The visitor to New York will not find the answer to the musty gag: "Is it true what they say about Chinese girls?" in Chinatown. The local slant-eyed Sadies seldom mix with Caucasians; and most of them are so shy they wouldn't tell you, let alone let you explore the question.
Almost every other superstition and preconceived notion you've had about the Chinese and Chinatown is as counterfeit as chop suey.
Remember the old song about "Chinatown, my Chinatown, where the lights are low."
Well, they aren't. Chinatown is so brightly lighted, with gay and multi-hued neon signs, that its few blocks rival Broadway.
Gotham's Chinatown is the oldest in the world, outside the Orient, and looks it.
Long before there were human habitations where now is San Francisco, there were suave and placid Orientals in Gotham.
New York's Chinatown, well over a century old, was first settled by a small group of Asiatics, stranded on our shores when a Yankee showman who had brought them here to exhibit their native customs and handicraft, beat it with the boodle.
Venerable tenements, some of which are said to have been standing when the first Chinese family moved in, more than 100 years ago, line its three crooked, narrow streets.
Though New York houses several times as many Chinese as San Francisco, our Chinatown is considerably smaller and certainly not so lively. Our Orientals are spread throughout the five boroughs of the city in which they work and live, very much like other citizens of this cosmopolitan metropolis. But Chinatown is to them their capital, their county-seat, which most of them visit every Sunday to see friends and relatives, transact business, shop for favorite provisions and stop in at the tong, clan or family clubhouse.
Chinatown boasts many Oriental restaurants, some of world renown, yet it knows no night life. There are more chow mein palaces in the area of Broadway and 50th Street than in Chinatown, and the city's only night club with an all-Oriental floor show, the China Doll, is in West 51st Street.