Eat a Bowl of Tea

Jacob Butler

A Bowl of Tea

When people from China first started moving to the mainland, women tended to be uncommon.  In fact, according to Historian Ronald Takaki, by 1870, there were fourteen males to every female.  This was coined as a “bachelor society”.  For sixty years, only men could become citizens, and women would often be left in China.  This is very well typified by the film Eat a Bowl of Tea when Wah Gay has to leave his wife in China, when he moves to America.  When Ben Loy and Mei Oi get back to America at the reception, Ben was the first person of his family to get married and bring his wife to the U.S.

When Ben tells Mei Oi he is going back to San Francisco, she is surprised.  She asks in disbelief to make sure it’s where the boat landed.  Her surprise makes sense.  For a lot of the Chinese immigrating, it was a very hard situation, especially those who landed on Angel Island.  On Angel Island, some would carve poems into the walls of the room where they were imprisoned.  One prisoner said he was “imprisoned in this barren mountain” in one of the poems.  Even for those who didn’t have to go to Angel Island, entering the U.S. was still hard.   Takaki tells the story of a group of Chinese going to Chinatown, and they were assaulted with bricks by whites.  It is no wonder that because of the way they were being treated, Wong Sam would include translations like “He is an assaulter” and “They were laying in ambush”.  

An important tenet of Critical Race theory is “everyone has a compound and complex identity”.   When Ben Loy went to China, everyone assumed he only spoke English and some people tried to say things behind his back.  Ben Loy is more than just an American like they had assumed, he also knew the language and had Chinese roots as demonstrated by how the apartment they had was decorated.