Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society.

• Author: Dao, James

Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society. Gwen Kinkead. HarperCollins, $23. To a publisher hungry for that quintessential New York story, a proposal about Chinatown must seem like a fat pitch. The themes practically leap from the morning headlines. Crime? Chinatown's got gangsters, hit men, and heroin traffickers. Social problems? Its sweatshops rival the 19th-century's. Struggling immigrants making good? Where else will you find peddlers who have saved up to $50,000 hawking toy phones and cheap socks only months after escaping the clutches of Communism? It seems like a sure winner.

Of course, things aren't so simple, as New Yorker writer Gwen Kinkead discovered. Why have so few white writers probed Chinatown during its 130-year existence, she asks a local journalist. "The reporters get lost," he tells her. "They get into the quicksand and they disappear."

Kinkead already knew this. Her father, a New Yorker writer himself, tried to report on Chinatown in the thirties and was thwarted by a wall of silence. Perhaps driven by his faflure, she leaps with admirable courage into a much changed Chinatown and manages to emerge with some sharply observed and even revelatory anecdotes. Unfortunately, part of the story gets left in the quicksand.

At its best, the book reads like a travelogue. Kinkead is a gregarious guide who can mix it up with the locals enough (thanks to her translator) to give her readers a glimpse of this forbidden city and its "invisible people." We meet Mr. Lin, a civil engineer in China who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and came to America on a tourist visa in 1986. Working for a Korean grocer and living in a crowded, filthy hovel with nine men, he had already saved $70,000 toward a business--but had never visited Central Park--when Kinkead met him. "Rice very cheap," he tells her to explain his remarkable frugality. In perhaps the book's most charming section, Kinkead pays a boisterous visit to an elite group of Chinese chefs who share secrets about preparing samy, whole fish, bear paw, and armadillo while gambling and downing beers like the Romans at Saturnalia.

There are also admirably detailed discussions of Chinatown's family associations and its criminal syndicates, or tongs, which now rank just below La Cosa Nostra on the Justice Department's list of organized crime groups. Though her material on organized crime is drawn from well-publicized court cases, Kinkead manages to breathe new life into it...