Our Laundry, Our Town
My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond
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With humor and grace, the memoir of a first-generation Chinese American in New York City.
Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng’s upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Back then, his family was one of the few immigrant Chinese families in a far-flung neighborhood in New York City. His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese hand laundry. From behind the counter of his parents’ laundry and within the confines of a household that was rooted in a different century and culture, he sought to reconcile this insular home life with the turbulent yet inspiring street life that was all around them––from the faux martial arts of TV’s Kung Fu to the burgeoning underworld of the punk rock scene.
In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the counterculture and civil rights movements. And by the 1980s, Flushing had become NYC’s second Chinatown. But Eng remained one of the neighborhood’s few Chinese citizens who did not speak fluent Chinese. Finding his way in the downtown theater and performance world of Manhattan, he discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder’s foundational Americana drama, Our Town. This discovery became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China—his ancestral home in southern China—that led to writing and performing his successful autobiographical monologue, The Last Emperor of Flushing. Learning to tell his own story on stages around the world was what proudly made him whole.
As cities, classrooms, cultures, and communities the world over continue to re-examine the parameters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Our Laundry, Our Town will reverberate with a broad readership.
Powerful, funny at times, and consistently inspiring, Our Laundry, Our Town turns one artist’s journey into the story of AAPI communities and emergence of a movement over the past half-century. Alvin Eng’s engaging memoir looks back on the past to envision a better future.---DAVID HENRY HWANG, screenwriter and Tony Award–winning playwright of M. Butterfly
A true fixture of Flushing and NYC history, Alvin takes us from his immigrant parents’ hand laundry to the 80s punk scene to 90s experimental Downtown Theater, then connects it to his complicated trip back to the motherland as a ‘jook sing.’---KRISTINA WONG, performance artist/author
Alvin Eng’s fascinating, funny, aching, searching, loving memoir derives its power from that key element of New York City’s dynamism and magic: that behind every apartment door and scrappy storefront, in every far-flung outer-borough neighborhood, lie vast worlds, sweeping histories, and epic tales of questing souls melding the old ways into something meaningful and new.---LISA KRON, playwright, actor and Tony Award-winning bookwriter and lyricist of Fun Home
Part personal journey, part historical deep dive into NYC’s Chinese community.---BRIAN LEHRER, WNYC/NPR
Eng’s contentment in fully embracing his identity as both American and Chinese is full of humor and heart. His fluency across cultures – not just in New York and China but also in rock music, theatrical performance, playwriting, and journalism – lends itself to a multifaceted, engaging memoir.---PopMatters
I really like how he takes global, geopolitical engagements like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and explains how they affected his family personally.---ALISON STEWART, WNYC/NPR
This new autobiography is a welcome addition to the Chinese American Toishan experience.---International Examiner
Alvin Eng writes passionately about his humble beginnings in the Foo J. Chin Chinese Hand Laundry in Flushing. This reflective, nostalgic book takes readers back to a very different NYC.---CHERYL WILLS, Spectrum News NY1
Second-generation Asian American youth always feel like they’re the first to not belong. How liberating, then, to encounter Our Laundry, Our Town. The book tells a moving tale of the distances that separate you from your immigrant parents, as well as a Toisanese labor history set in a laundry, but there’s a surprising twist. The protagonist is a young punk who hates math, loves The Who, and finds himself navigating the late-twentieth-century multicultural bohemia of rock and hip hop, Asian American film and theater, and avant-garde queer performance. In this humorous, amiable, and deeply heartfelt memoir, Eng seems to have achieved the Asian American dream: honoring his mother and father before him while also creating a community where he can be his whole self and finally belong.---KEN CHEN, Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College; former Executive Director, Asian American Writers’ Workshop
An evocative perspective on the Chinese American experience, a personal time-capsulated journey from immigrant Chinatowns back to China’s motherland. Eng creates a memoir-style blend of satire, sociology, and history to explore familial relationships, issues of identity, race, societal expectations—a multi-generational spin on assimilation and ‘Americanization’ that struggles through ‘longing to belong.’ Eng is a gem.---HENRY CHANG, author of the Detective Jack Yu crime novel series
Alvin Eng’s masterful, sweeping memoir about growing up with his five siblings in a dysfunctional family in the back of the Foo J. Chin Chinese Hand Laundry in Flushing, Queens is laced with his marvelous humor, family anecdotes and metaphors that bring a century of the Chinese American Experience to life. I was deeply touched, especially by the spirits parallels between the folks in Thornton Wilder's Our Town and the laundry and the beautiful idea that his parents didn't really see each other either—like the characters in the play. Just a beautiful book.---STEVE ZEITLIN, folklorist, author of Poetry of Everyday Life and Founding Director of City Lore
Our Laundry, Our Town makes an important and badly needed East Coast contribution to the continually evolving Asian American literary canon. Asian American and Ethnic Studies students and others will be able to find their personal experiences of regret, resignation, and, hopefully, triumph defined with pathos and humor, and written from—what has been rare in this genre—an adult’s point of view. And the book is absolutely fun to read!---JEFFERY PAUL CHAN, author of Eat Everything Before You Die; co-editor of Aiiieeeee!, and co-founder of the first Asian American Studies program in the United States at San Francisco State University
In Our Laundry, Our Town reveals how and why Eng has become a writer, by way of his youthful identity quest through music, television, Cantonese opera, Chinese and American cinema, theatre, and performance. The awareness, self-knowledge, and self-acceptance he acquires is won sometimes painfully, sometimes comically, from a synthesis of American and Chinese culture particular to the time and place he inhabits.---LINDA S. CHAPMAN, recipient of the Lilly Award and former Associate Artistic Director, New York Theatre Workshop
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1 The Urban Oracle Bones of Our Laundry:
Channeling China’s Last Emperor and Rock ’n’ Roll’s First Opera
2 Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting . . . or Faking It
3 Our Laundry’s Roots in Resistance: Family Reunification Along Flushing’s Fault Line
4 It’s Only a Paper Son: The Chinatown Bachelor Society
5 Addressees
6 Disappearing Acts: That Old-Time Religion
7 Chinese Rocks: Opium, the Chinese Diaspora and Soul . . . and Punk Rock
8 A Sort of Homecoming: But Where Are You Really From?
9 The Bigger Picture, On Screen and Off
10 Trip the Light, Gorgeous Mosaic: Double Happiness, Discovering Playwriting and Activism
11 Commencement Ceremonies: Leaving Flushing
12 Village Pilgrimage for a Marriage Blessing
13 Life Dances On: Our Town in China
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
