Author’s afterword:Stories about mysterious Chinatown settings were a staple of a lot of American entertainment for many years. The stories appeared in mainstream magazines and novels, pulp magazines, and movies, especially in the heyday of the black-and-white era. In pulp magazines and old movies in particular, a couple of patterns often repeated. Caucasian heroes would venture into a Chinatown and meet hostile guys, some of them armed with cleavers, and Chinese women would take on one of several roles. Sometimes they were sympathetic victims who needed rescuing; other times they were alluring but treacherous. For many years, I wanted to write a parody of such stories, in a racial and cultural role reversal. I put it off because I saw no market for a story of that kind.
Editors Derwin Ma
