USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1992
New York Theatre and Dance “Bessie” Award for
Sustained Achievement.
Chong directed Paris and Turtle Dreams (Grand
Prize Winner, Toronto Film Festival) with Mere-
dith Monk for television. His video works include
I Will Not Be Sad in This World (1991), Plage Con-
crete (1988), The Absence of Memory (1990), A
Facility for the Containment and Channeling of Un-
desirable Elements (1992), and Testimonial (1995),
which was screened at the Venice Biennale’s Trans-
cultural Show.
Undesirable Elements (1993) is an on-going
series of community-specific works by Chong
exploring the effects of history, culture and eth-
nicity on the lives of individuals in a community.
The year 2002 marked the 10th anniversary of
this production, celebrated in the production UE
92/02. Blindness: The Irresistible Light of Encoun-
ter (2004) explores Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of
Darkness and colonialism in the Belgian Congo.
Cathay: Three Tales of China (2005), commis-
sioned by the Kennedy Center, is a puppet theater
work based on China’s ancient history. In 2005
the Theater Communications Group published
East/West Quartets, a collection of works dealing
with East and West encounters. Through poetic
dramatization of history, Chong reveals the nu-
ances of these binaries. This collection includes
Deshima (1990), about historical exchanges be-
tween Japan, Europe, and America; Chinoiserie
(1995), about a clash of cultures between the West
and China; After Sorrow (1997), about the legacy
of war in Vietnam; and Pojagi (1999), a poetic his-
tory of Korea.
Zohra SaedChu, Louis Hing (1915–1970)
Author of Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), Louis Chu was
born in Toishan, China, and came to the United
States at the age of nine. He received his bachelor’s
degree in English at Upsala College in 1937. He
went on to graduate study at New York Univer-
sity (M.A., 1940), and the New School for Social
Research (1950–52). Chu also served in the U.S.
Army from 1943 to 1945. He held various jobs
during his lifetime: disc jockey for a radio station,
1951–61; owner of Acme Co., from 1950; director
of a daycare center for New York City’s Depart-
ment of Welfare from 1961. Bilingual in Chinese
and English, Chu was active in New York’s China-
town community, serving as executive secretary
for the Soo Yuen Benevolent Association from- His interest in the Chinatown community is
also reflected in his master’s thesis on New York’s
Chinese restaurants.
Like the main character in his novel, Chu went
back to China to seek a wife, as was permitted by
the War Brides Act of 1945. Eat a Bowl of Tea is
set during this transitional time in the late 1940s,
when discriminatory immigration laws were re-
laxed and male Chinese immigrants were allowed
to return to their country and bring back wives
and family members. Containing expressions and
cultural references largely inaccessible to the aver-
age reading public, the novel did not have much
public appeal when it was first published. Since its
republication in 1979, however, it has been increas-
ingly recognized as an important book about the
Chinese-American experience and the Chinatown
community. A movie based on the novel, directed
by Wayne Wang, appeared in 1989.
Centering on the story of the marriage of Ben
Loy and Mei Oi, the children of immigrant Chi-
nese fathers, the novel explores such themes as
the conflicts that arise when parents project their
unfulfilled hopes onto their children, the contra-
dictions between the idealized dream of success in
America and the harsh reality of immigrant life,
and the strengths as well as the restraints of the
immigrant community.
Eat a Bowl of Tea is a sympathetic and realis-
tic portrayal of a community of men who have
been forced under exclusionary immigration laws
to live the life of bachelors in their adopted land.
Wah Gay has been married for 25 years, but he has
not seen his wife after the first year of marriage.
Wah Gay and most of the old men portrayed in the
novel have had difficult lives as immigrant workers
in America, toiling away in restaurants and laun-
50 Chu, Louis Hing