The Chinatown Novel That Wasn’t

In 1947, New York-based publisher John Day Company set out plans for a novel that promised to be the first of its kind: “a ‘Chinese-American’ novel,” entitled Chinatown Family, “that dealt exclusively with the ‘experiences of the Chinese in America,’” as the commissioning brief put it. John Day editor-in-chief Richard Walsh and the celebrated writer Pearl S. Buck already had an author in mind for the book: twelve years earlier, Walsh and Buck had helped Chinese writer Lin Yutang to move to the United States...