when she writes “Irene arrived [ … ] and constantly reminded me that a book is just a book—there are more important things in life” (p. xiv). Of course, the author does not deny the value of books, but the sentence is a pleasant reminder that it is life that is the subject matter of many scholarly inquiries and should remain a primary concern. Indeed her work is full of life. She describes how a Chinese ethnic community tries to find a proper way to be not only accepted but an active participant in wider national surroundings like the United States of America. The number of notes and the bibliography demonstrate that she has worked seriously to narrate what began as a seemingly very “Chinese” festival, and became more and more an American one even with, and in spite of its “Chineseness”. The life of San Francisco’s Chinatown is described, not completely, but with sufficient detail and colour to attract the reader’s attention to an important fact: American society, with all its unsolved issues, is still an actively living reality.

The book is often too rich in names, excerpts of interviews, quotations from newspapers, etc. At times, the reader loses the thread of a chronological narrative, with all the flash-backs and repetitions. But life is seldom a linear affair, a well ordered story, unless artificially reconstructed for some purposes. So the reader will find a lot of interesting, intriguing, and worth-pondering-about events and anecdotes. For example, in chapter 7 the transformation of the festival with the acceptance of corporate sponsorship is explained well; chapter 8 recounts a more recent influence of “queerness”, when homosexuals were more or less reluctantly admitted into the parade, with a new approach to transnationalism and identity politics. The last sentence of the epilogue stresses again the fact that life is still flowing and can achieve new developments; it expresses the hope that as commercial a success as this festival is, it should be transformed into a political powerhouse, enabling Chinese-Americans to be incorporated “into American national identity and culture” (p. 206). This is a very American question, shared by other ethnic communities. It may have theoretical and practical repercussions in other countries, but in this rich, complex, perhaps unfinished study, the challenge is directly addressed to the so-called ethnic-Chinese Americans living today, still soul-searching for a better understanding of themselves and their ethnicity, which is important for their “being American”.