Afterword:
Certainly Jack’s travels would not be complete without a trip to the oldest and biggest of American Chinatowns. The San Francisco Bay area as a whole in many ways represents the heart of Chinese America. It’s plagued with the contemporary problems of drugs, gangs, and violence like any ghetto, as well as the same complex politics, dreams, and successes. Its history is just as varied as its present, and the combination of past and present offered me the story I wanted about self-imposed limitations, from which everyone suffers in some way at some time.
“Tong yun” is an approximate phonetic rendition of the Cantonese phrase for “Tang people.” The Cantonese used this term for centuries to refer to themselves, as opposed to people from other areas of China. The Tang Dynasty, which
