Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea is the most recent addition (and a most welcome one) to the series of Asian-American classics that the University of Washington Press is reprinting in paperback format. Other titles in this series that come to mind are the uncompromisingly naturalistic memoirs of the Filipino-American Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart, and the gripping novel about a Japanese-American who resists the World War II draft, John Okada’s No-No Boy. Louis Chu’s novel, which had first appeared in 1961 to unappreciative and uncomprehending notices, is every bit as essential to the canon of Asian America as the works of Okada or Bulosan
