With humor and grace, the memoir of a first-generation Chinese American in New York City Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng\'s upbringing in Flushing, Queens in the 1970s.
As cities, classrooms, cultures, and communities the world over continue to re-examine the parameters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Our Laundry, Our Town will reverberate with a broad readership..
Learning to tell his own story on stages around the world was what proudly made him whole.
This discovery became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China--his ancestral home in southern China--that led to writing and performing his successful autobiographical monologue, The Last Emperor of Flushing .
Finding his way in the Downtown theater and performance world of Manhattan, he discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder\'s foundational Americana drama, Our Town .
But Eng remained one of the neighborhood\'s few Chinese citizens who could not speak fluent Chinese.
And by the 1980s, Flushing had become NYC\'s second Chinatown.
In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the Counterculture and Civil Rights movements.
from behind the counter of his parent\'s Laundry and within the confines of a household that was rooted in a different century and culture, he sought to reconcile this insular home Life with the turbulent yet inspiring street Life that was all around them--from the faux martial arts of tv\'s Kung Fu to the burgeoning underworld of the punk rock scene.
His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese Hand Laundry.
Back then, his family was one of the few immigrant Chinese families in a far-flung neighborhood in New York City.
With humor and grace, the memoir of a first-generation Chinese American in New York City Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng\'s upbringing in Flushing, Queens in the 1970s
