Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond

Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng's growing up in the Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood of that singular universe that was New York City in the 1970s. Back then, his family was one of the few immigrant Chinese families there. His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese Hand Laundry. From behind the counter of his parent's laundry and within the confines of our household that was rooted in a different century and culture, he sought to reconcile this insular home life with the turbulent yet inspiring street life that was all around them--from faux tv martial arts stars to punk rock. In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the Counterculture and Civil Rights movements. These same systemic conflicts form the core of our current global reckoning on representation and identity.

By the 1980s, Flushing had become NYC's second Chinatown. But Alvin remained one of Flushing's few Chinese citizens who could not speak fluent Chinese. As a theatre practitioner and professor in the 21st century, discovering the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder's seminal Americana drama, Our Town, became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage.

At City University of Hong Kong, Alvin and his wife, director/dramaturg Wendy Wasdahl, led a Fulbright Specialist devised theatre residency on the Chinese influence on Our Town. From this residency, the US Consulate Guangzhou invited Alvin to perform my Our Town-inspired solo, The Last Emperor of Flushing, in his family's ancestral Guangdong Province of southern China. Learning to proudly tell his own story on stage and now on the page has made him whole. As cities, classrooms, cultures, and communities the world over continue to re-examine the parameters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Our Laundry, Our Town will reverberate with a broad readership.