Throughout “Everything But the Chickens: Cultural Authenticity Onboard the Chinatown Bus,” Nicholas J. Klein and Andrew Zitcer strive to define and understand the authenticity associated with the Chinatown curbside buses, arguing that the buses serve as mobile containers of perceptions of Chinatown and Chinese people. Although today there are corporate-owned competitors and it is no longer the cheapest option for travel along the Northeast corridor, the Chinatown bus remains a popular mode of transportation particularly because it is seen an “authentic urban experience.”
Klein and Zitcer offer multiple understandings of cultural authenticity. They assert the authenticity associated with the Chinatown bus largely stems from the “other,” insider-outsider, and superior-inferior mentality that developed as Chinese communities grew. By distinguishing themselves from Chinese immigrants, white Europeans maintained dominance and constructed an idea of “Orientalism” that specifically limited human encounters between the different groups. Thus Chinatown became a social idea, considered “another world” entirely, and presumed authentic-in-itself. To those outside of the community, the mobility of the Chinatown bus offers the distance to view and evaluate a neighborhood considered “exotic” – a chance to safely encounter the “other.”
In addition, Klein and Zitcer note how those within the Chinese community also aided in maintaining such insider-outsider mentality. Many participants in their focus groups desired to demonstrate insider knowledge about Chinatown and the Chinatown bus and “positioned themselves as experts.” Some even divulged “supposed secrets” about the Chinatown bus that “outsiders” would not know. Furthermore, participants represented the Chinatown bus as existing outside of societal norms. Klein and Zitcer define such anecdotes as “chicken moments” – stories that verged on the fantastic such as when a participant described a fellow commuter “just peeing on the seats.”
The importance of these stories, however, does not lie in whether or not they are true, but rather, that they are told at all. By continuing to depict the bus as foreign and unhindered by common laws through exaggerated tales, Chinese immigrants further encourage images of Chinatown as a “place of difference, of squalor, of danger, and of otherness” – therefore, a more “authentic” and thus appealing form of travel.
As someone who heard many horror stories before purchasing my ticket for a Chinatown bus, and subsequently had a relatively mundane ride, I can understand the allure in telling interesting stories about a bus that has continuously been characterized as far from ordinary. In general, I believe humans are prone to enjoy exuberant storytelling, and in the case of the Chinatown bus, it is certainly much easier to continue fueling common perceptions of the experience as “other-worldly.” Unfortunately, as Klein and Zitcer assert, these “chicken moments” are not simply harmless storytelling. The Chinatown buses represent social relations and the social idea of Chinatown, rooted in the historical construction of a place and race. By considering the Chinatown bus “authentic” through descriptions and stories that emphasize its “exotic-ness,” individuals unknowingly reinforce the insider-outsider mentality first instituted by Europeans to maintain power relations. Ultimately, the Chinatown bus is embedded in the socially constructed ethnic enclave of Chinatown and thus the authenticity attributed to it is a “form of cultural power,” constituting misperceptions that are lived as reality.
