"This is a model of what a creative and dedicated researcher can do working in a single community over many years. In collaboration with community members and colleagues, the author was able to study San Francisco's Chinatown from different perspectives. Chapters cover important aspects of community life as viewed by the residents, including the history of Chinatown, mobility, neighborhood satisfaction, crowding, language, health status, gender roles, and quality of life issues. Chalsa Loo explodes the myth that Chinese people have a special fondness for crowding. She does a superb job of documenting the research process, including the use of community residents in data collection and analysis. This will be a landmark study in community psychology."- Robert Sommer, Chair Department of Environmental Design University of California, Davis
The book is well documented yet readable. It should be an invaluable resource tool for human service professionals and policy planners, for its data is relevant to the Chinatown community but also has implications for other low-income ethnic minority populations.-MultiCultural Review
"The book is well documented yet readable. It should be an invaluable resource tool for human service professionals and policy planners, for its data is relevant to the Chinatown community but also has implications for other low-income ethnic minority populations."-MultiCultural Review

Author Bio

CHALSA M. LOO is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Clinical Psychologist at the Veterans Administration in Honolulu. She has also been Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Visiting Associate Professor at the Asian American Studies Research Center at UCLA. She has published widely on ethnic and mental health issues--publishing over 30 professional articles. Dr. Loo was the principal investigator for the research grant that funded this Chinatown study and was founder of the Chinatown Housing and Health Research Project. She was the 1991 recipient of the Distinguished Contribution Award presented by the Asian American Psychological Association.