Los Angeles Chinatown

Chinatown marks the setting of the unnamed narrator and Bon’s resettlement in Los Angeles without becoming a refuge from poverty or the past. Their apartment is nearby, and Chinatown offers shopping, food, and a vivid display of cultural goods; a visit there also sends the narrator back to memories of a raid in Cholon. In the novel, the neighborhood’s everyday uses and its commercial spectacle sit close to exile’s material hardship and the narrator’s continuing clandestine life.

A home on Chinatown’s outskirts

After arriving in Los Angeles, the unnamed narrator uses money collected by former teachers to pay for a bus ticket, several motel nights, an apartment deposit near Chinatown, and a used Ford. By September, he and Bon are reunited there in what the narrator describes as genteel poverty. The apartment is a dismal one-bedroom, and its proximity to Chinatown locates their new home in the city without suggesting that arrival has brought security or comfort.

The neighborhood is a point of reference for the practical details of their life. The apartment’s furnishings are meager: a red velour sofa, a patched La-Z-Boy recliner, and bunk beds. The narrator imagines that the only nearby place to buy bunk beds is the children’s section of a gaudy furniture store. The detail makes their adult household seem provisionally assembled, as if the furniture itself registers how little choice their circumstances allow.

Poverty and improvised survival

Bon’s days in the apartment are shaped by grief and unemployment. His part-time night work as a church janitor brings cash wages, while the lack of reported income makes him eligible for welfare. He spends benefit money on beer and food stamps on frozen meals. The narrator sets this dependence against Bon’s military abilities: he had been able to parachute, march long distances carrying heavy equipment, shoot accurately, and endure punishment, but those skills do not secure him civilian work in the United States.

The domestic routine is both specific and bleak. On benefit day, Bon drinks through a case of beer while the narrator joins him; they follow the habit until they pass out in the living room. Later, the narrator wakes to a television broadcasting the national anthem, flags, mountains, and fighter jets before the transmission gives way to static. Their bunk beds and narrow bedroom can evoke the disciplined arrangement of soldiers, but the narrator’s comparison is imaginary: their present life is defined by precarious work, public assistance, and grief rather than military purpose.

A commercial display of Asia

A Saturday Chinatown outing offers a change of scene before an appointment with the crapulent major. The unnamed narrator and Bon buy UCLA sweatshirts and baseball caps from alley vendors at prices that make clear the merchandise is unofficial. After barbecued pork and noodles, they browse a curio shop whose stock ranges from Chinese chess sets, chopsticks, lanterns, soapstone Buddhas, and miniature fountains to carved elephant tusks, imitation Ming vases, Forbidden City coasters, Bruce Lee posters, painted scrolls, tea, and ginseng. The narrator notes that the goods are sold primarily to non-Oriental customers.

The shop makes Chinatown legible as a place where cultural objects are arranged for purchase and display. The assortment moves between everyday wares and stylized signs of an imagined Asia; even the Bruce Lee posters and rubber nunchaku appear beside tea and carved landscapes. The narrator does not treat the shop as a simple portrait of the neighborhood’s residents. Instead, the inventory, and its stated audience, reveal a market in which Asian identity is made visible through portable souvenirs. He buys two packets of red firecrackers, then a mesh sack of oranges at a local market, carrying away both the display’s vividness and ordinary food for home.

From Chinatown to Cholon

The outing does not remain an uncomplicated shopping episode. Later that evening, the narrator and Bon take screwdrivers into the neighborhood and remove the license plates from two cars: Bon takes one from the front of a vehicle, while the narrator removes another from the rear. They return home and watch television. The account ties the act to their appointment with the crapulent major, while the Chinatown excursion earlier that day has stirred a memory from years before in Cholon.

In that remembered episode, the narrator and the major raid a rice-wine merchant’s shop, whose storeroom conceals a door to a gambling operation. The narrator had secretly tipped off Man and expected the alleged Viet Cong tax collector to be absent, but the suspect is there when the raid reaches its final confrontation. Chinatown thus becomes more than the site of the narrator’s present-day purchases: it is the immediate setting for preparations that lead into a recollection of his former double life. The movement between the two places links exile in Los Angeles to the unfinished political and personal history carried from Vietnam, without making the American neighborhood a replica of the one left behind.