Well before Sax Rohmer created his sinister villain Dr. Fu-Manchu in 1911, Chinatowns figured prominently in British and American popular fiction. These are chronicled by such scholarly works as William Wu's "The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940" (1982) and Mary Ting Yi Lui's "The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City" (2004).
T.J. English's 1995 "Born to Kill" provides a nonfiction account of "the rise and fall of America's bloodiest Asian gang," some dozen members of which were tried for "11 murders, numerous attempted murders, over a dozen robberies, numerous kidnappings, and countless extortionate acts . . . which took place over an intensely violent three-year period." The notion that North America's Chinatowns remain dangerous places, it seems, is not entirely without foundation.
Chinatown has also been a Hollywood standby since such silent films as D.W. Griffith's "Broken Blossoms" (1919), which was actually a sympathetic portrayal. The Robert Daley novel "Year of the Dragon," which made it to the silver screen in 1985, was definitely less so; it climaxed in a fight-to-the-death showdown between superstars Mickey Rourke and John Lone.