NONFICTION - July 5, 1992

CHINATOWN by Gwen Kinkead (HarperCollins: $23; 211 pp.) Kinkead, a writer for the New Yorker (in which sections of this fascinating book appeared) and the daughter of a writer-editor for that magazine, has stepped inside the closed society of New York’s Chinatown and somehow persuaded people to tell her about their universe--information she provides the reader in lively, exquisitely detailed prose. Chinatown is a hermetically sealed world within American culture, a place where people do not speak English, nor seem to care about learning it; where family associations and gangs enforce their own laws and punishments, and where organized crime smuggles half the heroin that is sold in the United States. Kinkead is the journalist-as-participant here, quoting herself in conversation with a man about his girlfriend’s other entanglements. At first her presence is jarring (not every fly on the wall can talk), but it seems she had to step outside of the traditional journalist’s role to get the residents of Chinatown to step out of their usual reticence. The result is a wonderfully textured, insightful look at a community that has, until now, been nothing more to outsiders than a mysterious tourist attraction.