In the American popular imagination, Chinatown is a mysterious and dangerous place, clannish and dilapidated, filled with sweatshops, vice, and organized crime. In this well-written and engaging volume, Jan Lin presents a real-world picture of New York City's Chinatown, countering this "orientalist" view by looking at the human dimensions and the larger forces of globalization that make this vital neighborhood both unique and broadly instructive.

Using interviews with residents, firsthand observation, archival research, and U.S. census data, Lin delivers an informed, reliable picture of...

This reader draws together seminal selections spanning the subfield from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Contributions from Simmel, Wirth, Park, Burgess, Zukin, Sassen, Smith and Castells are amongst the 40 selections.