PBA Galleries

First Edition. Original cloth. Illustrated. 168pp. Inscribed, “To Mr. Unohoo, Compliments of the Author. New York, 1928”

During the roaring Twenties, when the American reading public was beguiled with sensational tales of Fu Manchu villains, narcotics and bloody Tong wars in San Francisco and other Chinese-American communities, this  scarce volume was written by an urbane Chinese diplomat in New York to "project more favorable images of Chinese-Americans" and "to counter American society's negative caricature of Chinatown as a community of opium addicts, hatchet men and slave girls." 

The author, pictured in the frontispiece as a dapper young man, then secretary to the Chinese Consul General in New York, and cousin to a former Chinese ambassador to Washington, writes about everything from Chinese actors and the origin of Chop Suey to the “legal and social treatment” of Chinese-Americans. Little is known about his background, but, curiously, a 1901 newspaper identified a Los Angeles man of the same name as a US Customs Service official in the Philippines who had been “the only Chinese who had ever served in the American Army” during the Spanish-American War.